Don’t pass over synonyms

I am finally back in the writing saddle again with a spree of tidbits for the month of April 2015. These articles will focus on learning a simple TSQL command or technique. Today, I want to talk about how synonyms can be used to preserve backward compatibility objects while allowing for schema redesign in existing databases. The CREATE SYNONYM and DROP SYNONYM key words were added to the TSQL language in the 2005 version. The main purpose of the construct is to provide a simple name to reference a database…

Power Query – Part 4

There has been a big push for self service business intelligence tools by Microsoft in recent months. The center of this new universe is Microsoft Excel. I will carry on with talks about Power Query which is a self service ETL add-in for MS Excel. This tool was released in August of 2013. In addition to my blog, the online help is a good place to start learning about this tool. Last time, I demonstrated how the “reduce” section of ribbon has buttons that can refine the number of rows…

Power Query – Part 3

There has been a big push for self service business intelligence tools by Microsoft in recent months. The center of this universe is Microsoft Excel. I will keep on going with talks about Power Query which is a self service ETL add-in for MS Excel. This tool was released in August of 2013. In addition to my blog, the online help is a good place to start learning about this tool. Last time, I demonstrated how the “get external data” and “excel data” ribbon buttons can be used to export…

Power Query – Part 2

In recent months, there has been a big push for self service business intelligence tools by Microsoft. The center of this universe is Microsoft Excel which is a common application used by the data analyst. Today, I will continue talking about Power Query which is a self service ETL tool. This tool was released in August of 2013. In addition to my blog, the online help is a good place to start learning about this tool. Last time, I showed you how to find an online data source, extract the…

Power Query – Part 1

In recent months, there has been a big push for self service business intelligence tools by Microsoft. The center of this universe is Microsoft Excel, a common application used by the typical data analyst. The following four products started off as add-ins for Excel. Now, some of them are a integral part of MS Office 2013. Power Query Power Pivot Power View Power Map It is not surprising that these four business intelligence products have an offering in Office 365. I really like office 365 as a platform to share…

Is my string a number?

I have been recently devoting a-lot of time answering questions on STACKOVERFLOW. Many times, you are just helping and/or teaching younger SQL Server developers and/or administrators the tricks of the trade. Sometimes you come across a GEM, a question that you can blog about so that when they are asked again, you have a well constructed answer. One classic questions asked by new database developers is whether or not the user input is a number? I thought it was an excellent opportunity to review what tools are available given a…

Staying Connected

There are many companies in the world that have offices in remote locations. Sometimes downloading software media from Microsoft or Oracle might take minutes if not hours. During this time, your terminal session with the remote computer might time out. How do you prevent this from happening? The windows server operating system allows two concurrent remote desktop (RDP) connections. However, there are out of the box settings that automatically determine idle session limit and when to disconnected a user. I am including a link to MSDN that describes remote desktop…

Installing Windows PowerShell

PowerShell comes installed as part of the operating system in Windows 7. I checked my system which is a base install of Windows 7 SP1. The ISE or integrated scripting envrionment is the place to code, debug and launch scripts. To open the development environment, type powershell_ise at the run or command prompt to launch the application. At this point, you have to decide if you can live with the current version or install the new version. There are two commands that can be used to find the version. The…