Challenges of Speaking—Being Ready for Anything..

I have the good fortune to have a job that allows me to travel around the world speaking about technology. I love this—it gives me a way to see new places, experience other cultures, and meet a lot of wonderful people how have similar interests to me. I always say about half of my job […]

Getting Started with Polybase—Incorrect Syntax near ‘EXTERNAL’ Error

I was playing around with configuring Polybase this morning. Nothing to exotic, just installing the feature getting started. I got everything installed and was about ready to created my data source. The command to that is as follows: CREATE EXTERNAL DATA SOURCE AzureStorage WITH (            TYPE = Hadoop,         LOCATION = ‘wasb://polybase@mystorageaccountnamehere.blob.core.windows.net’, CREDENTIAL = AzureStorageCredential); Unfortunately, […]

Using SQL Sentry Plan Explorer to Shed Light on Estimated Execution Plans

Note: While I do have business relationships with many vendors, I do not have one with SQL Sentry aside from attending their great annual party at the PASS Summit. SQL Server allows us to have access to two types of execution plans, estimated and actual. Actual execution plans give us the real row counts and […]

Are You Still Installing SQL Server from the GUI?

This post was inspired by the following tweet from the Robert Davis. I have seen it all. “I imported SQL Server’s registry from another machine but it won’t start.” <- No s#!+ — Robert L Davis (@SQLSoldier) February 3, 2016 A little bit of a story—I once had a client who was insanely worried about […]