The Recording
The Panelists
- Kevin Feasel
- Mike Chrestensen
Notes: Questions and Topics
SQL Saturday Raleigh
Our big news is around SQL Saturday Raleigh, which we’ve officially launched. It will take place on May 17th at Duke Health in Durham. You can register at the SQL Saturday website. There are free tickets that do not include lunch, and paid tickets that include lunch. We will not have lunch available for sale on the day of the event.
We’re also hosting Brent Ozar for a pre-con the day before. You can sign up for this on Brent’s website.
ETL, ELT, and PowerShell
Our primary question for the day came in via e-mail from a viewer:
I currently use PowerShell scripts to pull data from source APIs for my company’s data pipelines. Our BI department is nascent, thus our scripts are mostly just pulling data and loading it into a tabular format in SQL Server. We don’t do much in the way of transformations. This has caused issues with large memory grants and implicit conversions in our SQL Server.
I’m curious if PowerShell is an appropriate or even adequate tool for performing transformations? If not, what other options are there?
We are trying to keep as much “processing” as possible outside of SQL Server to reduce licensing costs.
Mike and I spend a bit of time talking about viable options, areas of focus, and industry trends.
The QUALIFY() Clause and Its T-SQL Equivalent
Mike wanted to know about the QUALIFY() clause that exists in Teradata and Snowflake. I talk a bit about its purpose and reference a Stack Overflow post that shows some T-SQL equivalents. QUALIFY() looks pretty neat and I certainly wouldn’t mind it being available to us in T-SQL, but I won’t hold my breath on it, as there are functional alternatives.
A Minor Rant about Oracle Date Formatting
Our other topic of the night was a rant from Mike about how Oracle’s date formatting functions are annoying. I have a tiny amount to add, but this was mostly Mike’s time to shine.