Accessing Managed Instance via SSMS
It used to be that the only way to use SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) against Azure SQL Database Managed Instance (SQLMI) was to create a VM on the...
2020-05-11 (first published: 2020-04-27)
532 reads
James Serra's Blog
Azure Synapse Analytics confusion
I see a lot of confusion among many people on what features are available today in Azure Synapse Analytics (formally called Azure SQL Data Warehouse) and what features are...
2020-04-13
453 reads
Power BI Sharing
There are many ways to share the dashboards, reports, and datasets that you create in Power BI. Below I’ll compare all such options (there are twelve!). First make sure...
2020-03-16
88 reads
Power BI Security
A common topic I have been discussing recently with customers is the security around Power BI. Basically, how to prevent users seeing data they shouldn’t. So I’ll discuss the...
2020-03-19 (first published: 2020-03-10)
624 reads
SQL Database MI benefits
As I see a huge number of customers migrating their on-prem databases to the Azure cloud, the main question they ask is about whether they should go with an...
2020-03-10 (first published: 2020-03-02)
892 reads
Power BI Real-time Streaming
With Power BI real-time streaming, you can stream data and update dashboards in real-time. Any visual or dashboard that can be created in Power BI can also be created...
2020-02-19 (first published: 2020-02-11)
3,003 reads
Azure Storage tips
As a followup to my blog post Azure Data Lake Store Gen2 is GA, I wanted to give some pointers when using ADLS Gen2 as well as blob storage,...
2020-01-24 (first published: 2020-01-16)
433 reads
DevOps for databases: “DataOps”
DevOps, a set of practices that combines software development (Dev) and information-technology operations (Ops), has become a very popular way to shorten the systems development life cycle and provide continuous delivery of...
2020-01-16 (first published: 2020-01-07)
1,179 reads
Azure Synapse Analytics & Power BI concurrency
As a follow-up to my last blog, Azure Synapse Analytics & Power BI performance, I wanted to focus on concurrency when using these two products. A common question I...
2020-01-07 (first published: 2019-12-27)
783 reads
Azure Synapse Analytics & Power BI performance
With two new relational database features (Result-set caching and Materialized Views) just GA’d in Azure Synapse Analytics (formally called Azure SQL Data Warehouse), it makes for some very compelling reporting...
2019-12-26 (first published: 2019-12-12)
3,359 reads
Blogs
A bespoke reporting solution doesn’t have to cost the earth
By ChrisJenkins
You could be tolerating limited reporting because there isn’t an off the shelf solution...
Presenting with Visual Studio Code
A while back I wrote a quick post on setting up key mappings in...
Advice I Like: In 100 Years
By Steve Jones
In 100 years a lot of what we take to be true now will...
Forums
AllocationType as ROW_OVERFLOW_DATA
Hello, I inherited a number of tables with like 20-30 column using nvarchar(256) in...
is it true we cant debug c# scripts in ssis anymore under vs
Hi, i'm running vs2022. I'm trying out a c# script that i'd like to...
Question of the Day
Missing the Jaro Winkler Distance
I upgraded a SQL Server 2019 instance to SQL Server 2025. I wanted to test the fuzzy string search functions. I run this code:
SELECT JARO_WINKLER_DISTANCE('tim', 'tom')
I get this error message:Msg 195, Level 15, State 10, Line 1 'JARO_WINKLER_DISTANCE' is not a recognized built-in function name.What is wrong? See possible answers