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?
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.
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.
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.
Sometimes you want to have a copy of an existing database on […]
I originally wrote this article in December 2019 for my old blog. […]