Timothy Smith

Tracking Times In Data Flows for Finding Performance Issues

January 9, 2019 by

We’re facing a challenge with several of our data flows that use more time than they have in the past and we’re not sure when this trend started. We know in the past month, our reports have been delayed by over a day from the start to the finish. For some of our data flows we use SQL Server Agent that calls SSIS packages or procedures, while some of them use a custom data import and reporting application we’ve created. How can we track the length of time for these data flows, since we’re using a combination of tools for importing data?

Ahmad Yaseen

SQL Server Transaction Overview

January 8, 2019 by

In general, a Transaction is a single unit of work consists of multiple related tasks that should succeed or fail as one atomic unit. To make the concept of the transaction more familiar and why it should go all or none, imagine one of the most critical transaction examples in our daily life, which is withdrawing money from the ATM.

Read more »
Timothy Smith

T-SQL’s Native Bulk Insert Basics

January 8, 2019 by

From troubleshooting many data flow applications designed by others, I’ve seen a common pattern of over complexity with many designs. Putting aside possible risks by introducing too much complexity, troubleshooting these designs often involves opening many different applications – from a notepad file, to SSIS, to SQL Server Management Studio, to a script tool, etc. It may sound like many of these are doing a hundred steps, yet many times, they’re simply importing data from a file, or calling five stored procedures and then a file task of moving a file. This complexity is often unnecessary, as is opening many different tools when we can use a few tools and solve issues faster.

Read more »
Ranga Babu

SQL Server Code simplification using synonyms

January 4, 2019 by

Problem

In our environment, we use different DB servers and these servers are linked via Linked servers for cross server transactions. We use these linked servers in our stored procedures. The server names are different in different environments and we had to change the server names manually when we promote the stored procedures to other environments. There is a chance of errors while changing the server names manually. In this article let us see how can we eliminate changing the code manually.

Read more »
Rajendra Gupta

Power BI Desktop Q&A data interaction examples

January 3, 2019 by

The Q&A feature in Power BI desktop provides a way to move towards Artificial Intelligence. In my previous article, we learned about the prominent Q&A in Power BI Desktop feature. We can get the desired result from Power BI Desktop by asking a question in Natural language. It converts the result set in tabular, chart format based on the requirement. It also helps users to build the question with its intelligence. It is one of the most incredible features of Power BI.

Rajendra Gupta

Uninstalling SQL Server on Ubuntu

December 31, 2018 by

We learned to install SQL Server 2019 installation on Ubuntu without a Docker Container in one of my previous articles, but we might also get a request to uninstall SQL Server running on Ubuntu as well. Both the installation and the uninstallation of SQL Server is different in Linux than of Windows OS. In windows, we can remove or uninstall any program using the add or remove programs feature. In Ubuntu, We need to run the commands in order to uninstall the programs. However, before performing uninstallation, we need to take care of the below point.

Read more »
Rajendra Gupta

Flow Map Chart in Power BI Desktop

December 19, 2018 by

In this article, we will explore the Flow Map chart in Power BI Desktop. Power BI is helpful to visualize the data through various form of the inbuilt and the custom charts. We have explored few such important charts in previous articles. Below is the list of articles for reference

Rajendra Gupta

Helpful Linux commands for SQL Server DBAs – top

December 11, 2018 by

SQL Server 2017 and SQL Server 2019 supports both the Linux operating system. As part of performance troubleshooting or monitoring resources in Windows system, we need to check certain things like disk space, CPU or Memory consumption, check running processes, uptime etc. We can get the information, on a windows based SQL server, from the task manager.