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Managing customer’s SQL Server applications, we discovered a significant performance decrease related to query execution time. We figured out that the reason for that was the execution of a script, which checks the existence of database objects before updating them. The original script looked as follows: 123456789101112IF OBJECT_ID(’dbo.data_xxxx’) IS NULL BEGIN     CREATE VIEW dbo.data_xxxx     AS     SELECT VCV.item1, VCV.item2 AS item2, VCV.item3 AS item3 FROM TABLE_A VCV END ELSE BEGIN     ALTER VIEW dbo.data_xxxx […]

The application development process is a multi-layered activity with the core idea as the starting point and a well-functioning final product as the top layer. IT Business Analysis is all about the elicitation of business and software requirements. The main goal at this stage is to put flesh on the bones for a client’s idea and to provide proof of concept for its realization.
In this post, we will focus on the twists and turns involved in bringing the idea through to the final product.

In our second Amazon QuickSight introduction blog post we will go through the basic steps in building a dashboard. These steps include importing a CSV data set, creating calculated fields and data analysis. The data being analyzed is in regards to non–local employee travel which is a public access data set and the source of the data is data.gov. We utilized the data set of employee travel data (non-local) of Montgomery County of Maryland. This data set gives insights into […]

With a starting value of $288,222,000.21 USD and a final total of $285,769,892.75 USD, the middle values used to calculate the total in the initial dataset contained extremely large variances in values. The scale and degree of variance created a challenge for creating a waterfall chart in Power BI.

A customer of ours presented us with an interesting problem. How do you take a hard drive with four terabytes of historical data files that have millions of zipped data files nested by year, quarter, and month and move them into an Azure Data Lake Gen2 storage account? Getting the data from the hard drive to Azure was easy using the Azure Data Box service. Our challenge at the time of this blog post was that Powershell had limited functionality […]

Welcome to Episode 8 of my Power BI Best Practices Series. In today’s episode, I will show you how you can create drillthrough pages in your report. Here we go! Create Drillthrough Pages with Detail Drillthrough pages allow for your users to navigate to different pages within your report to expore the details of the visuals that they choose. For example, you can create a drillthrough filter in Power BI based on the specific entity. After you create the drillthrough […]

I recently needed to migrate an Azure SQL Database Managed Instance to an Azure VM running SQL Server. There were several reasons for this which included: Machine Learning Services was not available for processing R language libraries close to the database. Bulk loading CSV files were slower than expected because Managed Instances only supports the Full Recovery Model. PolyBase was not available for data mining data files located in Azure Data Lake Gen2 storage. The challenge that I faced was […]

Welcome to Episode 7 of my Power BI Best Practices Series. In today’s episode, I will show you how to align your visuals to make users happy with the content they see. Here we go! Power BI — Align Your Visuals Misaligned visuals on a messy dashboard may look confusing for the users. As they don’t understand where to look at, the users can’t find the information they need. So, you’d like to create a solid and elegant dashboard. The […]

Welcome to Episode 6 of my Power BI Best Practices Series. In today’s episode, I will show you how to relate tables and your data model to allow for cross filtering and relationships. Here we go! Power BI — Relate tables and your data model By default, Power BI relationships are not active. So, you need to set the relationships in your dashboard. You can also set the type of cardinality of the selected relationship from one of the following […]

DB Best announces the release of a new version of an ultimate DBA tool Database Compare Suite. The latest version supports Amazon DynamoDB. This is the second NoSQL database platform supported by DB Best Database Compare Suite to complement the recent addition of support of Apache Cassandra as a source and target. In addition to this, Database Compare Suite update 4.14 brings the ability to use SSL to connect to Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle databases. Continue reading to learn more […]