The slides and scripts for my session “Tackling the Gaps & Islands Problem with T-SQL Window Functions” at dataMinds Connect 2024 can be downloaded from GitHub. If you want to run the sample scripts, some of them require an installation of the AdventureWorks DW sample database.
Category: SQL Server
CONCAT_WS Function Truncates Text
I was writing some dynamic SQL that generates some SQL statements to load my facts and dimensions into a data warehouse. Some of those SQL statements can become very long, for example if a dimension has a lot of columns. When debugging, I noticed a couple of statements failing with various errors. Turns out, they […]
How to Install Integration Services 2022
The title of this blog post is a bit misleading, because what we actually want to do is to install the SSIS development functionality in Visual Studio 2022. SSAS and SSRS have been available for some time now in VS 2022, but the extension for SSIS has only just been released in preview. For those […]
How to Install SQL Server 2022
SQL Server 2022 has been released! In this blog post, I’ll walk you through how you can install the latest version of SQL Server on your machine. I’ll be using the developer edition of SQL Server 2022, which can be downloaded here. The download link will only download a small 4MB file. Opening this file […]
Cool Stuff in SQL Server 2022 – IS DISTINCT FROM
I have a blog post series about some nice features in the Snowflake cloud data warehouse; one of them is about the IS [NOT] DISTINCT FROM predicate. I was excited to find out this is now also included in the T-SQL language since the SQL Server 2022 CTP 2.1 preview! You can find the official […]
T-SQL Tuesday #149 – T-SQL Advice you’d give to your younger self
It’s the second Tuesday of the month, so it’s time for the T-SQL Tuesday blog party! This month’s topic is chosen by Camila Henrique (blog): what T-SQL advice would you give to your younger self? Here’s a little list I’d tell anyone starting out with T-SQL: you can configure most tools that when you hit […]
Parsing JSON in SQL Server with OPENJSON
Recently I had a piece of JSON of which I needed to extract data from to put into a table in Azure SQL DB. Unfortunately, the structure of the JSON itself was too complex to map automatically in Azure Data Factory. It might be possible though, but after a few tries to map it manually […]
Convert Local Datetime to UTC (pre-SQL Server 2016)
Recently I was working with a client who was still on SQL Server 2012. Support issues aside, there are some very useful T-SQL functions/clauses who didn’t exist in 2012, but were introduced in a later version. One of them is AT TIME ZONE, which you can use the convert dates between time zones, as demonstrated […]
T-SQL Tuesday #143 – Short code examples
It’s this time of the month again! T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blogging party on the second Tuesday. This month’s topic is “What are your go to handy short scripts?” brought to you by John McCormack. What are those little short bits of code that you can’t live without? I’m talking about little snippets that […]
Webinar – Improve SQL Server Data Quality in SSIS
On the 5th of October 2021 I’ll be giving a webinar about improving data quality of contact data (names, addresses, emails etc) using the Melissa Data Tools. I’ll be doing half an hour of technical demos, while Jeremy of MSSQLTips.com will take for another half our of the business value of the Melissa software. Data […]