SQL Server blogs from Wise Owl (page 1 of 9)

What Power BI report server is, and how to create reports through it

Posted by Andy Brown on 23 December 2020

Puzzled as to why there are two near-identical versions of Power BI Desktop? Wondering if web portal is anything like Power BI report server? Confused as to what a paginated report is? This blog answers all these questions, and more!

5 horrible SQL jokes and one puzzle

Posted by Sam Lowrie on 22 July 2020

Sam has a terrible sense of humour which is all too often inflicted on his delegates. Sadly, with this blog, on website viewers too ...

Azure Data Studio versus SQL Server Management Studio

Posted by Andy Brown on 16 January 2020

Microsoft have brought out a new SQL editor called Azure Data Studio, to act as a substitute for SQL Server Management Studio, but this owl cannot see any justification for its existence!

Introducing the new CREATE OR ALTER command in SQL

Posted by Andy Brown on 10 January 2020

From SQL Server 2016 onwards you can choose to CREATE OR ALTER a procedure, trigger, view or function, as this blog explains.

You can now use AT TIME ZONE to access different time zones in SQL

Posted by Andy Brown on 25 November 2019

If you're working with different time zones, the AT TIME ZONE keywords introduced in SQL Server 2016 will make your life much easier - this blog explains how they work.

A comparison of SQL Server Reporting Services and Power BI

Posted by Andy Brown on 18 October 2019

Power BI improves with each monthly update. Will it reach a point where SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services) becomes redundant? This detailed blog compares the two products, and considers the future of SSRS.

Introducing three new functions in SQL to make concatenating text easier

Posted by Andy Brown on 20 September 2019

The CONCAT function makes it much easier to join columns together, while the STRING_AGG and CONCAT_WS functions make it easier to create things like comma-delimited lists.

Congratulations to Shaun Rowark for his suggestion for a new acronym for SFWGHO!

Posted by Andy Brown on 14 August 2019

We're always on the look-out for a new acronym for the order of SQL commands, and are pleased to award a gift voucher to another worthy winner of our competition.

A table-valued function in SQL to split a comma-delimited list

Posted by Andy Brown on 11 June 2019

If you're creating Reporting Services reports using multivalue parameters and stored procedures, you'll find this function to split a list of values into a single-table column useful.

Wise Owl have found one SQL structure which slows down code more than any other

Posted by Andy Brown on 13 May 2019

If your stored procedures or SQL queries are running slowly, don't bother looking at correlated subqueries, cursors, functions or any of the other usual culprits. There's one SQL syntax which Wise Owl have found to be an order of magnitude worse than any other, as this blog shows.

Changes that BI developers can expect from SQL Server 2019

Posted by Andy Brown on 08 May 2019

SQL Server 2019 is not out yet (it's scheduled for release in the second half of 2019), but this blog shows what changes you can expect to see.

Mapping stored procedure parameters to SSRS parameters

Posted by Andy Brown on 02 May 2019

This blog explains why you might want to use the PARAMETERS tab in the Dataset Properties dialog box in SSRS.

A new acronym for the order of SQL keywords

Posted by Andy Brown on 29 March 2019

Someone has finally won our competition to think of a better acronym for the order of keywords in SQL, we're pleased to announce.

A way to get 32-bit and 64-bit drivers to co-exist on the same computer

Posted by Andy Brown on 21 September 2018

A (very) short blog containing a link to an article showing how you can import data from Access using SSAS or SSIS on a 64-bit computer

Five methods for creating partitions of SSAS Tabular tables programmatically

Posted by Andy Brown on 23 July 2018

Need to generate a partition for a fact table for each year, product or region? This blog gives five approaches, so that you can choose which method is for you.

Using partitions/processing to load a large fact table into a tabular data model

Posted by Andy Brown on 23 July 2018

This blog shows how you can load the empty structure of a large fact table into an Analysis Services tabular data model, then use partitions to bring in the data bit by bit.

Using MERGE and MATCHED in SQL

Posted by Sam Lowrie on 21 June 2018

Learn how to MERGE rows from two tables into one combined table, and how to remove unwanted data from both tables.

Resolving a problem with SSRS and a Windows 10 update

Posted by David Wakefield on 18 June 2018

After installing Windows 10 our laptops started returning a 503 error in Web Portal - this blog shows how to resolve this.

How to get rid of lots of blank rows in a Report Builder table

Posted by Andy Brown on 16 February 2018

There seems to be an occasional bug in Report Builder which fills a table with blank rows. Here's one owl's way to get round it.

Which should you learn: Report Builder or Reporting Services?

Posted by Andy Brown on 16 February 2018

Report Builder and SQL Server Reporting Services are almost identical - which makes the small but important differences even harder to explain.