Sifiso Ndlovu

Convert SQL Server results into JSON

July 12, 2016 by

In my article, Warehousing JSON Formatted Data in SQL Server 2016, we had a look at available T-SQL options for converting JSON data into rows and columns for the purposes of populating a SQL Server based data warehouse. The increased popularity of JSON in modern web applications may create a requirement for data teams to expose some of their data to client applications (i.e. reporting tools, web services etc.) in a JSON format. In this article we take a look at how such a requirement can be implemented by data teams using SQL Server 2016 FOR JSON clause

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Steve Simon

SQL Server and BI – How to document your Tabular model with Excel

July 12, 2016 by

Introduction

A few weeks back I had been working on an interesting proof of concept for a client within the food / grocery industry. The objectives were to be able to provide the client with information on sales patterns, seasonal trends and location profitability. The client was an accountant and was therefore comfortable utilizing spreadsheets. This said, I felt that this was a super opportunity to build our proof of concept utilizing a SQL Server Tabular Solution and by exploiting the capabilities of Excel and Power Reporting for the front end.

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Nikola Dimitrijevic

Handling excessive SQL Server PAGEIOLATCH_SH wait types

July 5, 2016 by

One of the most common wait type seen on SQL Server and definitely one that causes a lot of troubles to less experienced database administrators is the PAGEIOLATCH_SH wait type. This is one of those wait types that clearly indicates one thing, but which background and potential causes are much subtler and may lead to erroneous conclusions and worse, incorrect solutions

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Jean-Pierre Voogt

Storing Twitter feeds with Microsoft Flow in Azure SQL Database

June 29, 2016 by

A couple of weeks ago I got this idea to capture twitter feeds and store it in a relational database structure. I wanted to be able to do some trend analysis, to see what days certain hashtags get used more than other as well as to be able to go back to certain tweets and see what I can learn from them. I tried to get the Twitter API to work for me, but had no luck. So I came across Microsoft Flow which seems to make this process very easy.

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Ahmad Yaseen

SQL Server policy-based management

June 27, 2016 by

SQL Server Policy-Based Management was introduced in SQL Server 2008, to make it easy for database administrators to define and enforce SQL Server best practices and company standards in the form of policies. This feature is available in both Enterprise and Standard SQL Server Editions.

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Jean-Pierre Voogt

Format DBMail with HTML and CSS

June 23, 2016 by

Background

In my organization, the developers send a lot of database generated emails for informational purposes to ensure that everything in the system is still working 100%.We can call them production messages. Normally the way the email is presented is not important as it is only meant for the developer to help with system health check, but every now and again a business user would ask for the report (which was never meant to be an actual report) and then we would include the business user in the distribution list for this email.

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Jean-Pierre Voogt

Stretching temporal history tables in SQL Server 2016

June 20, 2016 by

Background

With the release of Microsoft SQL Server 2016 a lot of new features were introduced, one of which was Temporal Tables, a feature that gives you the ability to view the state of your data at a given point in time. This means you can go back in time with your data. Another very popular feature is Stretch Databases which allows for remote archiving of data to Azure Stretch region.

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Ahmad Yaseen

SQL Server network configuration

June 14, 2016 by

SQL Server Network Configuration involves enabling the protocols that manage the connection to the SQL Server and configuring the available options for these network protocols. It also provides the means to encrypt the communication between the SQL Server instance and the client applications and hide the SQL Server instance from being browsed. SQL Server Network Configuration can be managed using the SQL Server Configuration Manager tool.

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Marko Zivkovic

New feature in SQL Server Management Studio 2016 – Quick Launch

June 14, 2016 by

What is Quick Launch?

Quick Launch is a new feature that is added in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 2016. Quick Launch is search tool, but it doesn’t search code/contents of the script/files. Instead it searches SSMS itself including menu items, options and file names. Quick Launch is enabled by default when SSMS is installed and it is located at the top right corner of the menu bar (see below):

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Daniel Calbimonte

Is this the end of SQL Profiler?

June 13, 2016 by

Introduction

SQL Server Profiler is still a tool used to monitor our relational databases and our multidimensional ones. We used for performance and security purposes. However, in the SQL Server 2016, they announced that the SQL Profiler will be deprecated in future versions.

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Ahmad Yaseen

Querying remote data sources in SQL Server

June 10, 2016 by

A common activity when writing T-SQL queries is connecting to local databases and processing data directly. But there will be situations in which you need to connect to a remote database that is located in a different instance in the same server or in a different physical server, and process its data in parallel with the local data processing.

SQL Server provides us with four useful methods to connect to the remote database servers, even other database server types, and query its data within your T-SQL statement. In this article, we will discuss these four methods and how to use it to query remote SQL Server databases.

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Nikola Dimitrijevic

Troubleshooting the CXPACKET wait type in SQL Server

June 8, 2016 by

The SQL Server CXPACKET wait type is one of the most misinterpreted wait stats. The CXPACKET term came from Class Exchange Packet, and in its essence, this can be described as data rows exchanged among two parallel threads that are the part of a single process. One thread is the “producer thread” and another thread is the “consumer thread”. This wait type is directly related to parallelism and it occurs in SQL Server whenever SQL Server executes a query using the parallel plan.

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