Category: SQL Server

For me, one of the most valuable features of Power BI is the ease with which I can mashup data from a variety of different data sources. This, of course, requires importing data into Power BI’s internal xVelocity engine. For many others, however, it is critical to create Power BI reports and dashboards that reflect […]

Watson, IBM’s poster child for artificial intelligence, could not have been built using a single type of AI technology. This is hardly surprising. The intelligence needed to understand a question can differ quite dramatically from the intelligence needed to answer it. Indeed, upon understanding a question it takes intelligence to know what techniques are most […]

Most seasoned SQL Server administrators and developers will tell you to include SET NOCOUNT ON in all your stored procedure code. The reason generally given is to turn off the unnecessary “n rows affected” message that appears so often in the Management Studio Message pane. However, the “rows affected” message is only the visible tip […]

What are Graph Tables? Amy J, a student in Learning Tree’s course 8463, Querying Microsoft SQL Server 2014 asks “I see SQL Server 2017 has a “graph database” feature. How does a graph differ from the old HierarchyID datatype?”. Good question, Amy. While the old hierarchyID datatype can represesnt, in a very simplistic way, an […]

Perhaps the title should be the disadvantages of sending SQL batches from client applications. Many people think that the primary advantage to stored procedures arises from the fact that they are optimized and compile once and then remain in memory, hopefully to be used again and again. While this can be an advantage, there are […]