Ahmad Yaseen
Create SQL Virtual Machine

Migrating SQL workloads to Microsoft Azure: Databases Trip to SQL Server on Azure VM

July 31, 2020 by

In the previous articles of this series, we built the bridge that leads us to the best way of migrating our SQL workload to Microsoft Azure, by showing how to create the databases migration strategy that contains a deep study of the current environment and the available options in Azure to replace the on-premises setup, which we tried to make it easier by providing all Azure database services and the workload that fits each service, and finally, we introduced several Microsoft tools and services that can be used to assess the current setup, provide migration guidance steps and migrate the databases to Microsoft Azure services with the minimal downtime.

Read more »
Aveek Das
AWS S3 Home Screen

Getting started with Amazon S3 and Python

July 31, 2020 by

In this article, I am going to explain what Amazon S3 is and how to connect to it using python. This article will be focused on beginners who are trying to get their hands on python and working around the AWS ecosystem. AWS, as you might know, is one of the largest cloud providers along with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. There are a lot of services offered by Amazon including AWS S3. Amazon S3, also abbreviated as Amazon Simple Storage Service is a storage service offered by the cloud provider that enables the users to store any kind of files in this service. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Read more »
Ahmad Yaseen
Assess and Migrate Databases

Migrating SQL workloads to Microsoft Azure: Assessment and Migration Tools

July 31, 2020 by

In the previous articles of this series we discussed how to draw the initial strategy when planning to migrate the SQL workload to Microsoft Azure, the different database target platforms provided by Microsoft Azure that can be used as a migration target, based on the workload type, and finally, we went through some tools that help in discovering and assessing the on-premises environment by identifying the migration blocking issues and providing guidance steps for the migration process.

Read more »
Aveek Das
Power BI Report

Working with Power BI Data Models in Visual Studio Code

July 30, 2020 by

In this article, I am going to introduce the Tabular Object Model (TOM) in the Power BI Data Model and provide an understanding of how this model can be accessed outside of the Power BI environment. For more info about the Tabular Object Model in the Power BI Data Model, please read this article. In this tutorial, we are going to use the Visual Studio Code to simply write a dotnet console application and try to access the Tabular Object Model from the Power BI file. With the help of this knowledge, programmers and BI developers can not only view the underlying model in the Power BI Data Model but also can enhance the data model programmatically by writing a few lines of code. It can also be further improved by automating the creation of the Power BI models with the help of the Tabular Object Model library in dotnet.

Read more »
Ahmad Yaseen
Migrate a SQL database

Migrating SQL workloads to Microsoft Azure: Guidance and Assessment Tools

July 30, 2020 by

In the previous articles, Migrating SQL workloads to Microsoft Azure: Planning the jump and Migrating SQL workloads to Microsoft Azure: Services Selection, we discussed the steps that you should follow when you start thinking loudly that you need to migrate your SQL workload to Azure, by checking your on-prem site and the available services and features in Azure that meet your workload handling requirements. After that, we went through different database services provided by Azure and which one fits a specific workload, in order to make it easy for you to translate the current workload as an Azure service.

Read more »
Aveek Das
Binary Search Tree Example

Diving deep with complex Data Structures

July 29, 2020 by

In my previous article, Understanding common Data Structures, I have mentioned the most commonly used data structures in software programming. In this article, let us get into some more details about the other data structures that are a bit complex than the ones already discussed but also used quite often while designing software applications. Here, we will look into the following data structures.

Read more »
Nisarg Upadhyay
Sort and Filter: Order by on expression

Learn MySQL: Sorting and Filtering data in a table

July 28, 2020 by

In this article, we will learn how we can sort and filter data using the WHERE clause and sort the data using the ORDER BY clause. In my previous article, Learn MySQL: Querying data from MySQL server using the SELECT statement, we learned how to generate the ER diagram using reverse-engineering the database using MySQL workbench and basics of SELECT statement and usage. Ins this article, we will learn how we can sort and filter data using the WHERE clause and sort the data using the ORDER BY clause.

Read more »
Esat Erkec
Read I/O and Write I/O sections of the performance test

Using Diskspd to test SQL Server Storage Subsystems

July 28, 2020 by

In this article, we will learn how to test our storage subsystems performance using Diskspd. The storage subsystem is one of the key performance factors for SQL Server because SQL Server storage engine stores database objects, tables, and indexes on the physical files. Therefore, the storage engine always interacts with the disk subsystem because of data processing. In this context, when a bottleneck occurs on the storage subsystems, it causes a negative impact on SQL Server performance. It would be the right approach to measure the performance of the disks to be used before the SQL Server installation based on their usage purposes. For example, OLTP databases have to complete delete, insert, and update processes in a short time but OLAP databases handle a huge amount of batch data. In this case, the storage requirement of these two database systems should differ from each other. In short, it is a best practice to test and analyze the performance of the storage subsystems according to their usage purposes so that we can eliminate the I/O problems in advance.

Read more »
Emil Drkusic
Naming convention - the data model

Learn SQL: Naming Conventions

July 28, 2020 by

A naming convention is a set of unwritten rules you should use if you want to increase the readability of the whole data model. Today, I’ll try to explain how you should formulate your naming convention and, maybe even more important, why should you do it and what is the overall benefit from using it.

Read more »
Ahmad Yaseen
Azure SQL Database

Migrating SQL workloads to Microsoft Azure: Services Selection

July 28, 2020 by

In the previous article, Migrating SQL workloads to Microsoft Azure: Planning the jump, we discussed the main points that should be checked and considered while drawing your plan to migrate the SQL workload from the on-premises datacenters to Microsoft Azure. In this article, we will go through the different database services that are provided by Microsoft Azure to help you in selecting the proper service that can serve your SQL workload when migrating it to Microsoft Azure.

Read more »
Nisarg Upadhyay
What is pagination: Limit 10, offset 10

Learn MySQL: What is pagination

July 27, 2020 by

In this article, I am going to explain that in MySQL, what is pagination and how we can implement it. When we are populating a large dataset from the MySQL database, it is not easy to read all the records on the same page. Using pagination, we can divide the result-set into multiple pages, and that increases the readability of the result set. In this article, I am going to explain:

Read more »
Aveek Das

Understanding the SQL MERGE statement

July 27, 2020 by

In this article, I am going to give a detailed explanation of how to use the SQL MERGE statement in SQL Server. The MERGE statement in SQL is a very popular clause that can handle inserts, updates, and deletes all in a single transaction without having to write separate logic for each of these. You can specify conditions on which you expect the MERGE statement to insert, update, or delete, etc.

Read more »
Nisarg Upadhyay
PageVerify is Checksum

Enforce SQL database best practices using SQL Server Policy-Based Management

July 24, 2020 by

In this article, I am going to explain how we can enforce the SQL database best practices using Policy-Based Management. The policy-based management feature of SQL Server was introduced in SQL Server 2005. This feature was useful because it helps database administrators to define and enforce the database policies based on the organizations’ requirements.

Read more »