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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).

If you are like me, you may have heard Azure a few years ago for the first time. You may even have tested and tried to work with it. But somehow, either you’ve been turned off by the cost (it starts reasonably small, but it can have snow ball effect if you are not careful) or the demands were not really out there. So you decided to stop using the service because you’d better use your time for something else.

However, cloud computing is the thing now, and it makes sense to give it another look.