Articles

External Article

Connecting to SQL Data Warehouse

The most frustrating thing with any new system is often just working out how to connect to it. Oddly, you can’t use SSMS with SQL Data Warehouse, but it is fine with SSDT, SSIS, Power BI desktop, sqlcmd, BCP, and a range of Microsoft cloud services - there are PowerShell Cmdlets too. Rob Sheldon provides the details.

2016-05-30

3,054 reads

External Article

Automatically Creating UML Database Diagrams for SQL Server

SQL Server database developers seem reluctant to use diagrams when documenting their databases. It is probably because it has, in the past, been difficult to automatically draw precisely what you want, other than a vast Entity-relationship diagram. However, you can do it without buying any third-party tool, just using some existing Java-based open-source tools; and can even automate it entirely, using SQL and PowerShell. Phil Factor shows how.

2016-05-27

5,062 reads

External Article

Unified Approach to Generating Documentation for PowerShell Cmdlets

Now, it is easy to provide professional-quality documentation for PowerShell cmdlets, and to keep it in sync when you make changes, whether they are written in PowerShell or C#. While this has always been easy to do in PowerShell, it was always painful to do in C# or VB because it meant having to build your own MAML file. Michael Sorens completes his three-part series by summarising, in a wallchart, how to go about it.

2016-05-24

2,675 reads

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Question of the Day

The string_agg function

We create the following table and then insert some records in it: 

create table t1 (
   id int primary key,
   category char(1) not null,
   product varchar(50)
);

insert into t1 values
(1, 'A', 'Product 1'),
(2, 'A', 'Product 2'),
(3, 'A', 'Product 3'),
(4, 'B', 'Product 4'),
(5, 'B', 'Product 5');
What happens if we execute the following query in both Sql Server and PostgreSQL? 
select id, 
category, 
string_agg(product, ';')
                 over (partition by category order by id
                 rows between unbounded preceding and unbounded following) as stragg
from t1;

See possible answers