Or is it April 2020? Not sure. Anyway, I’d like to extend my best wishes for the upcoming year. I hope there will be many possibilities for the data community to come together and share knowledge in a safe and responsible manner. In case you’re wondering, here are my top 5 blog posts of 2021: […]
New Argument for STRING_SPLIT Function
A new (optional) argument has been added to STRING_SPLIT: enable_ordinal. Setting it to 1 will add an output column with the 1-based index of each item of the array. Nice. This is great if you want to preserve the order of the items. Let’s illustrate with an example: This returns the following result: As you […]
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 […]
Speaking at PASS Data Community Summit
I’m delighted to announce that I’ve been selected to speak at the (revamped) PASS Data Community Summit. Alas, PASS is no more, but the summit lives on in this free online edition. That’s right, free! Dozens of sessions related to the Microsoft Data Platform are at your fingertips 🙂 I’m giving a professional development session […]
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 […]
Cool Stuff in Snowflake – Part 13: Row-Pattern Recognition
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. In the book T-SQL Window Functions […]
Speaking at dataMinds Connect 2021
In October I’ll be speaking at the dataMinds Connect conference. This event is very dear to me, because it’s a home match, since it’s a Belgian conference, and also the biggest Microsoft Data Platform conference in the BeNeLux. it’s the first in-person event for me this year (fingers crossed the situation only improves till October!) […]
Upcoming Webinar – Intro to SSIS – Advanced Topics
On July the 22th at 9PM CET I will give the second part of the “Introduction to SSIS” webinar series on the MSSQLTips.com website. If you’ve never worked with SSIS before, it helps if you’ve seen part 1. The abstract: In this webinar, we build upon the Getting Started with SSIS webinar. You already know how to […]
Dynamic Datasets in Azure Data Factory
With “dynamic datasets” I mean the following: a dataset that doesn’t have any schema or properties defined, but rather only parameters. Why would you do this? With a dynamic – or generic – dataset, you can use it inside a ForEach loop and then loop over metadata which will populate the values of the parameter. […]
dataMinds Saturday Recording Available
I did a session on data visualization best practices on the past dataMinds Saturday virtual conference. The recording has now been made available at the AE website. They used the web infrastructure of their own webinars, so you have to register to view the recording (we’re GDPR compliant if you’re worrying about your privacy). So […]