Amidst the pandemic, the Houston Health Department (HHD) had another predicament to tackle. With lab results accumulating rapidly at one million cases per month, the vendor system they used for capturing and analyzing COVID data couldn't keep up. The SQL Server database had large tables with normalized name-value pairs for each question and answer received from the patient, and for each investigation result. Read our…
Now that SQL Server 2019 is officially here, I was eager to try it out. My upgrade/reinstall experience ran into several issues that I thought might be worth sharing: Upgrade/reinstall fails with "An error occurred for a dependency of the feature causing the setup process for the feature to fail." With no indication what dependency failed. I solved it by extracting the iso file into…
SQL Saturday Atlanta next Saturday might break the attendance record with over 900+ people registered! Kudos to the organizers. It's not easy to organize an event of this size with a modest budget. I'll present "What's New for BI in SQL Server 2019" at 1 PM. "SQL Server 2019 delivers important data analytics features and enhancements. Join this session to discover what BI features are…
What's the first thing that comes to mind when you hear "linked server"? Performance issues or a snail image, right? Many developers don't like linked servers because they are "slow" although they rarely bother to investigate the underling issue, much less to fix it. Linked servers are a very useful and commonly used feature of SQL Server. They allow SQL Server to query external data…
