When you are first learning PowerShell, it often seems to be an 'Alice through the looking-glass' world. Just the simple process of comparing and selecting strings can seem strangely obtuse. Michael turns the looking-glass into wonderland with his wall-chart of the PowerShell string-comparison operators and syntax
Key Performance Indicators are typically displayed in a scorecard with stop light indicators, which are either red, amber or green light icons. The limitation for these kind of indicators is that you can see the actual and target values in two different fields as well as see the status of the KPI in red, amber or green color. If the user wants to figure out the thresholds associated with the KPI, these values are generally not visible. Further, representing the threshold values in the scorecard itself defeats the purpose of the scorecard. The scorecard should display the KPI's status in the most summarized form and use a minimal amount of space on the dashboard. In this tip we would look at how to address this issue.
Today Steve Jones talks about a new use for cloud computing with Excel to analyze large sets of data.
Unstructured and XML semi-structured data is now used more than structured data. But fixed structured data still keeps businesses running day in and day out, which requires consistent predictable highly principled processing for correct results. For this reason, it would be very useful to have a general purpose SQL peer-to-peer collaboration capability that can utilize highly principled hierarchical data processing and its flexible and advanced structured processing to support dynamically structured data and its dynamic structured processing. This flexible dynamic structured processing can change the structure of the data as necessary for the required processing while preserving the relational and hierarchical data principles. This processing will perform freely across remote unrelated peer locations anytime and transparently process unpredictable and unknown structured data and data type changes automatically for immediate processing using automatic metadata maintenance.
It seems that archival isn't on the mind of most designers when they first build a database, which is OK, but DBAs ought to be building skills to implement this if the data size grows large.
This week Steve Jones notes there were quite a few patches from Microsoft for a variety of products. No SQL Server specific security patches, but that doesn't mean that DBAs shouldn't be patching systems.
Of all the technical solutions to the problem of slowly changing dimensions, the T-SQL MERGE statement is one of the most elegant.
Identifiers aren't locators, and they aren't pointers or links either. They are a logical concept in a relational database, and, unlike the more traditional methods of accessing data, don't derive from the way that data gets stored. Identifiers uniquely identify members of the set, and it should be possible to validate and verify them. Celko somehow involves watches and taxi cabs to illustrate the point.
By Arun Sirpal
Third part in my Ai series with databases. When building AI solutions within the...
By Steve Jones
This month we have a very interesting invitation from Koen Verbeeck. He has hosted...
It’s the second tuesday of the month, which means T-SQL Tuesday time! This month’s...
Tlp/Wa_Cs:0817-866-887. Blok A VI No, Jl. Parang Tritis Raya 3B-3C, RT.8/RW.11, Ancol, Kec. Pademangan,...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item How Do the Experts Become...
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As of June 2026, what is the best version of TLS to use with SQL Server?
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