Rajendra Gupta
Importing compressed data into SQL Server: Add an OLE DB destination

Importing Data into SQL Server from Compressed Files

March 5, 2019 by

Introduction

I have seen many organizations receive data from various sources and import into SQL Server. You might receive data in various formats and want to import into SQL Server. We can prepare a ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) process to import data into the SQL Server. In doing so, might receive data in a compressed file, which helps to send data over the network using a ZIP file format because it reduces the file size significantly. If we are receiving a ZIP file to import into SQL Server, we need to unzip it and then only we can import data. We might need to create a ZIP file as well from the existing files.

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Rajendra Gupta
SQL FILESTREAM demo backup

Transaction log backups in a SQL FILESTREAM database

March 5, 2019 by

In the continuation of our SQL FILESTREAM article series, we’ll be covering transaction log backups

In SQL Server, we take transaction log backups regularly to have a point-in-time recovery of a database. It is essential to define the backup policy with the combination of full, differential and transaction log backups. A standard configuration of backups for large databases in the production database environment is as follows.

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Nikola Dimitrijevic

SQL Server trace flags guide; from -1 to 840

March 4, 2019 by

SQL Server trace flags are configuration handles that can be used to enable or disable a specific SQL Server characteristic or to change a specific SQL Server behavior. It is an advanced SQL Server mechanism that allows drilling down into a hidden and advanced SQL Server features to ensure more effective troubleshooting and debugging, advanced monitoring of SQL Server behavior and diagnosing of performance issues, or turning on and off various SQL Server features

Rajendra Gupta
Execcute and monitor status of SQL Server Python SSIS package

Using Python SQL scripts for Importing Data from Compressed files

March 4, 2019 by

Using Python SQL scripts is a powerful technical combination to help developers and database administrators to do data analytics activities. Python provides many useful modules to perform data computation and processing of data efficiently. We can run Python scripts starting from SQL Server 2017. We can create the ETL solutions to extract data from various sources and insert into SQL Server.

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Esat Erkec
SQL Server Reporting Services - Import Flat File

SSRS Report Builder introduction and tutorial

March 1, 2019 by

The SSRS report builder is a powerful tool for data visualization. In this article, we will take a first step into familiarizing ourselves with the SSRS report builder and we will also demonstrate a very basic SSRS report example. Additionally, we will review the self-service business intelligence approach just because this approach can be implemented through the SSRS report builder very easily.

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Rajendra Gupta
Selecting the Pie Charts Tree in thhe Power BI application marketplace

Power BI Desktop Pie Chart Tree

February 27, 2019 by

Power BI Desktop amplifies the value of data. We can connect to multiple data sources and visualize the data interactively. One of the best parts of Power BI Desktop is the custom visual feature. It allows developers to create custom visuals and users can then download these visuals from the marketplace and use it as per the data set requirements. We can prepare reports using Power BI Desktop and share the reports using the Power BI service.

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Ahmad Yaseen

SQL Server Transaction Log and Recovery Models

February 27, 2019 by

In the previous articles of this series (see TOC at bottom), we discussed the main concept of the SQL Server transaction, the internal architecture of the SQL Server Transaction Log and finally the Virtual Log File and the best practices in managing the VLFs. In this article, we will go through the relationship between the SQL Server Transaction Log and the three database recovery models.

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Ahmad Yaseen

Auditing by Reading the SQL Server Transaction Log

February 25, 2019 by

In the previous articles of this series, we discussed the reasons behind auditing the different SQL Server instance and database events, how to audit the SQL Server instance manually and using the Extended Events and Triggers methods. In this article, we will show how to audit your SQL Server instance by reading the content of the SQL Transaction Log file of the user database.

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Timothy Smith

Getting Started with Subdocuments in Azure Cosmos DB

February 22, 2019 by

As we’ve worked with Azure Cosmos DB, we’ve seen that we can store data within fields and the fields of each document don’t always have to match – though we still want some organization for querying. The fields and values storage becomes useful when working with object-oriented languages as these fields can be keys that we use with values that we extract as properties. For an example, the below PowerShell line creates a JSON document in an object and we can see that we can extract the values of these keys in the JSON object.

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Rajendra Gupta

SQL Server FILESTREAM with Change Data Capture

February 22, 2019 by

Sometimes we require tracking data change activity (Insert, update and deletes) in SQL Server tables. SQL Server 2008 introduced Change Data Capture (CDC) to track these changes in the user-defined tables. SQL Server tracks the defined table with a mirrored table with same column structure; however; it adds additional metadata fields to track these changes. We can use table-valued function to access this changed data.

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Rajendra Gupta

How to recognize corrupted SQL backup files

February 22, 2019 by

A Database administrator’s key task is to keep the database healthy and available for the users. We are used to taking regular SQL backups depending upon the database criticality and the recovery model. We define the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) Recovery Time Objective (RTO) or the database system, and we should be able to recover the database in any scenario to meet the requirement.

Rajendra Gupta

SQL Server FILESTREAM and Replication

February 19, 2019 by

In the previous articles in this series (see TOC at bottom), we wrote about the various feature of the SQL Server FILESTREAM. In SQL Server, we use replication to replicate the articles to the destination server. Consider a scenario in which we have the FILESTREAM database in our environment. We would also have the requirement to configure this database for SQL Server replication.

Timothy Smith

Applying Field Operators and Objects in Azure Cosmos DB

February 15, 2019 by

Since we will sometimes require removing documents in Azure Cosmos DB, we’ll want to be able to specify the documents for removal. In some cases, this will be as simple as specifying a field for removal, such as removing one type of workout in our temporary database we’ve created. In other delete situations, we’ll want to remove if the value of the field isn’t what we expect – such as greater than what we want. This applies to updates as well – we may want to drill into a specific value range for an update. In this tip, we’ll look at using operators with strings, numeric types and dates.

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