I was in a need of converting some datetime values (of which I know the actual timezone) to UTC dates. A quick Google search showed me that most results on the first page were simply wrong. Most of them used this trick: Seems nifty, but they forgot about daylight savings time. If I run the […]
Category: SQL Server
Optimize for Unknown for Inline Table-Valued Functions
I had a curious performance issue today. An inline table-valued function (iTVF) was performing poorly for some parameter sets, and quite fast for other parameter values. In short, this one is fast: This one is slow: Turns out SQL Server used a plan with a hash join in the fast query, and a nested loop […]
Skip Validation of SSIS Packages
There’s been an update of the SSIS extension for Visual Studio 2019. There are some bug fixes and deployments are blocked to Azure-SSIS if the target server version is not SQL Server 2017, but the real killer feature is the ability to now skip validation of an SSIS package when you open it. This might […]
Speaking at DataMinds Connect 2020
I’m delighted to announce I’ll be speaking again at DataMinds Connect this year, one of the greatest and best Microsoft Data Platform conferences on the European mainland. Due to the pandemic, this year edition is virtual, but this also means: more sessions! And a deep-dive track! And the event itself is free! The agenda is […]
Quickly Editing Data in SSMS
WARNING: do not do this in production. A quick blog post on a SSMS trick: how to quickly edit data. Sometimes you directly want to manipulate data without having to write a SQL statement. For example, in the development environment you want to modify a value in a column to test out a scenario, or […]
Restarting SQL Server after adding a new SQL login
At a project, we asked if we could get a SQL Server login/user so we could make a connection from an Apache Airflow pipeline to the SQL Server instance. The answer was: “No, because then we would need to restart the server”. This sounded a bit strange, because I’ve never had to restart the SQL […]
The Azure-SSIS IR Startup Time
UPDATE: here’s an official blog post going in more technical detail on how they achieved the improvements in startup time If you want to run SSIS packages in Azure Data Factory, you need the Azure SSIS Integration Runtime (quite the mouthful), which is basically a cluster of virtual machines handling the packages like an SSIS […]
SQL Server Development Best Practices – Webinar
I’m delighted to announce I’ll be giving a webinar for MSSQLTips.com about SQL Server Development Best Practices. Aka writing T-SQL and stuff 🙂 The webcast is the 13th of June 2019 at 7PM UTC. In a nutshell, I’ll be talking about the stuff I would tell my 10-year younger self about T-SQL development (if I […]
Migrating SSIS to Azure – Slidedeck (Techorama 2019)
Techorama 2019 is over and it was a blast, as usual. Neatly organised, great speakers and fantastic content. I delivered a session on Migrating SSIS to Azure (Data Factory). You can find the slidedeck on SlideShare: Migrating SSIS to the cloud from KoenVerbeeck
SSIS 2019 has arrived!
It is not a joke: SSIS is available for Visual Studio 2019 as a preview. Whoa, hold on. SQL Server 2019 hasn’t been released yet? But there’s already an SSIS 2019? Didn’t we have to wait months after the release of SQL Server 2017 before we had an SSIS version for Visual Studio 2017? Yes, […]