Flight Data
Travel can be stressful and complicated. As much as computer systems have made things easier, when they fail, your trip can turn awful in a hurry.
Solving Complex T-SQL Problems, Step-By-Step
What should you do if your first, most intuitive solution to a problem ends up scanning the data more than is necessary, resulting in poor performance? Have you missed a new SQL Server feature that can remove inefficiency from your technique? Alternatively, do you need a little help, and some lateral thinking, to open the path to a different approach? Sometimes, the answer is "both".
Natural Data
Can you own data itself or patent it? There's a Supreme Court case dealing with this right now. Steve Jones notes that the outcome could affect our jobs as we deal with more and more data and laws to control data are enacted.
Custom Metrics for Monitoring Database Mirroring
SQL Monitor comes with plenty of metrics, but there are always going to be things that you want to measure that can't be done 'out of the box'. Taking database mirroring as an example, Grant shows that custom metrics can be used to monitor and alert whatever aspect of SQL Server or database that you need.
Using FULL JOINs to Compare Datasets
This article describes a technique of using FULL JOINs to compare two datasets within a numerical tolerance.
SQL Server Central Webinar Series #23: Safeguard your data offsite with SQL Backup Pro
You may already have a great backup and recovery plan. However, if something were to happen to your databases and you needed to restore from your backups, you’d want to be in control, with the ability to access a copy of those backups quickly, restoring them with minimal downtime and minimal fuss.
In this session Grant Fritchey, SQL Server MVP, will discuss the key reasons why you need to have offsite backups, and the advantages of hosted storage. He’ll address some of the fears surrounding cloud backups, and show how offsite backup is made quick and easy with the new ‘backup to hosted storage’ features in SQL Backup Pro 7.3.
A Billion Transactions
A billion transactions is a lot of activity on your database, however Steve Jones thinks more and more of us might see this on a regular basis. Microsoft's facilities group shows this to be the case.
Excuses Execrating Excel
A bad workman always blames his tools. So does the entire western media, it seems, as poor old Excel gets it in the neck for some appalling calculation errors in economic papers.
Stay Backed Up by Monitoring Your Backup Process
Based on a linked server setup, you can check your SQL Server backups on multiple instances.
Diagnosing Common Database Ails
When a database starts showing signs of an illness, it's up to the DBA to get to the root of the problem, fast. Kat Hicks takes a look at the most common causes of database troubles, free tools that can help, and the misconceptions that get in the way.
Blogs
Stop Using Pandas for Aggregations — Try DuckDB Instead
If you've ever loaded a 2 GB CSV into pandas just to run a...
Understanding Fabric Ontology
By James Serra
What problem is Fabric Ontology trying to solve? For years, most data conversations have...
QUOTENAME Basics: #SQLNewBlogger
By Steve Jones
Recently I ran across some code that used a lot of QUOTENAME() calls. A...
Forums
The New Software Team
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Database Mail in SQL Server 2022
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Database Mail in SQL Server...
The string_agg function
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The string_agg function
Question of the Day
The string_agg function
We create the following table and then insert some records in it:
create table t1 ( id int primary key, category char(1) not null, product varchar(50) ); insert into t1 values (1, 'A', 'Product 1'), (2, 'A', 'Product 2'), (3, 'A', 'Product 3'), (4, 'B', 'Product 4'), (5, 'B', 'Product 5');What happens if we execute the following query in both Sql Server and PostgreSQL?
select id,
category,
string_agg(product, ';')
over (partition by category order by id
rows between unbounded preceding and unbounded following) as stragg
from t1; See possible answers