Learning Never Gets Old (DBW 2024-02-17)

Database Weekly for February 17, 2024 Problems displaying this newsletter? [View online](. [Database Weekly]( The Complete Weekly Roundup of SQL Server News by SQLServerCentral.com Hand-picked content to sharpen your professional edge Editorial  Learning Never Gets Old It’s been a goal for several years to write (or help write) a book on a topic I love. While I can’t share details yet, there’s some movement on this dream and I’m excited about it. And I’m even more excited that I get to do it alongside someone that I’ve respected for a long time and has a lot more experience at this book thing. However, there’s one thing I didn’t anticipate. Writing a chapter in a technical book requires a different set of skills than presenting on the same topic to a room full of people. Crazy, right? The first chapter that I’m working on has taken me quite a while to complete. The chapter is about a topic that I’ve presented numerous times. I think the slides are clear and I finish the session with a step-by-step demo using a heavily commented script that attendees can download and try on their own later. In person, the flow of the presentation feels like it makes sense, and each section of the talk connects nicely as I go. But translating that content into a book has stretched my brain more than I expected. The first big difference is that I can’t rely on interacting with the reader in the same way I do in a live presentation. Readers can’t hear the questions or comments from other readers in real-time like they can in a presentation. And I don’t get to narrate and the content in quite the same way. In short, I’ve had to quickly learn that the correct progression of information, along with just the right amount of detail, is key to making the content accessible in a static, written form. At the same time, it’s causing me to rethink how I present and teach content in all the various ways I have an opportunity to do so. I’ve been teaching in one way or another for more than 25 years and I’m encouraged when I continue to learn more ways to improve at this craft. I love learning, helping others to learn, and building community around these technologies. And every opportunity I take to improve provides new opportunities to continue this journey and I’m thankful for that. What about you? Where have you been stretched recently in your specific spheres of expertise? How have you reacted to opportunities for growth? Do those challenges excite you? Don’t shy away from the challenge and never stop growing! Ryan Booz [Join the debate, and respond to the editorial on the forums](  The Weekly News All the headlines and interesting SQL Server information that we've collected over the past week, and sometimes even a few repeats if we think they fit. Vendors/3rd Party Products [Managing Test Datasets for a Database: What’s Required?]( The management of datasets is intrinsic to effective team-based database development. This article reviews what's required of test datasets in database development and then proposes a system of managing them in a migration-based approach that adopts a common standard for their storage, using JSON. [How to Write and Debug a PowerShell Callback for Flyway Migrations]( We can use callbacks in Flyway to plug into any part of the Flyway lifecycle and run various database tasks before or after a particular event takes place. In this article I've tried to assemble a 'best practice' guide for writing callbacks to ensure that the scripts always behave predictably, and so that when things go awry the cause is easy to spot, without hours of painful scrolling through Flyway output. AI/Machine Learning/Cognitive Services [Why Big Tech’s watermarking plans are some welcome good news]( From Technology Review Feed - Tech Review Top Stories This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, o... [The OpenAI Endgame]( From O'Reilly Radar - Insight Since the New York Times sued OpenAI for infringin... [Google’s new version of Gemini can handle far bigger amounts of data]( From Technology Review Feed - Tech Review Top Stories Google DeepMind today launched the next generation of its powerful artificial-intelligence model Gemini, which has an enhanced ability to work with large amounts of video, text, and images. It’s... [California Lawmaker Unveils Landmark AI Bill]( From IT Pro - Microsoft Windows Information, Solutions, Tools A proposal to force companies to test AI models before releasing them could inspire similar regulations around the US. Community Interests [SQL Saturday ATL – BI Recap]( From Data on Wheels (Steve Hughes) First of all, wow! What an incredible event! Loved... DMO/SMO/Powershell [Checking SQL Server Estate Connectivity with Powershell Jobs...parallel technicolour.]( From SQL Rod In my previous post Running Powershell for SQL Use... Microsoft Fabric ( Azure Synapse Analytics, OneLake, ADLS, Data Science) [Tinkering with Fabric Data Factory Framework Functionality]( From AndyLeonard.blog() I recently asked myself, “Self, is it possible t... Oracle/PostgreSQL/MySQL/other RDBMS [Henrietta Dombrovskaya: PG Day Chicago Schedule is announced!]( From Planet Postgres Dea PostgreSQL Community, friends, and colleagues! The PG Day Chicago schedule is here! I want to thank everybody who submitted proposals and our CfP committee for doing an exceptional... [Paul Ramsey: PostGIS Clustering with K-Means]( From Planet Postgres Clustering points is a common task for geospatial data analysis, and PostGIS provides several functions for clustering. ST_ClusterDBSCAN ... [Ricardo Zavaleta: Benchmarking PostgreSQL connection poolers: PgBouncer, PgCat and Supavisor]( From Planet Postgres Creating a connection to your Postgres database to execute a short-lived query is expensive. Several people have measured the overhead of Postgres connections and some locate them in the... [Functions and Procedures: Learning PostgreSQL with Grant]( From Simple Talk One of the most useful constructs in SQL Server is the stored procedure. It gives you a way to do several things. First up, you can store code within... [Vibhor Kumar: Exploiting SQL/JSON Enhancements for Modern Workloads in PostgreSQL 16]( From Planet Postgres The latest iteration of PostgreSQL, version 16, brings a suite of enhancements that bolster its capabilities with JSON data. These improvements not only align PostgreSQL more closely with the... [Dian Fay: (Plausible) Random Geography Generation with PostGIS: Fluviation]( From Planet Postgres Welcome to Squaria. Squaria is a continent of highly unstable geography defined by a single SQL query (with, as we'll see, many, many CTEs). Its only... Performance Tuning SQL Server [When SQL Server Isn’t Smart About Aggregates Part 1]( From Erik Darling Data With Sympathy Of all the cardinality estimation pr... [When SQL Server Isn’t Smart About Aggregates Part 2]( From Erik Darling Data Keep It A Buck Here are the missing indexes that S... PowerPivot/PowerQuery/PowerBI [Source Control with GIT, Power BI and Microsoft Fabric]( Source control is fundamental when dealing with projects and sharing code between multiple developers. Power BI present some challenges related to source control. But it’s finally providing us with a solution to these challenges. Let’s analyse this piece-by-piece. [Optimizing time intelligence in DirectQuery]( From Sqlbi How to optimize time intelligence calculations wit... [Reading Parquet Metadata In Power Query In Power BI]( From Chris Webb's BI Blog There’s a new M function in Power Query in Power BI that allows you to read the data from a Parquet file: Parquet.Metadata. It’s not documented yet and it’s... Reporting Services [Generate SSRS Report On Demand with PowerShell and a Web Service]( From MSSQL Tips Learn how to automate running an SSRS report with ... SQL Server News [How SQL developers can maximize savings]( From Microsoft SQL Server Blog Whether you build applications for SQL Server on-premises or in Azure, there are several options for you to develop or test for free, or with substantial cost savings. The post... SQL Server on Linux [Video: Create an Availability Group in SQL Server on Linux]( From 36 Chambers – The Legendary Journeys THE VIDEO THE SYNOPSIS In this video, we will buil... T-SQL and Query Languages [When an update doesn’t update]( I’ve seen this. Loads. It can be quite perplexing for folks because they expect to see an error message if the insert, update, or delete failed. I put this post together to provide some things you can investigate if this happens to you – you are sure that you updated the data, but when you check using SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), your change isn’t there. Tech News [Sequential A/B Testing Keeps the World Streaming NetflixPart 1: Continuous Data]( From Netflix TechBlog - Medium Michael Lindon, Chris Sanden, Vache Shirikian, Yan... Virtualization and Containers/Kubernetes [Deploying a Dockerized Application to the Kubernetes Cluster using Jenkins]( Jenkins serves as an open-source automation server with widespread application in the realm of software development, primarily focusing on continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD). flyway [How to Write and Debug a PowerShell Callback for Flyway Migrations]( From Product learning – Redgate Software We can use callbacks in Flyway to plug into any part of the Flyway lifecycle and run various database tasks before or after a particular event takes place. In...  [RSS Feed]( This email has been sent to {EMAIL}. To be removed from this list, please click [here](. If you have any problems leaving the list, please contact the webmaster@sqlservercentral.com. This newsletter was sent to you because you signed up at SQLServerCentral.com. 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