Erik Darling dusts off his favorite archival-quality bloggers and books.

What is the best way to on-board (train) a new junior employee?

by Ben Kubicek

SQLServerCentral.com

Editorial

It is important to train new people, so what is the best way to go about doing it?

Introduction to Testing Your PowerShell Code with Pester

by Additional Articles

SimpleTalk

PowerShell

Everyone knows how important code testing is, and to be thorough, you must automate testing. This includes scripts such as those written in PowerShell as well. In this article, Robert Cain introduces Pester, a tool for testing PowerShell code.

Back Yourself Up

by Hakim Ali

SQLServerCentral.com

Editorial

Ever thought about yourself as a resource that should be backed up to minimize your loss?

Stairway to Columnstore Indexes Level 11: Optimizing Queries For Batch Mode (Part 2)

by Hugo Kornelis

SQLServerCentral.com

Hugo Kornelis continues his exploration of the types of queries that can end up running in row mode when accessing columnstore indexes. He demonstrates how careful rewriting can often yield a logically equivalent query that runs in batch mode instead, and therefore gains the best possible performance benefit.

Using MERGE in SQL Server to insert, update and delete at the same time

by Additional Articles

MSSQLTips.com

insert

In a typical data warehousing application, quite often during the ETL cycle you need to perform INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE operations on a TARGET table by matching the records from the SOURCE table.

I Feel Like a Magician

by Steve Jones

SQLServerCentral.com

Editorial

Something sufficiently complex, in our eyes, may appear to be magic. Steve Jones feels some of his knowledge about SQL Server looks the same way to others.

Modern Data Warehouse Design Pattern – Part I

by Additional Articles

SQLServerCentral

Data Warehouse

The modern data warehouse design helps in building a hub for all types of data to initiate integrated and transformative solutions. To achieve these goals and to support modern designs, Microsoft has introduced a set of fully managed, cloud-based services that not only support modern data warehouse design patterns but also provide the advantages of inbuilt scalability, high availability, good performance, and flexibility.