I find it amazing how much opportunity and flexibility cloud environments are creating for organizations of all sizes. I’m seeing more and more companies experimenting with open-source software (OSS) relational database systems, which years ago would’ve been too complicated for the customer to set up ..read more

As organizations adopt cloud technologies and modernize their applications, the data they generate and ingest often grows exponentially, leaving them with difficult choices for storing and using this data. Customers are beginning to explore moving away from traditional relational database management systems (RDBMS) because of the data volume to be ingested, as these RDBMS often cannot handle workloads ..read more

As a follow-up to my introduction to SQL Server joins, in this T-SQL tutorial, I’m going to take a closer look at the most used type of joins in SQL Server – the INNER JOIN ..read more

Introduced by Microsoft in SQL Server 2005, SQL CROSS APPLY allows values to be passed from a table or view into a user-defined function or subquery. This tutorial will cover the incredibly useful and flexible APPLY operator, such as how the CROSS APPLY and OUTER APPLY operators work, how they’re like the INNER and LEFT OUTER JOIN, and give you some examples of both. All the examples use the AdventureWorks example database ..read more

A data warehouse (DW) is a centralized repository of data integrated from multiple systems.. This data is often cleansed and standardized before being loaded. Designed to support analytical workloads, a data warehouse can help organizations better leverage both current data and historical data to improve decision-making through the analysis of business processes and outcomes ..read more

Have you ever dealt with an application workload suddenly increasing and the demand on SQL Server begins to increase exponentially as a result? Maybe you’ve never had one of those “my solution to X problem just went viral, and everybody’s signing up” moments, but inevitably, at some point in your career, you’ll have to deal with a scalability limitation affecting performance and the business will look to you for a solution. Generally speaking, there are two types of scaling for SQL Server workloads; horizontally partitioning the workload across multiple servers or vertically scaling the workl ..read more

Open-source software (OSS) relational database management systems (RDBMSes) are becoming incredibly popular in the cloud computing world. In this article, I’ll discuss one of the most popular OSS relational databases, PostgreSQL, and the options you have for this database in the Microsoft Azure cloud. It’s worth noting these products are large with many detailed aspects, so consider this article a cursory, high-level overview of each offering ..read more

One of my favorite consulting questions to ask when dealing with a scalability problem is, “If you could change the system design with the knowledge you have today, what would/wouldn’t you change and why?” Sometimes it’s best to ask this question on a one-on-one basis with different developers, DBAs, report writers, and architects to get honest answers that aren’t intimidated by the other people sitting in a meeting or to avoid potential debating and arguing over a solution. This kind of information is incredibly important to know and understand before starting down the path of sharding data ..read more

The enterprise data warehouse (EDW) provides access to business data stored in a denormalized structure called a star schema, which makes it easy to analyze, visualize, and forecast essential business metrics. Business intelligence (BI) reporting makes use of the data warehouse for real-time self-service dashboards, custom visualizations, data marts, decision-making reports, and machine learning (ML ..read more

As a long-time database consultant, I’ve fixed more blocking problems in database systems than I can count. Often this blocking has resulted from conflicts between processes needing to read rows while those rows are being modified ..read more