Arshad Ali

Introduction With the recent acquisition of Datazen by Microsoft, if you have SQL Server 2008 or later Enterprise Edition with Software Assurance, you can leverage (download and use) Datazen to create visually appealing dashboards for mobile devices across all the major platforms at no additional costs. In this article series I am going to demonstrate […]

Introduction Microsoft Power BI is a cloud based self-service BI solution for the enterprise. Power BI provides capabilities that can be leveraged by people with all level of skills including data analyst, power users, business users, data stewards and folks from the IT department. I’ve discussed Power BI in detail in the last couple of […]

Introduction Microsoft Power BI is a cloud based self-service BI solution for the enterprise. Power BI provides capabilities that can be leveraged by people with all level of skills including data analysts, power users, business users, data stewards and folks from the IT department. Recently, under the Power BI umbrella, the team added another tool […]

Introduction In my last article “Converting Comma Separated Value to Rows and Vice Versa in SQL Server”, I talked about how you can convert comma separated (or separated with some other character) values in a single column into rows and vice versa. In this article, I demonstrate how you can convert rows values into columns […]

Introduction Often while reporting you will encounter a situation where you will have comma separated (or separated with some other character) values in a single column but you want to report them in rows whereas in some other cases you might have values in multiple rows and want them to be a single value separated […]

Introduction We often need to combine two or more string values to use this combined string value in reporting. Although there was a way to do that in earlier versions of SQL Server, starting with SQL Server 2012 we have CONCAT function for this specific situation. This T-SQL function also takes care of data type […]

Introduction There are different techniques to optimize the performance of SQL Server queries, such as keeping required and updated statistics, creating required indexes, partitioning table, etc., but wouldn’t it be great if had some recommendations before we started planning or optimizing queries so that we didn’t have to start from scratch every time? This is […]

Introduction There are different techniques to optimize the performance of SQL Server queries, like keeping required and updated statistics, creating required indexes, partitioning tables, etc., but wouldn’t it be great if we had some recommendations before we started planning or optimizing queries so that we didn’t have to start from the scratch every time and […]

Introduction In my last article I discussed the basics of statistics and why it is needed. I also covered when it needed to be created or updated and how it looks. In this article I will talk about how performance gets impacted because of missing and out-of-date statistics, how statistics are managed in SQL Server, […]

Introduction Statistics refers to the statistical information about the distribution of values in one or more columns of a table or an index. The SQL Server Query Optimizer uses this statistical information to estimate the cardinality, or number of rows, in the query result to be returned, which enables the SQL Server Query Optimizer to […]

Introduction Have you ever been in a situation where you needed to write a query that needed to do comparisons or access data from the subsequent rows along with the data from the current row? This article discusses different ways to write these types of queries and more specifically examines LEAD and LAG analytics functions, […]

Introduction There are several high availability solutions, which can be used with SQL Server like AlwaysOn, Failover Clustering, Database mirroring. While these high availability solutions ensure maximum uptime for your databases, you need to set up backup and restore strategies to recover the data or minimize the risk of data loss in case a failure […]