Mike Diehl's WebLog
Much aBlog about nothing...
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Power Query function for dense ranking
Recently I was having issues writing a measure in DAX to rank items properly (not an issue with the DAX, but in my understanding of the DAX).
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Power Query to Promote Headers and removing Special Characters
I had an Excel spreadsheet that had "nicely" formatted column headers that made the text appear on separate lines (ie. the text included Alt-Enter linefeeds). I wanted to use it as a source for Power Query (and PowerBI), but remove the linefeeds in the names before promoting them to the column header.
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SQL Server Maintenance Plans - how I use them
Jonathan Cox (@hackdba) has a good post for starting out on SQL Maintenance Plans.
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A pseudo-listener for AlwaysOn Availability Groups for SQL Server virtual machines running in Azure
I am involved in a project that is implementing SharePoint 2013 on virtual machines hosted in Azure. The back end data tier consists of two Azure VMs running SQL Server 2012, with the SharePoint databases contained in an AlwaysOn Availability Group. I used this "Tutorial: AlwaysOn Availability Groups in Windows Azure (GUI)" to help me implement this setup.
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Query Logging in Analysis Services
On a project I work on, we capture the queries that get executed on our Analysis Services instance (SQL Server 2008 R2) and use the table for helping us to build aggregations and also we aggregate the query log daily into a data warehouse of operational data so we can track usage of our Analysis databases by users over time.
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Joel's Predictions for 2011 (and Mike's comments)
Joel has posted his predictions for 2011. I find his predictions very interesting, mostly because I am crappy at doing predictions myself. However, I am seldom at a loss for commenting on someone else's work:
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Imaginet is hiring
Please contact me if you are interested.
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SQL Table stored as a Heap - the dangers within
Nearly all of the time I create a table, I include a primary key, and often that PK is implemented as a clustered index. Those two don't always have to go together, but in my world they almost always do.
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SSIS Bulk Insert task that bit me in the butt...
I've been working on SSIS packages that extract data from production databases and put them into data warehouses, and recently I hit an issue using the Bulk Insert task that bit me real good.
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SQL Database diagramming and VSTS Data Dude
At Imaginet, we use Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals (Data Dude) on our projects to manage database schemas, keep them in source control, unit testing, and lots of other nice features.