A couple of years back I achieved the Microsoft certification MCSE – Business Intelligence. You can read all about that process in my blog post How I prepared myself for the MCSE certification. As you might know, this certification is only valid for 3 years. My certification should have expired a couple of months ago, but […]
Tag: sql server
Bigger Fact Table for Wide World Importers
Microsoft released a new sample database a couple of months back: Wide World Importers. It’s quite great: not every (unnecessary feature) is included but only features you’d actually use, lots of sample scripts are provided and – most importantly – you can generate data until the current date. One small drawback: it’s quite tiny. Especially […]
Webinar – SQL Server BI Best Practices
I’ll be giving a webinar for MSSQLTips.com on Thursday March 10, 2016. The title is SQL Server BI Best Practices and its abstract goes like this: Join us for this webcast to learn about best practices for SSIS, SSRS and SSAS. Our presenter, Koen Verbeeck has several years of experience working with the SQL Server Business […]
Book Review – Expert Performance Indexing
A few weeks back, the folks at Apress Publishing sent me a copy of the book Expert Performance Indexing in SQL Server for me to review. Since I know both the authors and since I’m familiar with the spectacular work they do, I was happy to do so. Doesn’t mean I won’t do an honest […]
T-SQL Tuesday #74: Be the Change
It’s the second Tuesday of the month and you know what that means! T-SQL Tuesday time! If you don’t know what it means, T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party of the SQL Server community – started by Adam Machanic (blog|twitter) – where everyone is invited to write about a common topic. This month’s T-SQL […]
Happy Holidays
It’s the time of the year again: the obligatory “how was the past year” blog post, combined with “what do I plan to do next year?”. I plan on keeping it quite short 🙂 2015 was awesome because: I got to speak on ITPROceed and SQLServerDays again, and it was great as always Power BI […]
Performance Tuning with sp_BlitzIndex
Just a small blog post about how I used sp_BlitzIndex for the first and how awesome that was. sp_BlitzIndex is one of the many free scripts you can get from the great team at Brent Ozar Unlimited. Recently I went to a client for a one day data warehouse performance tuning exercise. Because you only have […]
Presentation Design – Before and After
Recently I gave a session on the SQL Server Days about the new features for business intelligence in SQL Server 2016. I have always found that the design of the slide deck matters and this time I was fortunate enough to have the assistance of 356labs, a presentation design agency founded by SQL Server MVP […]
What’s new for BI in SQL 2016 – Session materials
SQL Server Days 2015 is over and it was a blast. Met a lot of people from the #sqlfamily, too many to mention, and I saw some interesting sessions. My favorites were David’s session about loading data faster and Catherine’s session about BIML (yes, both are related to SSIS). I gave a session on the new […]
Why I hate Pie Charts
The pie chart should be avoided at all costs. Why? you can only display a limited number of slices (although that doesn’t really stop people from creating pie charts with dozens of slices) they take up a lot of space the human brain cannot easily compare slices based on radial areas. We’re better in comparing […]