At least there’s one consistency in the year 2020: every day amazing articles are published on the MSSQLTips.com. And the author of the year contest at the end of the year! I’ve been nominated again for the author of the year award, and you can vote here. There are many excellent authors nominated as well, […]
Top 5 Blog Posts of 2020
If you’re wondering what you’ve all been reading while working at home, here’s the list: Cool Stuff in Snowflake – Part 3: SPLIT and FLATTEN – People really seem to want to split some strings in Snowflake, and are possibly surprised with the resulting array. Like I was. Dynamically Changing Shapes in Power BI – […]
Good Riddance 2020
Normally I’d write a “Happy xxxx” blog post at the start of the new year, but this time I’m just glad the previous year is over. It has been a remarkable year to say the least. Focusing on the Data Community, I think I’ll remember 2020 for two reasons: The rise of the virtual event. […]
Speaking at SQLSaturday Vienna 2021
I’m thrilled to announce I’ve been selected to speak at SQLSaturday Vienna. Actually, it’s on Friday 15th of January, so don’t get fooled by the name. I’m bringing the session Self-service BI – Why Data Modelling Is Still Important, which is a beginner level talk about why you should pay attention to the data model […]
Migrating SSIS to Azure – an Overview
For quite some time now, there’s been the possibility to lift-and-shift your on-premises SSIS project to Azure Data Factory. There, they run in an Integration Runtime, a cluster of virtual machines that will execute your SSIS packages. In the beginning, you only had the option to use the project deployment model and host your SSIS […]
Publish Database Fails – Script File could not be found
A small blog post for anyone who stumbles across this issue (and for my future self, should I forget the solution). I was working on some tables in SSDT and I tried to publish changes to the database on my local machine. I got a build error because I created a clustered index on the […]
Exporting Environment Variables out of the SSIS Catalog
Sometimes when you’ve created a SSIS catalog, along with folders, environments and environment variables, you want this content on another server. Unfortunately, you can only script out these objects in SSMS at the moment you’re creating them (thus right before you clikc ‘OK’ to confirm). Once the objects are created, you can no longer script […]
Converting a Datetime to UTC
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 […]
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 […]
Speaking at SQLSaturday Denmark 2020
I’m delighted to announce I’m speaking at the virtual SQLSaturday Denmark at the 26th of September 2020. I’ll be speaking about the cloud datawarehouse Snowflake and its integration with Azure. The era of cloud data warehousing has finally begun. Gone are the days where you had to provision expensive servers and spend days configuring and […]