Articles

External Article

Cracking DAX – the EARLIER and RANKX Functions

So far in this series, Andy Brown of Wise Owl Training has shed light on functions like CALCULATE, VALUES and FILTER, but it’s only when you understand the idiosyncrasies of the EARLIER function that you can claim to have genuinely cracked DAX. This article gives four examples of the use of this peculiar function, in the process explaining why it has such a misleading name. Using the EARLIER function properly all boils down (as is so often the case with DAX) to understanding row and filter context. The article also shows how to use the RANKX function to sort data into your required order.

2019-08-26

External Article

Scaling SQL Monitor with your growing estate

Tony Davis describes the features and capabilities of SQL Monitor that allow it to scale smoothly to monitor a growing estate of servers and databases, while still providing a single, simple dashboard that gives the team all of the essential SQL Server metrics and alerts, establishes baselines, and detects trends in behavior.

2019-08-23

SQLServerCentral Article

A Self-Tuning Fill Factor Technique for SQL Server – Part 1

Introduction So what’s all the fuss about Fill Factor? It is a SQL Server parameter I’ve ignored for 20+ years. The main reason was/is I’ve had no idea about what value to use. There is just no documented definitive guidance. Back in April at SQL Saturday #830 - Colorado Springs, I attended two sessions by […]

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2019-08-20

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Question of the Day

Tracking All the Queries

I have 3 instances of a brand new long running query that are executing on a SQL Server 2025 instance. Query store is enabled. One of the queries is killed by the administrator, one is cancelled by the user. The other runs to completion. How many rows are in Query Store for this query?

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