Are you looking to improve your data platform skills and learn something new this Autumn?If you would like to attend a great online virtual conference with fantastic community speakers who prepared talks on a variety of subjects for you to enjoy, then you should consider DataWeekender.There are six tracks and [...]
I was going to write about querying XML but then realised I had to start with the queues. Bear with me. It will all start to make sense when you read all articles. It makes sense to talk about queues since I recently mentioned that SQLWATCH is moving to queues. [...]
I get asked a lot about how to learn SQL or what is the best way to learn SQL. I learned SQL in about two days from a simple book. The syntax, that is, that's the easy bit because SQL language has been designed to be easy and human friendly [...]
Those who closely follow this blog and myself will know that SQLWATCH and thus this blog were an offshoot of my original blog, firstly at https://marcingminski.com and then https://marcin.gminski.net. It all started with this post https://marcin.gminski.net/blog/sql-server-performance-dashboard-using-powerbi/ and this is how SQLWATCH was born and how I ended up with essentiall [...]
One of the biggest challenges I face when building SQLWATCH is testing. Up until recently SQLWATCH distributed-only solution. It means that it had to be installed on each monitored server and only worked in a local scope. This made the development and testing easy as I only had to make [...]
Apologies if you have received an email with random test content. I wanted to try a new template for the website and blog and somehow it decided that it will be a good idea to auto-post and thus trigger an email with some demo-content. #NeverTestInProduction
I get a lot of emails with concerns that some of you have very strict security and locked-down environments which prevent you from installing SQLWATCH. At the same time, some of you would have preferred the central repository to connect directly to the remote instance and pull data out of [...]
The identity value in relational databases is a field that increases automatically. It is often used to create surrogate primary keys. Surrogate keys Surrogate keys are meaningless and are only used to uniquely identify the row, not the data itself. For example, assume the following table: CREATE TABLE people ( [...]
I recently came across a tweet by Brent Ozar who touched on a very important aspect of performance monitoring. A subject that is not always well understood and can lead to misleading results. The impact of aggregation on granularity and thus observability. Brent's tweet inspired me to try and explain [...]
The observer effect is a term used in physics and it means that observing a phenomenon changes that phenomenon. Therefore, an object that is being observed, is looking different to the same, not observed object. How is this possible? In physics, this is to do with photons and electrons. An [...]
