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SQL Spot – Part 3

The growth spurt of SQL Server 2016 and all its related dimensions is hard to follow. Yet with our SQL spot we try to gather some intel for all SQL Server enthusiasts. As always, we try to share some interesting articles, which crossed our paths recently, either professionally or out of personal interest. The gathered community information addresses a healthy BI perspective, ranging from business to technical insights on various topics: SQL Server news, Power BI, SQL Server BI stack, features, data science topics, accidental DBA stuff and interesting learning or study materials.

I am mainly a BI developer, being an accidental DBA sometimes. So  I like to pick up on the basics of things to help me out in occasions I’m forced to pick up the DBA role. Also, since SP1 a lot of new features became available on standard editions. It is a good idea to have some of the enterprise features’ fundamentals well understood. Tuning and maintenance will provide the basics and a starting point for data analysts to get some insight on the inner workings of SQL Server. All rights go out the great blogging community.

 

Business, releases, news and trivia

Business

Releases

Data stories

 

Power BI

General

Power BI

Excel BI

 

DWH

Azure

 

SSIS

 

SSAS

General

SSAS vNext

  • Have you ever authored a DAX query in SSMS using the MDX editor? With the new DAX Query Editor, you no longer need to do so.
  • At the new Tabular 1400 compatibility level, a data source definition can include a native query and even a contextual M expression on top of the connection information, which opens interesting capabilities that didn’t exist previously and redefines to some degree the nature of a data source definition.

DAX

 

SSRS

 

Data science

General

Machine learning

R

 

Maintenance

Internals

Backup and recovery

Storage

Health Practices

Index

Troubleshooting

  • Some free tools from IDERA that might help you out on your quest for finding issues faster.
  • Maybe these SQL Server help scripts from Rolf Tesmer can help you out on your day to day Accidental DBA operations.

Infrastructure

SQL

 

Security

 

Tuning

Internals

Index Tuning

  • Get an idea on the negative effects on bookmark lookups and how they can be avoided. In addition understand the tipping point on when SQL server will scan a table ignoring your non clustered index, not using an index seek because bookmark lookups become too expensive.
  • Update on why indexes are also important for Update and Delete Queries, reducing the amount of rows that might need to be locked.
  • SQL product team has made significant implements in columnstore index functionality, supportability and performance within SQL Server 2016. SQL Server product team has created a large set of blogs across multiple columnstore index scenarios.

In-memory optimization

SQL skilles

 

Learning

Courses

  • Dive into azure data lake store with this introduction step by step course.
  • One of the most fun things I did last year was getting introduced to BIML and automating SSIS development were possible.
  • With the information included in this Deep learning course, the strategic decision maker will be able to connect deep learning with their particular industry and business.

Vids

General

Group of computer programmers working in the office. Focus is on blond woman showing something to her colleague on PC.
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Managing files from other devices in a Fabric Lakehouse using the Python Azure SDK
In this blogpost, you’ll see how to manage files in OneLake programmatically using the Python Azure SDK. Very little coding...
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Database specific security in SQL Server
There are many different ways to secure your database. In this blog post we will give most of them a...
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SQL Server security made easy on the server level
In this blog, we’re going to look at the options we have for server level security. In SQL Server we...
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Microsoft SQL Server history
Since its inception in 1989, Microsoft SQL Server is a critical component of many organizations' data infrastructure. As data has...