Poor data is bad for business. In this paper, you will learn how you can use SQL Server 2012's Data Quality Services to solve common data quality problems. Paras Doshi will cover in this article Data Standardization, Identifying and correcting unrealistic or invalid values, and Validating & correcting records using Regular Expressions.
In my previous article “A Static Relational Interval Tree”, I described a new powerful structure, the Static Relational Interval Tree (or Static RI-Tree), efficiently handling interval intersection queries in SQL. The power of Static RI-Trees resides in their ability to efficiently partition a set of intervals so that queries can focus on just a subset of the intervals. In this article, I present other kinds of queries that are also nicely handled by a Static RI-Tree.
In the previous articles, we described how Change Tracking works, and the steps you need to follow to enable it and configure it properly. Now, it's time to see how this feature can be used in a common scenario which is typical in BI solutions but easily extensible to any other context that requires an incremental data load.
Some of you might remember the first time you were able to read a magazine, or a street sign, or a label. Those who learned the English language as their mother tongue might not know how differently Spanish-speaking kids learned to read their own language. Yet I am sure that all kids enjoyed that first moment when they were suddenly able to make sense of those signs which, until then, had been just drawings for them.
In the first article, I described the characteristics of Change Tracking, how to activate and deactivate it, and how the system objects that support this feature are structured. Assuming that you have mastered these concepts, I will now describe the functions that SQL Server provides to work with Change Tracking.
This article is the second of a two-part series on “Building Ideal Models for Power View reports”. In the first part, we saw how to build an ideal PowerPivot model for Power View reports, which you can read here: http://www.solidq.com/sqj/Pages/Business_Intelligence/Building-Ideal-PowerPivot-Model-for-Power-View-reports.aspx . If you want an introduction to Power View, please refer to our earlier SolidQ Journal article: http://www.solidq.com/sqj/Pages/Business_Intelligence/An-introduction-to-PowerView-in-SQL-Server-2012.aspx
Keeping track of the INSERT, DELETE and UPDATE operations performed on data in one or more SQL Server tables is a regular activity in both the development and administration phases of many applications. For a long time, the absence of a feature that would track changes automatically has forced developers to implement custom solutions which use triggers, timestamps and/or store the primary keys of these changed rows in ad hoc tables.
The purpose of this article is to expand on the already familiar White Paper, “Integration Services: Performance Tuning Techniques”, which was written by Elizabeth Vitt and Hitachi Consulting, and published at TechNet in 2006. Some of the concepts in that White Paper will be reproduced here, both in the interests of clarity and to link the two documents - thus enriching the reader’s knowledge of SQL Server Integration Services’ inner mechanisms.
Suppose that you need to do query tuning in a system that suffers from performance problems. There could be requests from users to tune very specific queries, but there could also be requests to improve the system’s performance as a whole. Then there is the question which queries should you tune? There could be hundreds of different query patterns in the system. It simply won’t be an efficient use of your time to try and tune them all. You need to figure out a smart process that will help you isolate a fairly small number of queries— the ones that, if you tune, will have a bigger impact on the system’s performance than others. This article describes a strategy that will help you prioritize queries for tuning. It also provides a solution for implementing the strategy using enhanced Extended Events in SQL Server 2012.
This article belongs to a two-part series on “Building Ideal Models for Power View reports”. We will study all the reporting properties in PowerPivot Model as well as in Tabular Model that you can configure to build an Ideal model for Power View reports. Part 1 is focused on PowerPivot model and Part 2 is focused on Tabular Model.
