I’m doing a little series on some of the nice features/capabilities in Snowflake (the cloud data warehouse). In each part, I’ll highlight something that I think it’s interesting enough to share. It might be some SQL function that I’d really like to be in SQL Server, it might be something else. It’s been a while since I […]
How I passed the DP-700 Exam
I recently took and passed the DP-700 exam, which is required for the Microsoft Certified: Fabric Data Engineer Associate certification. It’s the second Fabric certification, and it focuses more on the data engineering aspect of Fabric, as well as a bit of governance and administration. My preparation for this exam is probably fairly atypical, because: […]
Take over Ownership in Microsoft Fabric
When you create an item in Microsoft Fabric (a notebook, a lakehouse, a warehouse, a pipeline …), you are also the owner of the item. There has been an outstanding issue in Microsoft Fabric, where if a user’s account was deactivated, other users could no longer access the item. Whoopsies. When a consultant came in, […]
Book Review – Agile Data Warehouse Design
I recently read the book Agile Data Warehouse Design – Collaborative Dimensional Modeling, from Whiteboard to Star Schema (quite the title) by Lawrence Corr and Jim Stagnitto. The book was recommended to my years ago by a former colleague (the book is from 2011, with the latest revision from 2014) and it has been sitting […]
Cloudbrew 2024 – Slides
You can find the slides for the session Building the €100 data warehouse with the Azure Data Platform in this GitHub repo.
Book Review – Microsoft Power BI Performance Best Practices
I was asked to do a review of the book Microsoft Power BI Performance Best Practices 2nd edition (Amazon link), which means I got a copy for free. The book is written by Thomas Leblanc and Bhavik Merchant and published by Packt. As the title obviously implicates, the book aims to give you a set […]
Create a Numbers Table in Power Query
This is a quick blog post, mainly so I have the code available if I need it somewhere in the future 🙂 Sometimes you need a numbers table (also called tally table) when you’re working with data. It’s a table with one single integer column that contains incremental numbers (0,1,2,3,4,…). In a database, it’s fairly […]
Microsoft finally adds Tenant Switcher for Fabric / Power BI
Praise whatever deity you believe in, because it’s finally here, a tenant switcher for Microsoft Fabric (which includes Power BI). A what? Let me explain. When you have a organization with multiple tenants in Azure (also called directories in some products like Azure Devops), or you’re a consultant like me who works with multiple clients […]
Book Review – Humanizing Data Strategy by Tiankai Feng
This book was making its rounds on social media, and the concept seems interesting enough to make me want to read it. It’s a very short book (only 106 pages), but a pleasant read. It focuses on the people side of a data strategy, instead of focusing on technology and tools as sometimes many of […]
Free webinar – Tackling the Gaps and Islands Problem with T-SQL Window Functions
I’m hosting a free webinar at MSSQLTips.com at the 19th of December 2024, 6PM UTC. The topic is about window functions, something that really interests me and that should be in the toolbox of every season SQL developer. The abstract: The gaps and islands problem is a common problem in data analysis. Some examples are: […]