I don’t want to write what is Azure Data Lake. Simply click the link to know more. Instead of that, I have prepared for you a short and easy-to-follow step-by-step guide to have your own Data Lake. The only thing you need to have is your own Azure subscription. If…
APPROX_COUNT_DISTINCT()
20. 9. 2019
APPROX_COUNT_DISTINCT() is a nice new function announced currently to be in public preview for Azure. Being well known for Oracle users is now joining (like many other things:)) also the Microsoft world. This function is designed to provide aggregations across large data sets where responsiveness is more critical than absolute…
ROUND() is a well-known function in SQL Server. Most of us know only that two parameters can be used like ROUND(99,95, 2). This will do standard mathematical up/down rounding of numbers in the first parameter for the number of decimal places from the second parameter. But there is also an…
If you have installed Visual Studio 2019 you are probably missing project type for Microsoft BI stack like Reporting Services Project Type, Analysis and Integration Services project type. You are surprised because during the installation you have setup also SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) to be installed. Then you have…
Creating backups of user databases from an on-premise environment to Azure Blob Storage is an easy task. You need to configure Storage Account in Azure where your database backups will be sent. Then you can reference this newly created storage container directly from SQL Server Management Studio when creating a…
It’s confusing that developers are still doing fails when using CHECK, NOCHECK and WITH CHECK/NOCHECK clauses because they don’t know exactly what are differences between them. To be honest, it’s not a very native and clear part of SQL syntax. Let’s go to make this a little bit more clear…
Past week we were using tool for scanning database metadata across all our production servers and at one of them the tool captured following error when trying to access one of the databases: After some searching and investigating detail about the server we captured two core informations: The database is…
Concatenating strings in T-SQL
1. 4. 2019
It may look like an easy task to concatenate string in T-SQL at the first look. But it still has some hidden points where beginners are failing most of the time. There are a few very important things to remember when working with string and doing concatenation. Without respecting them…
If there is a need to move data between local SQL Server instances (on-premise) and Azure SQL Databases we can use Azure Data Factory. But it isn’t the ideal solution all the time: it’s paid in some scenarios and not everyone is familiar with it. And the most critical issue…
One friend called me yesterday that he can’t believe what’s happening to him: he is saving various strings to the table and to check if the string already exists he is generating hashes using the SHA2_256 algorithm. But today he has seen that for the same string stored in two…