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
459 reads
James Serra's Blog
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
107 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)
634 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)
902 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)
3,026 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)
441 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)
1,192 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)
793 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)
3,397 reads
My latest presentations
Just wanted to make everyone aware of my latest presentations that I recently uploaded. Details below. I also have a list of all my presentations with slide decks here. Azure...
2019-12-04
55 reads
Blogs
A Last Minute Trip to the EU
By Steve Jones
My life has some crazy travel stretches for sure. Between speaking, office visits, customer...
Part 3 of 3: Tuning DiskANN — R, Alpha, L, Beam Width, Recall and Latency
In Part 1, we saw how ‘Vamana’ represents vectors as nodes, connects them with...
Automated SQL Server Benchmarking with HammerDB and Docker: A Complete Testing Framework
I’m excited to announce the release of a new open-source project that fully automates...
Forums
Optional Parameter Plan Optimization in SQL Server 2025: Fixing the Kitchen-Sink Search Procedure
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Optional Parameter Plan Optimization in...
AI Experience Gap that we keep talking about
Comments posted to this topic are about the item AI Experience Gap that we...
Question of the Day
ORDER BY alias
There is a table tmp_tab:
CREATE TABLE tmp_tab ( id int, val int );
INSERT INTO tmp_tab VALUES (1, 1), (2, NULL), (3, 3), (4, 4), (5, 5);You want to order the rows ids by the following expression:
ISNULL(val, id) + 1Which of the following queries produces the expected ordering and why? (Select all correct) See possible answers