Top Articles

Data Lineage,

SQL Visualisation Guide – Query Diagrams, Lineage & ERD

Have you ever inherited the SQL codebase from someone else where it is in a “bit of a mess”? 😁 Sound familiar? Most data engineers and SQL developers have been there including myself—staring at a spaghetti-like web of queries, trying to untangle a chaotic SQL codebase. It’s a common nightmare. Traditionally, you had to fight …
Uli Bethke November 3, 2024
SQL,

SQL Challenge: Tackling the Island Problem in Time Series Data

Jump into our SQL Challenge! Today, we're exploring customer loyalty trends. Are you prepared to show off your SQL skills? About the quiz In this SQL pop quiz, we're challenging…
Uli Bethke November 7, 2023
XML,

XML Converters & Conversion – Ultimate Guide (2026)

“Urgent XML Conversion Project – Need by End of Week”. “Just Convert this XML to SQL Tables. Should be Simple!” Sound familiar?  From my experience, XML conversion projects follow the…
Maciek October 4, 2023
Snowflake,

7 guardrails against common mistakes that inflate Snowflake credit usage 

Dodge costly pitfalls Snowflake implementation has pioneered dozens of innovations in the data platform space. The long list includes separation of compute and storage, physical workload separation, data sharing, data…
Uli Bethke September 13, 2023
SQL,

Detect Bad SQL with Static & Dynamic Code Analysis – A Guide

Preventing Query Catastrophe with FlowHigh SQL Analyser Does the following sound familiar? As the wizard EsQuEl delved deep into the SQL code, he stumbled upon multiple instances where tables were…
Uli Bethke September 8, 2023

Recent Articles

All JSON Snowflake XML
Snowflake,

Exploding polygons in Snowflake. KaBooom! Visualising Dublin property data in Tableau.

Introduction In this blog post we will show the power of Snowflake UDFs to prepare data for visualisation in Tableau. We take the Irish Census Data from the Central Statistics…
Uli Bethke May 14, 2018
SQL,

SQL on Hadoop, BigQuery, or Exadata. Please don’t call them MPP.

I often hear people referring to SQL engines running against HDFS or object storage as MPP. Strictly speaking this is incorrect. Let me first explain what an MPP database is…
Uli Bethke May 10, 2018
XML,

Converting FPML XML to Oracle

In this guide we will show you how to process FpML XML files with Enterprise Flexter and convert it to Oracle. FpML XML Standard FpML (Financial products Markup Language) is…
Maciek May 8, 2018
XML,

Converting ACORD XML to Avro row storage

In this example we will use Flexter to convert an XML file to the Apache Avro format. We then query and analyse the output in the Spark-Shell. Flexter can generate…
Maciek April 26, 2018
Snowflake,

Loading data into Snowflake and performance of large joins

Introduction In this blog post we will load a large dataset into Snowflake and then evaluate the performance of joins in Snowflake. Loading large data into Snowflake Dataset The dataset…
Uli Bethke March 16, 2018
JSON, JSON,

Converting FHIR JSON to CSV with Flexter

In this post we will be converting FHIR JSON files to text (CSV). If you want to explore a different modern approach to handling nested JSON — including how to…
Uli Bethke March 16, 2018