I'm pretty new here and usually don't resort to forum post unless I really can't figure things out by searching for a solution on my own but I'm stuck. I work in an IT department and I am developing a tool that will be used to compare across three data pulls to see where we are missing data. All data is supposed to be accounted for in all three databases so we need to find discrepancies where it does not match. This is data used across all of our car dealerships and it is pulled from three providers who give it to us. (Example: Our website listing, cars actually on sale in our inventory, and the third deals with web listings on other sites).
Unfortunately, whenever we do an export from each site the dealership locations do not match with the exact same syntax. I have all three tables in a sql database that is reuploaded by the user each month. I have case statements written so I can run a query to change each matching dealership in a way that matches syntax across all three tables. For example 'Ford Denham' and 'Denham Ford' are all changed to 'ASFD' which is an acronym we use for that dealership.
Now we have reports which I have created with SQL Report Builder. My problem is, all of my queries are written as if the Location is always 'ASFD' so I can match records based on location. When the user uploads data how can I automatically have my Case Statement run on the new files in the database without having to trigger the query myself? If I don't run the Case Statement rename then none of the reports will run correctly because Locations do not match correctly.
Thank you for any help. Let me know if I should have gone about this a different way since I have never really posted here before. I tried to be as descriptive as possible.
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I'm looking for a second opinion from maybe someone with more experience with SQL.
So I have a database that looks like this :
Company has multiple Clients which has multiple Projects which has multiple Tasks, etc.
In my application a user is assigned a company and cannot query information that isn't tied to it. So whenever a user tries to retrieve Client/Project/Task/Punch I need to make sure that my query contains a Where clause that looks like WHERE companyID=[user's company id]. This add a lot of joins when I need to fetch Punch since I need to go up the chain to see if the company is the same as the user.
Since a client/project/task/punch will never switch from a company to another one, I was wondering if there's any red flag to add a companyID field in project/task/punch in order to simplify the querying ?
I'm using PostgreSQL
If I understand correctly, what you are buildng is a multitenant system, where your companies are the tenants. If that is the case then there are no red flags - on the contrary, your main concern is to isolate data belonging to different companies in the most efficient and most secure way.
I find this old blog post to be a basic but clear introduction to multitenancy.
The recommended way to go was then, and is today, the third option: one DB, many schemas. I'm no Postgres expert, but I believe it supports that option quite well.
I'm new to CDS/Dataverse, coming from the SQL Server world. I created a new Dataverse table and there are over a dozen columns in my "new" table (e.g. "status", "version number"). Apparently these are added automatically. Why is this?
Also, there doesn't seem to be a way to view a grid of data (like I can with SQL Server) for quick review/modification of the data. Is there a way to view data visually like this?
Any tips for a new user, coming from SQL Server, would be appreciated. Thanks.
Edit: clarified the main question with examples (column names). (thanks David)
I am also new to CDS/Dataverse, so the following is a limited understanding from what I have explored so far.
The idea behind Dataverse is that it gives you a pre-built schema that follows best-practice for you build off of, so that you spend less time worrying about building a comprehensive data schema, creating tables, and how to relate them all together, and more time building applications in Power Apps.
For example, amongst the several dozen tables it generates from the get-go is Account and Contact. The former is for organisational entities and the latter is for single-person entities. You can go straight into adding your user records in one of these tables and take advantage of bits of Power Apps functionality already hooked up to these tables. You do not have to spend time thinking up column names, creating the table, making sure it hooks up to all the other Dataverse tables, testing whether the Power Apps functionality works with it correctly etc.
It is much the same story with the automatically generated columns for new tables: they are all there to maintain a best-practice schema and functionality for Power Apps. For example, the extra columns give you good auditing with the data you add, including when a row was created, modified, who created the row etc. The important thing is to start from what you want to build, and not get too caught up in the extra tables/columns. After a bit of research, you'll probably find you can utilise some more tables/columns in your design.
Viewing and adding data is very tedious -- it seems to take 5 clicks and several seconds to load the bit of data you want, which is eons in comparison to doing it in SQL Server. I believe it is how it is due to Microsoft's attempt to make it "user friendly".
Anyhow, the standard way to view data, starting from the main Power Apps view is:
From the right-hand side pane, click Data
Click Tables
From the list of tables, click your table
Along the top row, click Data
There is an alternative method that allows you to view the Dataverse tables in SSMS – see link below:
https://www.strategy365.co.uk/using-sql-to-query-the-common-data-service/
To import data in bulk:
Click on Data from the top drop-down menu > Get data.
Importing data from Excel is free. To import from other sources, including SQL Server, I believe is a paid service (although I think you may be able to do this on the free Community Plan).
I am using report builder 3.0 (very similar to SQL server reporting services) to create reports for users on an application using SQL server 2012 database.
To set the scene, we have a database with over 1200 tables. We actually only need about 100 of these for reporting purposes. But it is very common that we need to combine fields from multiple tables together to get a common resource of data that my colleagues and I need for our reports.
Eg if I want a view of a customer, I would want to bring in information about the customer from the customer_table, information about his phone details from the Phone table, information about his account(s) from the accounts table and so on. Then I might need another view of the accounts - account type, various balance amounts, opening date, status etc.
What I would love to do is create a "customer view" where we combine all these fields into a single combined virtual table. Then we have an "Accounts view". It would be easier to use, easier to manage etc. Then we use this for all our reports going forwards. And when we need to, we can combine the customer and accounts view to use on a report plus actual tables into one combo-dataset to use on a report.
I am unsure about the right way to do this.
I see I can create a data source. This doesn't seem right as this appears to be what one might do if working off 2 or more databases. We are using just 1 database.
Then there are report models. It seems these are being deprecated and phased out so this doesn't seem a good option.
Finally I see we can create shared datasets. However, this option (as far as I can tell) won't allow me to combine this with another dataset. So using the example above, I won't be able to combine the customer view and the account view with this approach to use for a report to display details about the customer and his/her accounts.
Would appreciate guidance on the best way to achieve what I am trying to do...
Thanks
I can only speak from personal experience, but using the the data source approach has been good for our purposes. We have a single database with 50+ tables in it. This is linked to as a shared data source in the project so is available to all 50+ reports.
We then use Stored Procedures to make the information in the databases available to the reports, each report has it's own Stored Procedure that joins as many tables as required to provide the data for the report. The advantage of using Stored Procedures also allows you to only return rows you are interested in, rather than entire tables.
I'm not certain if this is the kind of answer that you were after, but describes how we solve a similar (smaller) issue.
I would like to be able to query TFS to look for specific check-ins. The database Tfs_Warehouse has a table called DimChangeset in it which has a good bit of data around specific changesets. However I’d like to limit the data by only returning information that has been between a specific branch.
The [DimChangeset] table in Tfs_Warehouse shows all check-ins, but doesn't say where what they were from or too.
Is there any way via a SQL query to check for all merges between one code branch and another? Not across projects, just between two specific branches.
The database that TFS uses has things like the ParentPath, but I can't see exactly how to find a destination path or ID? I figure there must be something based on the fact that it knows about it in work items.
You have to query the FactCodeChurn table; see reference here
The site I am working on as a student will be redesigned and released in the near future and I have been assigned the task of manually searching through every table in the DB the site uses to find tables we can consider for deletion. I'm doing the search through every HTML files source code in dreamweaver but I was hoping there is an automated way to check my work. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how this is done in the business world?
If you search through the code, you may find SQL that is never used, because the users never choose those options in the application.
Instead, I would suggest that you turn on auditing on the database and log what SQL is actually used. For example in Oracle you would do it like this. Other major database servers have similar capabilities.
From the log data you can identify not only what tables are being used, but their frequency of use. If there are any tables in the schema that do not show up during a week of auditing, or show up only rarely, then you could investigate this in the code using text search tools.
Once you have candidate tables to remove from the database, and approval from your manager, then don't just drop the tables, create them again as an empty table, or put one dummy record in the table with mostly null values (or zero or blank) in the fields, except for name and descriptive fields where you can put something like "DELETED" "Report error DELE to support center", etc. That way, the application won't fail with a hard error, and you have a chance at finding out what users are doing when they end up with these unused tables.
Reverse engineer the DB (Visio, Toad, etc...), document the structure and ask designers of the new site what they need -- then refactor.
I would start by combing through the HTML source for keywords:
SELECT
INSERT
UPDATE
DELETE
...using grep/etc. None of these are HTML entities, and you can't reliably use table names because you could be dealing with views (assuming any exist in the system). Then you have to pour over the statements themselves to determine what is being used.
If [hopefully] functions and/or stored procedures were used in the system, most DBs have a reference feature to check for dependencies.
This would be a good time to create a Design Document on a screen by screen basis, listing the attributes on screen & where the value(s) come from in the database at the table.column level.
Compile your list of tables used, and compare to what's actually in the database.
If the table names are specified in the HTML source (and if that's the only place they are ever specified!), you can do a Search in Files for the name of each table in the DB. If there are a lot of tables, consider using a tool like grep and creating a script that runs grep against the source code base (HTML files plus any others that can reference the table by name) for each table name.
Having said that, I would still follow Damir's advice and take a list of deletion candidates to the data designers for validation.
I'm guessing you don't have any tests in place around the data access or the UI, so there's no way to verify what is and isn't used. Provided that the data access is consistent, scripting will be your best bet. Have it search out the tables/views/stored procedures that are being called and dump those to a file to analyze further. That will at least give you a list of everything that is actually called from some place. As for if those pages are actually used anywhere, that's another story.
Once you have the list of the database elements that are being called, compare that with a list of the user-defined elements that are in the database. That will give you the ones that could potentially be deleted.
All that being said, if the site is being redesigned then a fresh database schema may actually be a better approach. It's usually less intensive to start fresh and import the old data than it is to find dead tables and fields.