Grant Fritchey

15Feb 2016 by Grant Fritchey 11 Comments

Loading Data into Azure SQL Data Warehouse

Ouch. Let's start with the level set. I'm not an ETL expert. In fact, I haven't done any professional ETL work for several years. My skills are, at best, rusty. With this in mind, I knew I'd have a hard time extracting data from a local database in order to move it up to Azure SQL Data Warehouse. I expected to be fumbling and slow and to constantly feel more than a little stupid as I made one mistake after another. All of this came to pass. Yet... OMG! THAT WAS DIFFICULT! Here's how I started. I defined a bcp command for the tables I was interested in. I ensured it was working correctly, then wrote a little PowerShell script so I could supply a list of tables and get…

12Feb 2016 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Speaker of the Month: February 2016

Professional Development

I've been a little remiss on this. I just haven't been getting out to see people speak for a while (no travel is nice). However, I'm back in the airplane seats again, so these blog posts are off and running again. Speaker of the Month for February 2016 is Jason Hall (b|t) for his talks on SQL Cruise. Jason covered two topics, TempDB and SQL Sentry Plan Explorer. I missed the talk on TempDB, but I heard it was great. I was there for his presentation on Plan Explorer. Excellent stuff. I had never seen Jason present before. In fact, I didn't know he did presentations. He does. He spoke really well to the crowd. He knew the material down (not surprising since he's been responsible for developing the tool)…

04Feb 2016 by Grant Fritchey 4 Comments

Positivity

Professional Development

I'm sitting in the classroom of SQL Cruise listening to Tim Ford (b|t) explain mechanisms for monitoring indexes. It's a great class. Earlier in the week I got to hear Jes Borland (b|t) talk about extended events and do a session on wait statistics. I was also lucky enough to listen to David Klee (b|t)Â talking about systems monitoring, especially around VMs. Argenis FernandezÂ (b|t) and Jason Hall (b|t) are coming up today. In short, I've received some excellent learning while on a boat in the Caribbean. Now, one could argue (and you'd be right) that I'm thinking about positivity because of the nature of the position in whichÂ I find myself. Hang on though, I have some additional points. One of theÂ biggest strengths of the SQL Cruise is the intimacy of the…

01Feb 2016 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Learning R: Happy With My Book Choice

Data Science

This is just a quick update. I wrote about the two books I'm using to learn R. Well, I'm extremely happy with my choices, especially with the Using R for Introductory Statistics book. It has problems at the end of each chapter. No, unlike our elementary school math books the answers are notÂ in the back of theÂ bookÂ (you knew that, right?). The answersÂ are however very clearly within the text of each chapter. I've really been enjoying these little problems. They're helping me cement both my understanding of R and my understanding of the mathematics. I strongly recommend this book.

29Jan 2016 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

PASS Board 2016: Update #1

PASS

Hello everyone. Just because I've moved on to the executive committee doesn't mean I'm walking away from these reports. I will continue to communicate all that I can about my role as EVP throughout the year. One of our commitments this year is providing greater insight into each of the portfolio roles, including the Executive. Youâ€™ll start to see more communications in the coming weeks of each of our roles. The last month has largely been about learning my newÂ role. As EVP, my primary responsibilities include working closely with PASS HQ on finances and governance. Some of these responsibilities may seem tedious and mundane, but they are an essential part of ensuring that PASS delivers on its mission to provide our global community with the best professional development and networking…

27Jan 2016 by Grant Fritchey 4 Comments

The Importance of a Full Backup in SQL Server

Database Lifecycle Management, DevOps, Professional Development, SQL Server, SQL Server 2016

This is the first of 12 posts this year in support of Tim Ford's #iwanttohelp initiative. These will be completely 100 level, introductory blog posts meant to help people that are just getting started as data professionals. I'll try to cover several different topics over the year, but felt I should start with what I think is the most important, backups. It is impossible to overstate the importance of getting a good backup of your SQL Server databases. A backup is the most fundamental of protections for the information on which your business is dependent. Since SQL Server is a service, it manages it's own files. Because of this, you can't just copy the *.mdb file where your data is stored. Instead, you must run a process, usually through the…

25Jan 2016 by Grant Fritchey 7 Comments

Finding Your Query in Query Store

Azure, SQL Server 2016, T-SQL

Query Store is pretty amazing. I'm loving working with it. I think it's likely to change how query tuning will be doneÂ in the future. Lots of people are probably going to just use the reports and tools in SQL Server Management Studio. However, a pretty healthy chunk of us will start using the system views in order to programmatically access the information stored in Query Store. One of the first things you're going to want to do is track down your query. The primary views you'll want are sys.query_store_query and sys.query_store_query_text. They join together based on the query_text_id. Let's take four scenarios and see if we can retrieve the correct query. First up, an ad hoc query: SELECT e.NationalIDNumber, p.LastName, p.FirstName, a.City, bea.AddressTypeID FROM HumanResources.Employee AS e JOIN Person.BusinessEntityAddress AS…

18Jan 2016 by Grant Fritchey 15 Comments

Removing All SQL Server Query Store Data

Azure, SQL Server 2016

While setting up example code for my presentation at SQL Cruise (which is going to be a fantastic event), I realized I wanted to purge all the data from my Query Store, just for testing. I did a series of searches to try to track down the information and it just wasn't there. So, I did what anyone who can phrase a question in less than 140 characters should do, I posted a question to Twitter using the #sqlhelp hash tag. Jamey Johnston (t|b) came through... and it was right there in the documentation that I had been reading, over and over. In fact, it was in the documentation in two different places. Reading is clearly a problem for me today. Just so that you know, it's actually really easy:…

13Jan 2016 by Grant Fritchey 10 Comments

Learning R: Hitting the Books

Data Science

I've been using a series of web sites while I was starting the process of learning R. I've highlighted several of these in previous posts. While people will claim to learn better based on a single source-type, studies have found that you actually learn best by a multitude of methods. So, in addition to video instruction, web sites, guides, etc., I'm also going to read a few books to help learn R. After a lot of research, I've arrived at two that I'm starting with. The first is R In Action. I'm already on the 2nd chapter and I'm enjoying the style and approach. The other book is Using R for Introductory Statistics. I'm using this book because as I have already picked up, the real trick to learning R…

12Jan 2016 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

“Applies To…” in the MSDN Documentation

Azure, SQL Server 2016, T-SQL

Quick little post. I just wanted to share how happy I am with the new "THIS TOPIC APPLIES TO" infographic. An example here: I think it makes things much more clear when you're attempting to figure out what's up with some T-SQL syntax. Well done Microsoft and thank you. Side note, this only exists in documentation that has been updated recently. I first saw it in some documentation that was updated January 11, 2016. It's not there in another piece of documentation I saw that was updated October 15, 2015. Here's hoping it gets put everywhere. It works.