Esat Erkec

Text Analytics with Microsoft Flow

September 19, 2018 by

Twitter is a very popular social media platform which generates millions of tweets a day. These tweets include very valuable data for marketers or social media analyzers because they can analyze these tweets with specific algorithms and find out the sense of social media users.

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Sifiso Ndlovu

Available options for generating heatmaps in an SSRS report

September 17, 2018 by

As developers of business intelligence solutions, we tend to service different types of business users. Whilst a call center supervisor is more likely to consume reports that offer detailed breakdown of day-to-day performance of her call center agents, senior managers on the other hand often prefer big-picture analytical reports that represent data in a form of colorful graphs and charts. Not surprisingly, such reports often make use of heatmap controls to provide visually effective comparative view of business metrics against set targets.

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SQLShack

SQL Server database auditing tools

September 17, 2018 by

This collection of content presents an overview of top SQL Server database auditing tools, with product page links for each of the tools and screenshots if available. If you noticed a tool we missed, please let us know in the comments below.

All database auditing tools are sorted by alphabetical order.

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Prashanth Jayaram

Substring function overview

September 14, 2018 by

The requirement of data refactoring is very common and vital in data mining operations. In the previous article SQL string functions for Data Munging (Wrangling), you’ll learn the tips for getting started with SQL string functions, including the substring function for data munging with SQL Server. As we all agree that the data stored in one form sometimes require a transformation, we’ll take a look at some common functions or tasks for changing the case of a string, converting a value into a different type, trimming a value, and replacing a particular string in a field and so on.

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Prashanth Jayaram

SQL Server transactional replication: How to reinitialize a subscription using a SQL Server database backup

September 13, 2018 by

A workload management is considered as a critical aspect of SQL Server transactional replication. Replication is the oldest of the high availability technologies in SQL Server and it is available since the inception of SQL Server. As a very mature technology, SQL Server transactional replication is also very robust and, in most cases, very straightforward to set up and manage.

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Bojan Petrovic

Querying data using the SQL Case statement

September 12, 2018 by

The Case statement in SQL is mostly used in a case with equality expressions. The SQL Case statement is usually inside of a Select list to alter the output. What it does is evaluates a list of conditions and returns one of the multiple possible result expressions.

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Ahmad Yaseen

SQL Server Execution Plan Operators – Part 1

September 12, 2018 by

In the previous articles of this series, SQL Server Execution Plans overview , SQL Server Execution Plans types and How to Analyze SQL Execution Plan Graphical Components, we discussed the steps that are performed by the SQL Server Relational Engine to generate the Execution Plan of a submitted query and the steps performed by the SQL Server Storage Engine to retrieve the requested data or perform the requested modification operation.

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Prashanth Jayaram

SQL Replication: Basic setup and configuration

September 12, 2018 by

This is article is a continuation of the previous: SQL Server replication: Overview of components and topography.

By now, you’re familiar with the components of replication. So far, we’ve seen a lot of theory about replication. It’s a time for practical walkthrough of setting up a basic transactional SQL Replication system. The best way to get a feel for how SQL Replication is implemented and how it works is to see it in action.

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Prashanth Jayaram

How to setup a custom SQL Server transaction replication model with a Central Subscriber and Multiple Publisher databases

September 12, 2018 by

In this data-driven era, replication is often a critical requirement for achieving a modern, agile database management environment. It is believed designing an enterprise-grade dataset is the to achieving this requirement but building datamarts from datasets always presents certain challenges

In this article, we’ll discuss what it takes to setup “central subscriber with multiple publishers” replication model, to create an aggregate dataset from multiple sources, and you’ll also see how to scale with the data.

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Prashanth Jayaram

SQL Server replication: Overview of components and topography

September 11, 2018 by

The volume of data retained, managed, and accessed today is unprecedented. Businesses expect the IT department to keep data online and accessible indefinitely, putting intense pressure on the databases required to store and manage it. To meet today’s needs; we need to replace outdated and inefficient legacy processes with new, more agile techniques. SQL Server Replication is one of the techniques to accommodate such demands.

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Esat Erkec

How to create a Mobile Dashboard with SQL Server Microsoft Mobile Publisher?

September 10, 2018 by

Over the past three years, I read some interesting news about Microsoft which was “Microsoft acquires mobile business intelligence leader Datazen”. This news made me excited because showing Reporting Service reports in mobile devices can be painful and often not effective for end users. After this acquisition, Microsoft developers worked quickly to adapt the Datazen application to SQL Server Reporting Services and this effort culminated in Microsoft SQL Server Mobile Report Publisher.

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Ahmad Yaseen

How to Analyze SQL Execution Plan Graphical Components

September 7, 2018 by

In the previous articles of this series, SQL Server Execution Plans overview and SQL Server Execution Plans types we went through the different stages that the submitted SQL Server query followed and how it processed by the SQL Server Relational Engine that generates the Execution Plan and the SQL Server Storage Engine that performs the requested data retrieval or modification operation. In addition, we described deeply the different types and formats of the SQL Server Execution Plans that can be used for query performance troubleshooting purposes. In this article, we will discuss the graphical query plan components and how to analyze them.

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Sreekanth Bandarla

Deploy SQL Server for failover clustering with Cluster Shared Volumes – part 1

September 4, 2018 by

Microsoft SQL Server provides us with a wide variety of solutions to architect High availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) solutions for mission-critical workloads. In this article, let’s just focus on HA, specifically Failover Clustering. Failover clustering is probably the most mature, robust and stable high availability solution which Windows Server Operating system offers. It’s been there around for few decades now and did evolve over time along with SQL Server. In this article Let’s see a hidden feature of windows server failover cluster which helps in making our already highly available SQL Server Failover clustered instances even more highly available. The new feature which we are going to talk about is Cluster Shared Volumes, AKA CSVs. Considering windows server 2019 is around the corner, I say CSVs are not a new concept in clustering, it’s been there for almost a decade now. Microsoft introduced CSVs in windows server 2008R2, but at that time SQL Server was not supported on CSVs. Well, CSVs were originally designed for Hyper-V workloads and later on enhanced for File servers and eventually landed into SQL Server beginning version 2014.

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Prashanth Jayaram

How to setup cross-platform transactional SQL Server replication for database reporting on Linux

August 31, 2018 by

In most cases, an organization can either use the existing out-of-the-box database replication features offered by their database software provider or invest in custom solutions to execute and manage database replication processes. The latter option sometimes allows greater flexibility to create data replicas across multiple types on multiple platforms.

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SQLShack

Top 50 PowerShell bloggers of 2018

August 31, 2018 by

We made a collection of the most popular PowerShell bloggers, including a link to each individual blog. The ranking is based on Alexa global score.

If your blog is on this list, you can display the ‘Top blogger’ badge on your blog. Please see the bottom of the page for the instructions on how to display the badge on your website

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James Rhoat

Considerations and concerns when setting up Database mail for SQL Server

August 31, 2018 by

Database mail is widely used by DBAs and companies around the world and is one of the features of SQL Server that can be very important for startups. That is because it is a cheap solution for getting alerts from your SQL Server for potential hardware issues, early warning signs of corruption, along with potential resource constraints. However, it can be misused or pose potential security issues. Before we start, to my myself clear I am in favor of configuring Database mail for the DBA team when done properly. In the rest of the article, we will touch on some of the common mistakes people make with database mail and their SQL Servers. We will not discuss the setup of this feature as it was well documented by Bojan Petrovic on SQLShack.

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