With Christmas just around the corner, in today’s “get together” I thought that we would have some fun by cataloging a collection of ‘your favorite items’. Whether it be a coin collection, a china plate collection or a stamp collection, the process is the same and certainly something that you will enjoy creating and maintaining. For today’s example, we are going to construct a “Postage Stamp” cataloging system. We are going to see how we are able to get from this…
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There are plenty of scripts to compute the date of various holidays given the year. Let’s look at the problem in reverse: Given a date, determine if it is a given holiday or not.
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Transact-SQL (T-SQL) snippets were first introduced in SQL Server 2012 Management Studio. T-SQL snippets are templates containing one or more T-SQL statements which you can easily use them when you develop T-SQL scripts. The main concept behind code snippets is code reuse. With code reuse you develop faster, easier and with less syntax errors. If you frequently use specific T-SQL statements, then you should consider creating snippets with these statements as they will help you a lot.
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In the previous article, in this series, How to create and configure a Sunburst chart in SQL Server 2016 Reporting Services, we have explored new chart types in SQL Server 2016; the Sunburst chart and the Tree Map chart, that are used to display hierarchical data. The Sunburst chart is a way of presenting relational datasets together in a compact form. The Tree Map Chart is also a way of showing hierarchical data.
In this article, we are going to show how to create a Tree Map chart and its comparison with the Sunburst chart.
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In a previous article, we have discussed about the top 10 security factors that you should take into consideration in order to secure your SQL Server instances. In this article I will try to deep dive into one of those factors, that is SQL Server Surface Area.
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If you have ever wanted to run a job dependent on a certain performance condition, then this article is for you.
Usually SQL Server agent jobs are configured to run on a schedule. But what if instead of a schedule you want a job to be executed when a certain performance threshold is exceeded?
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SQL Server 2016 introduces a new set of configurations that can be applied at the database level to control its performance and behavior. These configurations were previously applicable only at the SQL instance level before version SQL Server 2016, With the ability to configure settings at the database level, many databases that are hosted in the same instance can now be isolated from each other, with each database has its own customized configurations. The database level configurations allow us also to set different database configurations for the Always On Availability Groups primary and secondary databases to meet the different types of workloads.
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This article will teach you how to install PolyBase and will show you a simple example to start.
PolyBase is a new feature in SQL Server 2016. It is used to query relational and non-relational databases (NoSQL). You can use PolyBase to query tables and files in Hadoop or in Azure Blob Storage. You can also import or export data to/from Hadoop.
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Last month I ran two Business Intelligence pre-conferences in South Africa. A interesting request arose during the course of the preconference in Cape Town. The individual wanted an approach to extracting data from an OLAP cube that would avoid intensive utilization of MDX and more reliance upon T-SQL. His main concern was with filtering the data at run time, via the report front end.
In this “fire side chat” we shall do just that, utilizing the cube that comes with the new Microsoft database “WideWorldImporters” and we shall learn how we can get from this
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SQL Server tries always to generate the most optimized execution plan for each stored procedure the first time that the stored procedure is executed. The SQL Server Engine looks at the stored procedure passed parameter values when compiling the stored procedure, the first execution, in order to create the optimal plan including the parameters and keep that plan for future use in the plan cache. This parameter analysis process is called the Parameter Sniffing.
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In many of our past “get togethers” we have discussed pivoting raw data in order to best represent corporate data within our business reporting. As we may remember, in many instances we pivoted the data within the report query.
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In our first part of this series, we showed how to import a bacpac file using the Azure Portal with Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer (MASE) and SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) to create a Database in Azure.
In the second part, we will show how to import a bacpac file to create a Database using the sqlpackage.exe tool and PowerShell.
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Dynamic Data Masking is a new security feature introduced in SQL Server 2016 that limits the access of unauthorized users to sensitive data at the database layer.
As an example of the need for such a feature is allowing the applications developers to access production data for troubleshooting purposes and preventing them from accessing the sensitive data at the same time, without affecting their troubleshooting process. Another example is the call center employee who will access the customer’s information to help him in his request, but the critical financial data, such as the bank account number or the credit card full number, will be masked to that person.
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Microsoft SQL Server 2016 introduces several significant new features, and enhances some existing ones in reporting services. We have summarised these new features in the previous article. We’ve also explored how to configure the SQL Server Mobile reports in my earlier article.
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Developers who work in both SQL and .NET world must have experienced the differences between Visual Studio IDE and SQL Server Management Studio IDE.
Being a full-stack developer myself, I always felt that SSMS lacked a lot of basic features when compared to the functionalities which Visual Studio IDE provided out of the box. With SSMS being tightly coupled with SQL Server Core engine, the IDE had quite a technical debt associated with it over a period of time.
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My name is Ahmad Yaseen and I am a senior SQL Server database administrator at Aramex International Company for more than six years, where I started building my experience in the SQL Server administration field. Being a SQL Server Database administrator in such big company is not that easy, as the difficulties that you may face is not only at the beginning. What makes the DBA job special is that it is a very deep job, in which you will learn new things, have to solve new problems, fall in strange situations and be under pressure every day, but it is an interesting job for me.
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As we are nearing the end of the North American summer, I thought that we would take a lighter look at nifty ways of reporting information. In today’s “fireside chat” we have a look at a unique way of displaying our information using charts and line graphs all in one single chart (see below). We shall take things one step further and work with the color fill of the vertical bars to reflect the values that they represent.
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SQL Server 2016 came with many new features and enhancements for existing ones, that concentrate on the aspect of SQL Server security. One of the new security features introduced in SQL Server 2016 is Row-Level Security. This feature allows us to control access deeply into the rows level in the database table, based on the user executing the query. This is done within the database layer, in complete transparency to the application process, without the need to manage it with complex coding at the application layer.
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Ever since the early days of my career, SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) has been one of my preferred data visualization tools simply because end users and developers alike use it for free. Although a majority of my SSRS solutions have been based off a relational dataset that uses Transact SQL (T-SQL), I have also produced several reports that used Multidimensional Expressions (MDX) to connect and retrieve data from SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) multidimensional OLAP cube. Recently, I found myself having to refactor some of these SSAS based SSRS reports, particularly converting a single value SSAS-populated parameter into a multi-value parameter. In this article, I explore how you can go about making these changes using SSRS query designer’s design and query modes.
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Lately, database administrators often hear the question “have you tried Azure?“ or “can we use Azure for some of our databases?“. For me it was hard to answer these questions at first, but after a while I got to know what is really important behind these situations. In fact, what really matters is assessing the current environment, calculating the most suitable pricing tier and preparing a smooth migration.
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Even if you are a SQL veteran, actually especially if you are, you sometimes get really stuck doing something in the old way not realizing that in newer versions of SQL Server some handy functions have been added that can make your life easier.
In this article, I will mention a couple of these which appeared in SQL Server 2008 or later versions or might have even been there before but most people just didn’t know about.
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SQL Server 2016 introduces a new type of table that is designed to keep the full history of data changes, where row validity is managed by the system. This new table type is called a System-Versioned Temporal Table. In earlier SQL Server versions, user tables would enable you to hold only the most recent copy of the row, without being able to query the value before the UPDATE or DELETE operations. Using a Temporal Table, you will be able to query the recent state of the row as usual, in addition to the ability to query the full history of that row, which is fully managed by the SQL Server Engine, as you can’t define the rows validity period explicitly.
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In SQL Server 2000, the sample databases were pubs and northwind. They contained sample information to learn SQL Server.
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In this article, we will show how to create a simple SQL Server Reporting Services report from a SSAS Tabular model database as a data source, using DAX query, and then deploy it.
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In SQL Server Reporting Services Native mode, a report server has a role of a standalone application server, that provides all viewing, processing, delivery, and management of reports and report models. This is the default mode for SSRS instances.
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