External Article

How to Start Big Data with Apache Spark

It is worth getting familiar with Apache Spark because it a fast and general engine for large-scale data processing and you can use you existing SQL skills to get going with analysis of the type and volume of semi-structured data that would be awkward for a relational database. With an IDE such as Databricks you can very quickly get hands-on experience with an interesting technology.

External Article

More Power BI to your Elbow

Power BI Desktop continues to evolve. There have been many improvements to the reporting side that together make it easier to get from the data to the visualisation as quickly as possible. You can now create line charts that let users drill down into hierarchical data. There are now ways of adding dynamic reference lines to a visualization that provide users with relevant reference points. Robert Sheldon demonstrates how to combine these features to great effect.

Blogs

SWAG Saves the Day

By

PASS Summit East is in one week. I was on the road last week...

Upgrading SQL Server Containers on the Laptop

By

I don’t have SQL Server installed on my laptop. In an effort to keep...

How to Find Expensive Queries in Amazon Redshift

By

Slow-running queries can degrade your Redshift cluster’s performance and lead to increased costs. Identifying...

Read the latest Blogs

Forums

Having Issue deploying a report to an on prem server from PowerBI desktop

By daniel.manke

Using PowerBI Version1.25.9508.3237(January 2026). Installed Microsoft Power BI Desktop (Optimized for Power BI Report...

SQL 2019 instance with AG, across 2 Windows 2016 OS servers - OSin-place upgrade

By millardus

Hi all Can I get some perspective from the community please on performing in-place...

How Long is a Long I/O?

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item How Long is a Long...

Visit the forum

Question of the Day

How Long is a Long I/O?

In SQL Server 2025, a long I/O is recorded in the error log with message 833. How long much an I/O request be outstanding before this message is written to the log?

See possible answers