Query Exercise: Improving Cardinality Estimation
Your challenge for this week is to tune a query. Say Stack Overflow has a dashboard that shows the top-ranking users in their most popular location. It’s even got an index to support it
2024-02-16
Articles
Attention SQLBits 2024 Attendees!
Microsoft will be featured at SQL Bits with a keynote speaker, a full day of training and a few other sessions. Register today for the conference in March and we hope to see you there.
2024-02-14
1,281 reads
Scientific Calculations in Power BI - Cube, Square, Logarithms, Powers, Inverse and more
Microsoft Power BI Desktop provides users with multiple ways to help shape and transform their data. One of the options users have is scientific calculations, which support operations like cube, square, logarithms, etc. Power BI has this option in the Power Query Editor mode, where the user can easily apply one of these transformations for any number-based columns. In this tip, we will overview this utility in Power BI and how to benefit from it.
2024-02-14
Writing SQL Server code with AI using GitHub Copilot
Introduction In this article, we will see how to work with GitHub Copilot. GitHub copilot is an interesting plug-in that generates code using AI. The technology is from Microsoft and OpenAI. We will show how to install Copilot, and how to generate SQL Server code (T-SQL) using Copilot. First, we will answer some FAQs about Copilot […]
2024-02-12
13,813 reads
Planning a Database Testing Strategy for Flyway
With Flyway, you can adopt a test-driven development strategy that will allow you to test and evaluate databases, and database objects, at every phase of the database development lifecycle. The further down the delivery pipeline that bugs appear, the more costly in time and resources they are to fix. This approach will allow you to catch many of them before the database change even gets committed to version control, making a continuous delivery process much easier to adopt and sustain.
2024-02-12
Leveraging AI Tools for SQL Queries
This article covers the basics of how different AI tools can be used to write SQL.
2024-02-09 (first published: 2024-01-19)
8,909 reads
Use a Table Variable for Logging Entries that Need to Survive Rollbacks.
This article shows how a table variable can be used to capture error information and log it when your code doesn't work as expected.
2024-02-09
2,761 reads
Fun with Powershell
Have you ever been in a situation that you want to call a cmdlet or a function with a parameter that depends on a conditional criteria that is available as a list? In this article I will show a technique where you can use PowerShell Dynamic Parameters to assist the user with parameter values.
2024-02-09
LangChain Prompt Templates with OpenAI LLMs
Learn how to get started with a few sample prompt templates by using the gpt-4 LLM within OpenAI and LangChain in a Databricks notebook.
2024-02-09
Dimensional Modeling Case Study Part 2 - Days Dimension
Learn how you can model days in a dimension that might need to be aggregated in different ways for your data warehouse operations.
2024-02-07
2,304 reads
Blogs
Au Revoir for now
By Steve Jones
No, I’m not quitting or retiring. Just going on vacation, but I leave tonight...
The SUM of Nothing: #SQLNewBlogger
By Steve Jones
I caught this interesting item over on Pinal Dave’s blog: Eleven Interview Questions that...
Forums
Building a SQL Server Fleet Audit That Leadership Actually Reads
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Building a SQL Server Fleet...
Smart AI Agents and Data Security
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Smart AI Agents and Data...
RegEx Functions IV
Comments posted to this topic are about the item RegEx Functions IV
Question of the Day
RegEx Functions IV
I have this data in a table in a SQL Server 2025 database:
EmailAddressID EmailAddress 7 dylan0@ADVENTURE-WORKS.COM 8 Diane1@ADVENTURE-WORKS.COMIf I run this query, which row(s) are returned?
SELECT top 10 * FROM person.EmailAddress WHERE REGEXP_LIKE(EmailAddress, '^D', 'i') AND BusinessEntityID IN (7,8)See possible answers