How is your health? How is your job in information technology affecting your health? I want to know! Since I started blogging here almost a decade ago as a new Microsoft Most Valuable Professional, I’ve become a registered nurse and now I’m a full-time psychiatric nurse practitioner student. There are articles and studies purporting that ...

Recently Microsoft released a preview version of the SQL Server Diagnostics extension to SSMS. You can read more about it here. I downloaded it from here and you can see the results below. If you install the extension while SSMS is up and running, you’ll have to stop and restart SSMS in order to see the new menu option. Figure 1. SQL Server ...

There are new HTML 5 enabled custom visualization for making interactive R visualizations in Power BI Desktop. Read the documentation and find the download links here. Because of the dependency on R packages that are loaded with the R library command. The end result is that your required R packages end up installed in your machine’s R library. ...

Here is a list of links to get you started in understanding Cosmos DB, Microsoft’s new cloud based globally distributed multi-model database. Cosmos DB development started in 2010 as project Florence. When it was initially released to the public as part of Azure, it was called DocumentDB. Multi-model means it is more than just a document database ...

Cosmos DB is Microsoft’s new Azure (i.e. Microsoft cloud) globally distributed multimodel database. There is a good podcast where Rimma Nehme explains it. I’ve long wanted to blog about how to configure USB flash drives to play mp3 files on automotive sound systems. You can downloads Rimma’s podcast as an mp3 available on this page. To play mp3 ...

Recent builds of SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) have a feature called PresentOn that can be accessed from Quick Launch. Figure 1. Quick Launch location in SSMS. Enter Present in to Quick Launch and select it. Figure 2. Select PresentOn. Using PresentOn is helpful when you give a presentation. It doesn’t increase the size of the ...

The Northwind database implements the manager to employee hierarchy using an adjacency list, which is a type of graph. This post shows you how to migrate the adjacency list to a graph of one node and one edge. This is a continuation of what was started in this prior post. In the Employees table, the employee’s manager has an EmployeeID ...

Relational databases do not natively support many to many relationships although a junction table is an easy workaround. Graph databases natively support many-to-many relationships. One of the first sample databases Microsoft provided for SQL Server was Northwind. It has three many-to-many relationships as can be seen in the entity relationship ...

Yesterday at SQL Saturday I was asked how to connect to SQL Server 2017 CTP 2.1 that was running in a virtual machine by using Remote Desktop Connection. If you want to learn how to use new software before it is released, running it in a virtual machine is a really good idea. It is wise to keep prerelease software off of your primary machine. ...

This is a list of references I used in creating my SQL Saturday presentation on SQL Server 2017 graph databases. To get started with the graph database features of SQL Server 2017, I recommend that you start with the following official Microsoft ...