In Belgium, a national campaign is launched to raise money for cancer research: #TourneeMinerale. In this campaign, people can be sponsored for not drinking alcohol for the whole month of February 2017. This sponsor money is donated to the national cancer research center. The name of the campaign – Tournée Minéral – comes from the […]
T-SQL Tuesday 86: SQL Server Bugs & Enhancement Requests
Let’s kick off the new year with a T-SQL Tuesday! This month’s edition is hosted by Brent Ozar: Announcing T-SQL Tuesday #86: SQL Server Bugs & Enhancement Requests Brent wants us to blog about our favorite Connect items because Microsoft is currently listening to its customers and actually closing items. So it is the time […]
Clustered Columnstore Index really hates Updates
First a little background. I’m working on a large fact table that behaves itself as a slowly changing type 2 dimension. Weird right? But I have a good reason for this: it’s a snapshot table and if I would create the snapshots like you’re supposed to (by exploding the fact table) I would end up […]
Master Data Services Error – Missing Temp Directory
I recently had to install SQL Server 2016 again on my Windows 10 machine. This also meant that I had to install and configure MDS as well. Last time it didn’t went so smoothly: Master Data Services error – Cannot read configuration file due to insufficient permissions. However, this time I had already applied Service […]
SSIS Naming Conventions 2.0
People who have been working for a while with Integration Services probably know the legendary blog post by SQL Server MVP Jamie Thomson: Suggested Best Practises and naming conventions. The blog post served as a guidance point for many SSIS projects regarding naming conventions of the various tasks and components. I still use them every […]
Problem where you can only browse Google websites
Note: not a SQL/BI related post like usual, but since it’s a common issue I want to share my solution here Quite recently I had a bizarre issue on my laptop: suddenly I could only browse Google websites (Google search, YouTube, Gmail …). All the other websites would time out or give error messages. On […]
Calculate a semi-additive average in DAX
A semi-additive average? What exactly are you trying to calculate? Let me explain first. A semi-additive measure is a measure that can be summed across some dimensions, but not all. Typically it’s the time dimension that isn’t additive. For example, the stock level at various warehouses. You can add all the stock levels of your […]
SQL Server 2016 service pack 1 is here!
SQL Server 2016 service pack 1 has been released and it is a mayor one! You can download it here. Why, you ask, is it so important? Because a lot of Enterprise Edition database engine features are now available in the other editions as well. In other words, you can now enable compression and use […]
Book Review – Power Pivot and Power BI
Since Power BI is all the rage right now, I was in need of some material to spice up my knowledge of DAX (read: finally understand how CALCULATE works). I’ve been following the website powerpivotpro.com for quite some time now and they always have very insightful articles about DAX and real world scenarios. Anyway, Rob Collie […]
Master Data Services – Database Error has Occured when Publishing Business Rule
I was preparing a demo for a session about the new features of Master Data Services in SQL Server 2016. In that demo, I created a business rule to test out the extension with custom scripts. When the business rule was finished, I tried to publish it. But, I was greeted with the following error: “300 […]