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It has been five months since I last wrote a blog post here. That means, I’ve been pretty busy with a few other stuff backstage. One of them is being asked to become a (technical) partner at a relatively new IT company, which I immediately said “yes” to.

I have been using Azure Data Studio for a while now (since end of 2019, perhaps? Too lazy to check). It was love at first sight for me. Because I had used the Visual Studio Code before (I still use it sporadically), I felt at home with ADS immediately. The look, the intellisense, the dark mode, the cross-platform, the extensions, almost everything.

I have been always fascinated by online marketing and the metrics used to measure the performance of a website. Unfortunately, I don’t have much experience in this yet and handled a project in online marketing data only once (a 6-months project in 2016) for a marketing agency whose clients were the likes of Audi, Volkswagen, and P&G. Because of this, now I just decided to create my own project by measuring this website’s metrics and reporting what I do to improve those.

If you want to use a Power BI for your data visualization, you will be faced with the following question, when your data source is an SQL Server database : do you want to import or use a direct query as a data connectivity mode?

This weekend 10 years ago I made a last-minute decision to participate in an event called Startup Weekend. Little did I know, that this event impacted my career choice big time. Since then, from a simple database administrator I went on to become a project manager, a freelancer and consultant, created a startup (and failed), application manager and head of IT. Not only that, I managed to get to meet great people, whom I still follow or connect with in social media up until now.

Use case: you have an SQL Server database table and use Identity (auto increment) for the primary key (let’s call it id). For any reason, the table content is as following:

I have been asked a few times on how to migrate databases in the cloud. Sometimes I’m confused and have to pause before answering this question. Not because I don’t know how, but it’s more that I’m trying to figure out what is the motivation behind the question. In short: it should not be different than migrating databases on the on-premises servers. In other words, the only difference is that, the servers on the cloud are managed by a third-party provider.

Not too long ago,  only a handful companies (at least in Germany) offered their employees a possibility to work from home, without having to provide legitimate reasons (acceptable reasons are usually kids sick,  wait for a package or plumber, or have to go to a car mechanic near home).

But, as we all know, Corona changed that. We are all in lockdown.

Just recently, I took the exam AZ-900 to receive Azure Fundamentals certification. For most people working in IT, especially in the cloud computing, this means nothing special. In fact, this certification only has a meaning (just a little) when you just start out a career and apply for an entry-level in the IT industry (which gave me more pressure not to fail this one, so I might over-prepare it a bit). To my defense, I took this exam because I had received a free voucher from an event I attended a year ago. I’m the kind of person who constantly looks for ways in either saving money to the max or taking full advantages of anything (or both).

But I also have other reasons why I took this exam and took some lessons along the way, both from a personal and technical point of view.

A while ago, I wrote an article here on how to restore a complete database with a different database name. That is actually restoring a database from a full backup. This time, in addition to that, I want to show you how to backup a SQL Server database and restore it, both in full and differential mode.

A few years ago at the beginning of my 3-year freelancing journey, I just joined a project at a big, international marketing agency in Düsseldorf as a Business Intelligence Developer. This required me to stay in Düsseldorf Monday through Friday (at the time, WFH was not yet a thing) for 6 months. Back in Hamburg at almost the same time, someone I know asked me if I could help her optimizing and adding a few features on her website. No big deal, I thought.

I’m not sure if the title above is understandable. What I mean by that is, you have a string and you want to split it and put each string element into specific columns. The split element is separated by a delimiter.

When you see the example below, I hope you understand what I’m trying to do (spoiler alert: it has something to do with CROSS APPLY).