Triangle SQL Server User Group

Do you have a question about SQL Server or the data platform space? Are you running into technical problems in the office and want a second opinion? Do you have an urge to stump our panel with arcane or weird scenarios--or watch others do just that to us? Then Shop Talk is for you.

Shop Talk is a Q&A-driven broadcast featuring Mala Mahadevan, Tracy Boggiano, Mike Chrestensen, and Kevin Feasel. Each week, we will dedicate one hour to answering your questions, including live questions with no prep (and I can't see how that could possibly go wrong!). Send questions to us on the air at https://www.twitch.tv/trianglessug or get them to us early by e-mailing shoptalk@tripass.org and give us a fighting chance to come up with the right answer.

Prior episodes' show notes are available at https://shoptalk.tripass.org .

Have you seriously considered becoming an IT consultant but are unsure of the path to get there? The risks and rewards of being your own boss are both quite high, and the differences in the journey are shocking. What do you need to know so you can ask the right questions to help you determine the right path?

In this session, the most common paths to going independent – consulting for someone else, contracting, or starting your own consultancy – will be reviewed in depth. Each path has its own realities, misconceptions, and myths. The hard lessons learned from our own experiences going down each of these paths will be presented so you can better determine the right path for you. Topics such as finding work, travel, legal and contracts, finances, and getting help will be discussed.

Many people learn from the Jaffle Shop sample dbt project. However, the complexity of the project is quite simple. What I really wanted is a project that goes over the following dbt concepts:

• Seed raw data tables
• Transform raw data using views
• Support multiple databases with macros
• Capture slowly changing dimensions type
• Incremental loading of large data
• Use ephemeral tables as a place holder
• Use dbt utils package to make a date dimension
• Create a dimensional model for reporting
• Save pre-canned queries in analyses directory
• Test data quality using property/schema files
• Output custom data quality exceptions to a table
• Create documentation based on model design

In the end, I created my own sample dbt project using the Chinook database schema as the foundation. I must thank Luis Rocha for the OLTP database design and sample data.

This open source project was built using an Fabric SQL Database as the target. However, it can be built on any supported database using the correct dbt adapter and ODBC driver. At the end of this presentation, a data engineer will be ready to model data for any given database or warehouse.