In this quick blog post I’ll show the simply way to web scrape some data from a website using python. SETUP Before we start, firstly you’ll need to install three python libraries using the usual pip method, if you’re not familiar how to do this simply open a command prompt (windows example) and type in […]
Over the years I’ve developed or collected many SQL scripts which have been useful for everything from performance tuning to simple backups and restores. But as I’ve started to branch out into other coding areas like Python and Powershell I thought it was about time to make my github repository open for others to use. […]
Since SQL Server 2014 we’ve had the capability to backup databases directly onto azure storage, before you’re able to do this however there are a few steps which need to be setup first via Azure and in SQL Server itself. CREATE STORAGE ACCOUNT, KEYS AND CONTAINER Firstly, logon to your Azure account, if you don’t […]
A new feature in SQL Server 2016 (also available in Azure SQL database) is the ability to create and query JSON (Javascript object notation) documents, which have now become a common alternative to XML. Lets look at some examples, I’ll be using tables from the new sample database for SQL Server 2016 WorldWideImporters which you […]
A new feature in SQL Server 2016 and the Azure SQL database is something called Dynamic data masking. This is essentially used to mask the data from prying eyes and is helpful for blocking some users or DBAs from seeing confidential types of data like account numbers. So let see and example of how this works, […]
We’ve all been in a situation before where you’re attempting to concatenate a string and integer values together and been presented with the below error. Msg 245, Level 16, State 1, Line 13 Conversion failed when converting the varchar value [VALUE] to data type int. which is usually greeted by a loud sigh. Let me […]
Having migrated a few of our on premise databases over to AzureSQLDB I’ve always found it a little painful or very painful depending on the method you’ve decided to use. The above graphic illustrates two common methods used to migrate & convert a database from an on premise SQL instance into an AzureSQLDB, I tended […]
