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Schema Design Basics for Power BI

You have a Power BI project that generates real-time reports for an inventory management system that uses SQL Server. You are aware that Power BI performance is heavily influenced by how your data is structured in SQL Server but don’t have a clear understanding of how to optimize your SQL data structure for Power BI. In this article, we look at different ways to structure the data and tables to help improve Power BI query performance.

2025-10-13

The Phoenix Project

The Phoenix Project

In this newly updated and expanded edition of the bestselling The Phoenix Project, co-author Gene Kim includes a new afterword and a deeper delve into the Three Ways as described in The DevOps Handbook.

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2025-10-10 (first published: )

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External Article

Natural Language Query for SQL Server

Data is usually the most important asset in organizations, but only SQL developers can frequently access that data. Technical teams often write queries for non-technical users. This restricts agility, slows decision-making, and creates a bottleneck in data accessibility. One possible remedy is natural language processing (NLP), which enables users to ask questions in simple English and receive answers without knowing any code. Still, the majority of NLP-to-SQL solutions are cloud-based, which raises issues with cost and privacy.

2025-10-03

External Article

Unlocking the Power of FULL OUTER JOIN in SQL: Performance, Use Cases & Examples

The JOIN statement is one of the most common operations SQL developers perform. Yet in a world ruled by Inner and Left Joins, the poor Full Outer Join is like Cinderella before the ball – allowed out on only the rarest of occasions. In an (unscientific) survey I once performed of SQL developers at one Fortune 100 firm, half of the developers had never used a Full Outer Join in production code, and the rest had used it in a tiny handful of occasions.

2025-10-01

External Article

Building a Dynamic Countdown Timer in Power BI

A countdown timer can be a powerful visual tool in many Business Intelligence reporting scenarios. This could be for marketing campaigns, contract expiries, and business deals with clients. Real-time countdown visuals are not natively supported in Power BI. Although, there is the Count Down Timer custom visual, which is not dynamic in its configuration.

2025-09-29

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Create an HTML Report on the Status of SQL Server Agent Jobs

By Nisarg Upadhyay

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We Should Demand Better

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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Estimated Rows

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Estimated Rows

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Question of the Day

Estimated Rows

I have two calls to the GENERATE_SERIES TVF in this code:

SELECT   TOP 10 gs.value
FROM     GENERATE_SERIES(1, 10) AS gs
ORDER BY NEWID ()
OPTION (RECOMPILE);
go
DECLARE @a int = 10;
SELECT   TOP (@a) gs.value
FROM     GENERATE_SERIES(1, @a) AS gs
ORDER BY NEWID ()
OPTION (RECOMPILE);
In the actual query plans, what is the estimated number of rows for each batch?

See possible answers