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External Article

The Best of Both Worlds: Using Excel and Power BI Together

Excel and Power BI work well together. This allows you to use the two tools together to provide for many types of business workflow and BI practices. You can publish an Excel file to Power BI to share with others, analyse a Power BI dataset in Excel or import either an Excel workbook or Excel data to Power BI. You can gain the workgroup power and business-orientation of Power BI without losing the ease and versatility of Excel. Saurabh shows how.

2017-09-22

6,233 reads

External Article

Investigating the Cause of SQL Server High CPU Load Conditions When They Happen

Any DBA who is trying to find the cause of an intermittent problem with a server or database dreams of being able to use a query or procedure take a snap of the relevant variables at the point when the problem occurred. Laerte takes an example of a slow-running query hogging resources to show that you can run queries when a WMI alert is fired, and save the results for later inspection, whenever it happens.

2017-09-20

4,188 reads

SQLServerCentral Article

A Pattern for Email Address storage and retrieval

Email addresses are very prevalent in IT systems and often used as a natural primary key. The repetitive storage of email addresses in multiple tables is a bad design choice. Following is a design pattern to store email addresses in a single table and to retrieve them efficiently.

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2017-09-15 (first published: )

8,759 reads

External Article

SQL Server R Services: Digging into the R Language

It is not just the analytic power of R that you get from using SQL Server R Services, but also the great range of packages that can be run in R that provide a daunting range of graphing and plotting facilities. Robert Sheldon shows how you can take data held in SQL Server and, via SQL Server R Services, use an R package called ggPlot that offers a powerful graphics language for creating elegant and complex plots.

2017-09-15

6,981 reads

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The Empty Aggregate

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Question of the Day

The Empty Aggregate

I have this table in a SQL Server 2025 database: 

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[CustomerOrder]
(
[OrderID] [int] NULL,
[CustomerID] [int] NULL,
[total] [money] NULL
) ON [PRIMARY]
GO
What is returned from this code? (answers are for the sum and then the count) 
SELECT SUM(total) AS sum,
       COUNT(total) AS count
FROM dbo.CustomerOrder;

See possible answers