You learn a lot when thrown into a crisis situation, where everyone is looking to you for answers. The system is down, the CEO is pleading to you for answers as the each minute cuts the company's bottom line. When you are in a hurry, you need some new ideas right away. This book is your helpful tool. When used correctly, you can determine solutions and even related solutions to simple (yet lesser known) areas of SQL Server. Learn what causes SQL tasks to wait or site in queues. Even if your system is not in trouble right now, you can use what you will learn in this book to view the history of wait statistics.

As representatives from the IT community, all of us have had our own experiences of attending interviews - clearing or close to clearing and sometimes with tons of questions and doubts failing miserably. These stories are in the most pleasant or not so pleasant memories of our mind and we will assure you this book will kindle those memories for sure. We have taken tons of interviews and most of the interviews are not revolving around how deep technical and internals you know about the subject - but it revolves around how good you are with the basics.To clear an interview, one doesn't need to know inside-out of a subject, and subjects like "SQL Server" so vast that every single day we learn something new with this product, and even a complete lifetime will fly off if we keep doing this. Again, the various roles one can get into for products like SQL Server are from Database Developer, Database Modelers, Database Architect, Database Administrator and many more. Hence, this book is geared towards demystifying and a refresher for memories on the fundamentals which sometimes are the most important things to clear any type of interview for any role. Some of the concepts discussed are generic and are not tied to any specific version of SQL Server, but most of it the new features introduced with SQL Server have been included in this book.This book is not a shortcut or a sure to crack interview guide but this book gets you prepared in an organized manner. Let us also assure you this is neither a completely comprehensive guide but surely is a great starter nevertheless. Use this to guide you and be mentally prepared for the big day. When faced with this big day, we get overwhelmed and confused about where to start our preparation. And this book is just that secret recipe in your arsenal to get geared up. Sometimes these basics will help you narrow to a solution quickly when given a scenario.Now this book's flow is "Question & Answer" mode from start till the end to help you grasp the concepts faster and to the point. Once you get an understanding of concepts, then if we are twisted with the concept in a scenario it becomes easy to solve them. Most companies have a typical way to do interviews which are based on the scenario as per their environment and these are just combinations of the concepts to fit their need and SLA.Though each of these chapters is bucketed for convenience we highly recommend reading each of the sections nevertheless irrespective of the roles you might be doing as each of the sections have some interesting trivia's working with SQL Server. In the industry, the role of accidental DBA's especially with SQL Server is so common. Hence if you have performed the role of DBA for a short stink and want to brush-up your fundamentals then the respective sections will be a great skim.

Harness the power of SQL Server 2017 Integration Services to build your data integration solutions with ease About This Book Acquaint yourself with all the newly introduced features in SQL Server 2017 Integration Services Program and extend your packages to enhance their functionality This detailed, step-by-step guide covers everything you need to develop efficient data integration and data transformation solutions for your organization Who This Book Is For This book is ideal for software engineers, DW/ETL architects, and ETL developers who need to create a new, or enhance an existing, ETL implementation with SQL Server 2017 Integration Services. This book would also be good for individuals who develop ETL solutions that use SSIS and are keen to learn the new features and capabilities in SSIS 2017. What You Will Learn Understand the key components of an ETL solution using SQL Server 2016-2017 Integration Services Design the architecture of a modern ETL solution Have a good knowledge of the new capabilities and features added to Integration Services Implement ETL solutions using Integration Services for both on-premises and Azure data Improve the performance and scalability of an ETL solution Enhance the ETL solution using a custom framework Be able to work on the ETL solution with many other developers and have common design paradigms or techniques Effectively use scripting to solve complex data issues In Detail SQL Server Integration Services is a tool that facilitates data extraction, consolidation, and loading options (ETL), SQL Server coding enhancements, data warehousing, and customizations. With the help of the recipes in this book, you'll gain complete hands-on experience of SSIS 2017 as well as the 2016 new features, design and development improvements including SCD, Tuning, and Customizations. At the start, you'll learn to install and set up SSIS as well other SQL Server resources to make optimal use of this Business Intelligence tools. We'll begin by taking you through the new features in SSIS 2016/2017 and implementing the necessary features to get a modern scalable ETL solution that fits the modern data warehouse. Through the course of chapters, you will learn how to design and build SSIS data warehouses packages using SQL Server Data Tools. Additionally, you'll learn to develop SSIS packages designed to maintain a data warehouse using the Data Flow and other control flow tasks. You'll also be demonstrated many recipes on cleansing data and how to get the end result after applying different transformations. Some real-world scenarios that you might face are also covered and how to handle various issues that you might face when designing your packages. At the end of this book, you'll get to know all the key concepts to perform data integration and transformation. You'll have explored on-premises Big Data integration processes to create a classic data warehouse, and will know how to extend the toolbox with custom tasks and transforms. Style and approach This cookbook follows a problem-solution approach and tackles all kinds of data integration scenarios by using the capabilities of SQL Server 2016 Integration Services. This book is well supplemented with screenshots, tips, and tricks. Each recipe focuses on a particular task and is written in a very easy-to-follow manner.

Useful business analysis requires you to effectively transform data into actionable information. This book helps you use SQL and Excel to extract business information from relational databases and use that data to define business dimensions, store transactions about customers, produce results, and more. Each chapter explains when and why to perform a particular type of business analysis in order to obtain useful results, how to design and perform the analysis using SQL and Excel, and what the results should look like.

Updated for the latest database management systems -- including MySQL 6.0, Oracle 11g, and Microsoft's SQL Server 2008 -- this introductory guide will get you up and running with SQL quickly. Whether you need to write database applications, perform administrative tasks, or generate reports, Learning SQL, Second Edition, will help you easily master all the SQL fundamentals. Each chapter presents a self-contained lesson on a key SQL concept or technique, with numerous illustrations and annotated examples. Exercises at the end of each chapter let you practice the skills you learn. With this book, you will: Move quickly through SQL basics and learn several advanced features Use SQL data statements to generate, manipulate, and retrieve data Create database objects, such as tables, indexes, and constraints, using SQL schema statements Learn how data sets interact with queries, and understand the importance of subqueries Convert and manipulate data with SQL's built-in functions, and use conditional logic in data statements Knowledge of SQL is a must for interacting with data. With Learning SQL, you'll quickly learn how to put the power and flexibility of this language to work.

A poorly performing database application not only costs users time, but also has an impact on other applications running on the same computer or the same network. SQL Tuning provides an essential next step for SQL developers and database administrators who want to extend their SQL tuning expertise and get the most from their database applications.There are two basic issues to focus on when tuning SQL: how to find and interpret the execution plan of an SQL statement and how to change SQL to get a specific alternate execution plan. SQL Tuning provides answers to these questions and addresses a third issue that's even more important: how to find the optimal execution plan for the query to use.Author Dan Tow outlines a timesaving method he's developed for finding the optimum execution plan--rapidly and systematically--regardless of the complexity of the SQL or the database platform being used. You'll learn how to understand and control SQL execution plans and how to diagram SQL queries to deduce the best execution plan for a query. Key chapters in the book include exercises to reinforce the concepts you've learned. SQL Tuning concludes by addressing special concerns and unique solutions to "unsolvable problems."Whether you are a programmer who develops SQL-based applications or a database administrator or other who troubleshoots poorly tuned applications, SQL Tuning will arm you with a reliable and deterministic method for tuning your SQL queries to gain optimal performance.