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External Article

Direct Query with Power BI

Power BI allows you to connect directly to the data just as if it were a “standard” connection, and modify and extend the data to support analytics. By using DirectQuery, you can build reports based on extremely large datasets where re-importing data not a practical solution. It also allows you to do data aggregations on the server. There are, of course, restrictions as well but it is nevertheless a worthwhile technique to use where appropriate. Adam Aspin explains all.

2016-09-13

4,392 reads

External Article

Introduction to SQL Server Stretch Database

In many cases Azure SQL Database offers an economically and functionally viable alternative to SQL Server deployments. However, there are also scenarios where we might discover that rather than serving as a replacement, it provides synergy, working side by side with your on-premises databases. One of technologies that illustrate this paradigm is Stretch Database, introduced in SQL Server 2016. Marcin Polichtdescribes its basic characteristics and reviews its implementation steps in this article.

2016-09-07

4,849 reads

External Article

The Exploratory Testing Chrome Plugin

If all your application testing is done by test experts, who know how to record images, do screen-capture, write issue-reports to TFS more appropriate and consistent format and so on, you probably don't need the 'Exploratory Testing' chrome plug-in. Otherwise, it is worth checking out Ambily KK's walkthrough.

2016-09-05

3,633 reads

External Article

Master Data Management (MDM) Using SQL Server

So many of the problems that organisations have with their IT applications are due to the struggle with data, in the absence of overall organization-wide control and supervision of data and its progress through the various parts of the organization. Master data management (MDM) offers a solution to the many data woes by controlling data change, It does it in an analogous way to Version Control, so that changes are cleansed, checked, tracked and audited, and any named version can be published to other services. Now Microsoft has an implementation as part of the data platform.

2016-09-02

4,892 reads

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Question of the Day

Getting the Average

I have this data in the dbo.Commission table in a SQL Server 2022 database.

salesperson commission
Brian       12
Brian       16
Andy        7
Andy        14
Andy        21
Steve       20
Steve       NULL
All the data is a varchar, and I decide to run this query to get the totals for each salesperson.
SELECT SalesPerson
     , AVG(TRY_PARSE(Commission AS int)) AS TotalCommission
 FROM commission
 GROUP BY SalesPerson
GO
What average commission is calculated for Steve?

See possible answers