Speaking experiences at Data Céilí

This month marked a new experience for me, as I spoke at the Data Céilí event in Dublin. I had never been in Dublin before, nor in Ireland. As the weather turned warm and sunny in the Netherlands, I looked forward to lush green hills, glorious views, and amazing people. Rain Well, that idea quickly … Continue reading Speaking experiences at Data Céilí

Why won’t you go parallel, part 2

In my previous blogpost (Click here to read) I wrote about a query that just wouldn't go parallel. This sparked some discussion and interest from a few people who were very kind and helpful with their suggestions and even deep dives into the query plans, execution statistics etc. To make one thing very clear, this … Continue reading Why won’t you go parallel, part 2

Why won’t you go parallel, a curious case of a stubborn query.

With an unsatisfying end. Intro So what's up this time. Our client has moved to Azure in classic lift and shift scenario. Well, almost. They've deployed new VM's and installed SQL Server 2019 Standard in nice DTAP setting. The VM's are standard E16-4as-v4 SKU. 4 vcpus and 128 GB memory. The disks are Premium SSD … Continue reading Why won’t you go parallel, a curious case of a stubborn query.

Microsoft Fabric: setting your spark compute pool size

This next blog won't be a long one and will probably serve most as a reminder for myself where to find the settings for the Spark compute pool. When you create a workspace, you get the default starter pool and it has taken me way longer than I care to admit to find where to … Continue reading Microsoft Fabric: setting your spark compute pool size

Notebook exit code 137. Cause and solution

Yes, I've been at it again with Microsoft Fabric, and as I'm trying to find the limits of this new cool toy, the limits sometimes get angry with me and throw an error. Most of the time this error is caused by me and I can usually figure out what's happening, but not always. Exit … Continue reading Notebook exit code 137. Cause and solution

View with a where clause

I was teaching a class and during an interesting discussing an attendee told me that views with a filter took a long time to produce results, even if the result set itself was quite small. I wanted to test this out for myself to see what was happening. I'll take you along this short journey … Continue reading View with a where clause

Distinct or Group By?

A few days ago, I heard someone stating that Group By was much quicker than Distinct. Less disk impact, less memory etc.So, I thought I'd find out if it's true or not because I found it interesting. I always thought there was no difference. I tested a single small table and found no difference in … Continue reading Distinct or Group By?

Increase network performance between your VM and Azure SQL Database

For a few weeks I'm facing an issue where an application on an Azure VM has a slow network connection to an Azure SQL database. I've tried different tiers and SKU's but the speed is just not there. When the application is running, it can push about 250 to 500 kb/s to the database. As … Continue reading Increase network performance between your VM and Azure SQL Database

Clustered Columnstore performance with deletes and updates

One way that might speed up you inserts and deletes on Clustered Columnstores. @Microsoft @SQLServer @AzureSQL.

Monitoring Azure SQL with Zabbix

My first long-read about monitoring your Azure SQL DB with Zabbix. And a little bonus with Linux.