Tag: SQL Server

Get Your Self-Service On!

Do you need to make an immediate or occasional one-time backup of your Dynamics GP databases, or maybe run a SQL job that populates your BI360 Data Warehouse?  Occasionally, you may be performing some month-end closing procedures, post a large, significant batch, or perhaps you are about to integrate a large amount of your Dynamics GP data into your BI360 Data Warehouse.  It’s critical that you make a good set of database backups to use in recovery in case of a failure, in order to refresh your Dynamics GP data into your Data Warehouse without IT involvement.  There are several ways you can create a one-time backup or run other SQL jobs, like refreshing your Data Warehouse for month-end reporting.  Here are some easiest ways, with some of the tools most people are familiar with:

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May 11, 2016

What’s New with Microsoft’s BI Stack

Microsoft has made a large investment in BI in 2015, both on-premises and in the cloud.  BI offerings across Datazen, R, Excel, Power BI and coming to SQL Server 2016 are huge.  Microsoft released a public BI roadmap on where they are headed with their BI stack.  Microsoft’s simple goal is to put the power of data in the hands of every business user.  This simple goal is inline with the #1 top ranked IT priority according to Gartner.

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January 27, 2016

Upcoming Updates to SQL in 2016

Coming in 2016, the newest upgrades and features to SQL have developers everywhere speculating about the future. Microsoft has designed the 2016 release of SQL to be easy to use, traditional in application appearance and control, and most importantly data-secure. The most exciting new feature for SQL in 2016 is called Always Encrypted. Microsoft has created an extra layer of data security so that even when you are working with sensitive data such as social security numbers or credit card numbers, the data is secure. This ensures that even at the most vulnerable time for an attack, while data is being used, a person’s identity and company’s reputation are safe. The best part about this upgrade and its new features is that it will not hinder the performance of the application. 

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August 24, 2015

Using Power BI to combine Financial and Social Data for More Powerful Analytics

In my last blog post we talked about Power BI Designer Preview and why I was lovin’ it.  In this post I’m going to use Microsoft’s most recently Power BI tool to connect to my SQL server instance to analysis my Google Analytics data, Marketing data and CRM opportunities.

Connect to your SQL Data

Let’s get started by selecting the Get Data button in the top left corner and then select SQL Server

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May 28, 2015

Five Tips on Understanding SQL Server Better

Being a developer I often find myself in situations where I need to troubleshoot SQL queries that are not performing well and generally need optimizations. I would like to share some interesting tips on how SQL Server handles queries and what execution plans might be better than others. A query execution plan is an ordered set of steps that are used to access the data in SQL server. If you are working with SQL Server Management Studio once you have started a new query window click the following button  (or CTRL + M) so you can enable execution plans. In the examples below I will be using tables from AdventureWorks database which is a sample database provided by Microsoft.

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May 20, 2015