I love when it happens
October 4, 2019
DeadLock Art
04October
August 5, 2019
PROTIP: Performance Tuning on the cloud will save you money by the hour
05August
Note: I'll be focusing on Azure Cloud and SQL Server, but these considerations are valid for any Cloud/DB Vendor. Whenever people talk about “The Cloud” I often hear: “cloud is expensive” and, sooner or later, “if performance aren’t good we can scale up in minutes later” .The mindset of taking care of performance issue by scaling up/down cloud resources...
June 24, 2019
Creating a Report and distributed Alerts for PowerBI Scheduled Refreshes in your organization (starring Powershell, PowerBi & Microsoft Flow)
24June
The Issue If you ever tried to manage a PowerBI Tenant, you may have come across this problem: A part the PowerBI success comes from the ability for BI people to self-serve the data it needs, you just provide them with the datasources that they need and they can go around creating all the reports that they want; this is also an issue when trying to manage the tenant, because by default the owner...
June 10, 2019
How to implement a Linear Regression Prediction in a PowerBI report using Python
10June
Machine learning is the buzzword of the moment, so I wanted to talk about that sweet ML here too. For a project that I’m working on, I’ve been experimenting on basic ML prediction algorithms, in this instance I’ll show you a basic POC on how ML can be integrated right into PowerBI in a serviceable manner. It’s ugly but it works The data I just needed some whatever data to...
May 22, 2019
Get faster performance and lower network usage in SQL Server Loops by avoiding the “DONE Token” overload
22May
FYI: You can get the Notebook for this article on my github and experiment yourself (opens with Azure Data Studio). Preamble Everybody knows that using loops in SQL Server is not efficient, if you’re able to write that same logic in a set-based statement it’s guaranteed to be faster.Still, devs can’t be helped, you just can’t seem to nail down the set-equivalent statement...
April 29, 2019
SQL Notebooks: On the right track to enhance Data Analysis on SQL Server
29April
Since about a couple of versions ago, Azure Data Studio introduced Jupyter Notebooks support for SQL Server (and with SQL Server 2019 “Big Data Clusters” on the horizon, it was about time) What are Notebooks? “Notebooks” are a tool that our data science/machine learning colleagues know, love and are at their disposal since some time (Python, Spark, etc…); A notebook...
April 10, 2019
How to identify the unit of measure of Extended Events durations
10April
Even if I use Extended Events almost every day, I always forget the unit of measure of each duration counter, since they’re basically arbitrary; Seconds, milliseconds, microseconds? Whatever, it depends on the dev that implemented that specific counter. That’s why I’ve added to Tsql.tech Github repository the following code that extracts the descriptions from XE DMVs in order to...
April 2, 2019
Quickly move data between instances for testing using only PowerShell
02April
Quick tip, how many times did a dev ask you to move the PROD/QA data to DEV to test a feature? Of course, not the whole DB, which would be too easy via a scripted backup/restore, but only a single table, or subset of table data? How do you deal with it usually? With the SSMS Import data Wizard? (ugh..) Exporting to flat file and reimporting? Linked Servers? External tools? Restore the whole...
March 25, 2019
Cast any string directly to XML with auto-escaping characters in SQL Server
25March
Recently I had to look up the definition for a bunch of SQL objects and didn’t want to manually retrieve them manually in SSMS (with Create Scripts) or Visual Studio (by searching the object name in my TFS repository). Since lazyness and automation are the basis of a well done engineering work, I wanted to create a list, where I could basically click on the object that I needed and see the...
March 22, 2019
How to Show Better Execution Plans in Azure Data Studio
22March
Azure Data Studio is starting to mature and some neat features are coming to the vscode-based (and now multidatabase and multiplatform) tool. We got query plans in the app since some time, but to be frank they’re not very pretty and have some issues with dark themes: Phantom Lines in plans with Dark Theme The new way Phil Scott built the Queryplan.show extension for Azure Data Studio, which...
