This article will cover off importing data, manipulating data, and finally managing relationships within Power BI. Again, like the previous article, this one will focus on the basic principles of using Power BI, as opposed to an in-depth walkthrough.
Read MoreThis article will help you get to grips with the basics of Power BI and what it has to offer as an analytics tool. Along the way, we’ll cover the following: what Power BI is; why we need Power BI; Excel Vs Power BI; and, finally, installing Power BI.
Read MoreAggregate and Analytic functions in SQL Server operate on a set of rows. However, unlike such aggregate functions as sum, count and average that return scalar values, analytic functions return a group of rows that can be further analyzed. In this article, we will see some of the most commonly used analytic functions in SQL server. We will be discussing the following functions:
Suppose you are designing an SQL Server database application for a company’s CEO and you have to display the fifth most highly paid employee in the company.
What would you do? Read More
In this article, we will introduce SQL transformations in action. We will also see how to handle missing values in our dataset.
Consider a scenario of a movie rating dataset containing records of different movies along with the average user ratings associated with each movie. The ratings are in numeric form ranging from 1 to 10 with 1 as the lowest rating and, respectively, 10 as the highest rating (though no movie in the history has achieved 10 rating:). Suppose that we want to convert the numeric ratings into categorical ratings. For instance, we want to replace ratings of 1-3 with the categorical value “poor”, of 4-6 with “average” while ratings of 7-10 will have the value “good”. We can accomplish it with SQL transformation in Azure ML Studio. Read More
Security is one of the most important requirements for a data-driven system. Encryption is one of the ways to secure the data. Wikipedia defines encryption as:
“Encryption is the process of encoding a message or information in such a way that only authorized parties can access it and those who are not authorized cannot.”
In SQL Server 2016, Microsoft introduced an encryption feature called Always Encrypted. In this article, we will see what Always Encrypted is, and how it can be used to encrypt and decrypt data, with the help of simple examples.
“What is the difference between a primary key constraint and a unique key constraint?”
This is probably the most frequently-asked job interview question for database developers. In this article, we will try to answer it.
Let’s start by looking at what primary and unique keys are, as well as at their similarities.
Prior to SQL Server 2016, table-level security was the default lowest level of security for a database. In other words, a user could be restricted to access a table as a whole. However, in some cases we need users to have access to a table, but not to specific rows within the table. Prior to SQL Server 2016, this required custom stored procedures to be written for the provision of such fine-grained security. However, such stored procedures are prone to SQL injection and other security caveats.
Real-world database applications need to make multiple requests from the front end to the database in order to carry out all sorts of functions.
If an application is data-intensive, such as the ones used in banks or airports etc, the number of data trips can be huge. Each request to a database utilizes bandwidth and requires time to execute. Without the table-valued parameters, a front application needs to make multiple data trips in order to manipulate multiple rows of data. However, with table-valued parameters, multiple rows can be inserted, updated and deleted from a database using a single parameterized command that takes a table-valued parameter. Read More
A database can have hundreds of thousands of records. It is easy to insert and select these records via database management systems like SQL Server or MySQL etc. However, it is not easy to display thousands of records on a single webpage or in a desktop application. Space and memory constraints make it difficult to display a huge number of records all at once.
A common solution to such a problem is to implement paging. (Note, this is not memory paging implemented by operating systems) Paging in programming refers to displaying data via a series of pages. A random Google search may result in thousands of results. Google uses paging to display these results. If you scroll down the Google page with search results you would see the following:
Here you can see the number of pages that the search result is divided into. You can click the Next link to see more pages.
In this article, we will see how OFFSET FETCH NEXT operators can be used to implement paging on front-end applications. We will begin with a simple example using the OFFSET FETCH NEXT operator and will then see how it can be practically used with the help of a stored procedure.