The Bit Bucket

Another book that I read recently was SQL Query Design Patterns and Best Practices Book Cover by Steve Hughes, Dennis Neer, Dr Ram Babu Singh, Shabbir H Mala, Leslie Andrews, and Chi Zhang. It also came from our friends at PackT publishing.

Purpose

The intro to the book says “This book is for the SQL developer who is ready to take their query development skills to the next level. This includes report writers, data scientists, or similar data gatherers and allows users to expand their skills for complex querying and build more efficient and performant queries.”

2024-06-11

I was excited to see Gus Frazer’s new book on Data Cleaning with Power BI. Our friends at PackT sent a copy for me to take a look at.

Gus has a background with both Power BI and Tableau, and it’s always interesting to see a mix of perspectives in any book. In this book, he shows a variety of data cleaning/cleansing tasks, then how to do many of them with M in Power Query. And you can tell Gus has a teaching background. because chapters have review questions. The book could well support a course.

2024-06-10

I hadn’t seen Mohamed Kabiruddin for a while. He used to be Australian based, and worked for Microsoft for some time. Now he’s a product manager at Google. He’s always fascinating to chat to and so I was so pleased to have him on a SQL Down Under podcast today.

Mohamed leads Cloud SQL for SQL Server working with the engineering team to deliver features and capabilities for enterprises to run their SQL Server workloads on Google Cloud SQL. His expertise lies in architecting globally distributed data and information retrieval systems, databases, cloud database migrations, and vector embeddings.

2024-05-18

I’ve seen a few books lately from the PackT people. The latest was the second edition of Extending Power BI with Python and R by Luca Zavarella: Perform advanced analysis using the power of analytical languages.

Author

The author is Luca Zavarella. I’ve been working with Power BI since before it was released, and ever since I’ve seen discussions around using R (initially) and Python (later), Luca has been one of those people that everyone listens to.

2024-05-06

Welcome to show 2 for PG Down Under!

I really enjoyed recording today’s show with John Miner. John is a data architect at Insight in the USA. Over many years, John was a data platform MVP, is a strong community contributor, and blogs at craftydba.com.

After I created the Wide World Importers sample databases for Microsoft back in 2016, I did also do a migration of the code to PostgreSQL. That didn’t get released for quite a while but I’ve now seen it out there in the wild. I wanted to do a show on the migration but was concerned that I had done it so long ago, that I might have forgotten what surprised me at the time.

2024-05-04

I’ve recently been doing work with a site that makes extensive use of Central Management Servers. And that’s an issue if you upgrade past v19.3 of SSMS.

Central Management Servers

If you haven’t used these, it’s the Registered Servers window that you can open in SSMS. (View -> Registered Servers) What it lets you do is set up groups of servers, and execute multi-server queries against all the servers in the group. You can also have a hierarchy of groups with nested folders and then work at different group levels.

2024-05-02

Joe Sack is an old friend. (I’ve known him a long time. He’s not actually old). He’s always fascinating to chat to and so I was so pleased to have him on another SQL Down Under podcast today. Last time was in 2017.

Joe is a Senior Product Manager at Microsoft and is working with the integration of data and AI with SQL Copilots. The aim is to use AI and natural language processing to make database management simpler, whether you’ve been doing it for years or just getting started. The experiences he discusses in the show include Azure Copilot integration and Natural language to SQL.

2024-04-27

Another book that I was recently sent for review by the PackT people was Web API Development with ASP.NET Core 8: Learn techniques, patterns, and tools for building high-performance, robust, and scalable web APIs.

Author

The author is Xiaodi Yan, who is a fellow longer-term Microsoft MVP and an experienced software developer, focussing on .NET, AI, DevOps and all things cloud-related. You’ll also find him on LinkedIn Learning as an instructor.

2024-04-25

I saw a question on the Q&A forums about how to connect to the LocalDB version of SQL Server from SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). I thought it was worth posting a walkthrough of how to do it.

LocalDB

The first thing to understand about LocalDB is that it doesn’t run as a service. You fire it up as an attached process to another program. The basic idea was that you’d use it from Visual Studio or Azure Data Studio, and those programs would instantiate it as required.

2024-04-21

The people at PackT recently sent me a book to review, and I was happy to do so as it was on a topic that’s dear to my heart: Azure Data Factory. The book was Azure Data Factory Cookbook and it’s the second edition of the book. The authors are Dmitry Foshin, Tonya Chernyshova, Dmitry Anoshin, and Xenia Ireton.

PackT

In the past, I wasn’t keen on PackT books. When they first appeared, they tended to be low cost books from unknown authors, many of whom struggled with writing in English, and pretty poor editing of the content.

2024-04-20