The Bit Bucket

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

Another bunch of fun today recording a SQL Down Under show and it’s now published!

This time I had the pleasure of discussing SQL Server and other data-related tools with Erin Stellato.

Erin is a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft and works directly with the tools that I wanted to discuss.I’ve known Erin quite a while and she’s always interesting to hear from.

I hope you enjoy it. You’ll find this show (and previous shows) here: SQL Down Under Podcast /

2024-04-09

I really enjoyed recording today’s SQL Down Under show and it’s now published!

This time I had a great conversation with fellow Microsoft Data Platform MVP Angela Henry.

Angela is a principal consultant at Fortified, and on LinkedIn, describes herself as a data mover and shaper.

Angela has a particular fondness for the Microsoft BI Stack and Databricks.

You’ll find Angela online as @sqlswimmer.

I hope you enjoy it. You’ll find this show (and previous shows) here: SQL Down Under Podcast /

2024-03-30

I often look at the results of a query in SSMS and want to save them off somewhere, and what I really want is a table. To do that, at present, I need to:

• Right-click and use Save Results As to go to a CSV
• Use the flat file import wizard (or something) to import the CSV

Now obviously, in some cases, if it was a SELECT query, I could add an INTO clause and just run the query again, but there are many many cases where I want to save the outcome of another type of query. It could also be that I just can’t run the query again for whatever reason.

2024-03-28