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.
Tag: sql server
New Stars of Data – SQL Bad Practices caught in the Wild
At the 12th of May 2023, a new edition of New Stars of Data takes place. If you’re not familiar with the concept, it’s a free virtual event focusing on the Microsoft Data Platform, organized by the fine folks of DataGrillen. The twist is that only new speakers are allowed; people who have never spoken […]
Book Review – SQL Query Design Patterns and Best Practices
Disclaimer: The publisher – Packt – sent me a free copy of the book for the intended purpose of a review. At the time of writing, the book is yet to be released (the date is set at the 22nd of March 2023). The book SQL Query Design Patterns and Best Practices: A practical guide […]
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 […]
Book Review – SQL Server Query Tuning and Optimization (2nd Edition)
The nice people from Packt Publishing sent me a digital copy of Benjamin Nevarez new book to review: SQL Server Query Tuning and Optimization – Optimize Microsoft SQL Server 2022 queries and applications. It says first edition on the cover, but that’s because it’s the first time this book has been published by Packt. The […]
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 […]
Speaking Engagements for Fall 2022
The summer holiday is almost over, and this means conference season will be back in full swing again. I’ll be speaking at a couple of events in the second half of this year: Data Bash. A new free virtual conference focusing on the German-speaking nations in Europe. And on data of course. There are sessions […]
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 […]
Speaking at dataMinds Connect 2022
I’m very excited to announce I’ll be giving a session at the 15th edition of dataMinds Connect (in the beginning it was called SQL Server Day(s)). It will be my 11th session at the event (I think only Nico Jacobs has more; Nico has done a perfect strike: 15 sessions!). I will be talking about […]
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 […]