This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Jess Pomfret (@jpomfret). She wants to hear about life hacks to make your life easier! In this post, I share two of my most-used keyboard shortcuts. One for moving text lines up and down without copying and pasting, and one for moving windows around without dragging and dropping. I use these all the time :)
Moving text lines up and down
Previously, I was moving text lines up and down in a couple of different ways. Have you ever marked all the text on a line, copied it, then pasted it again? Yeah, I did that all the time. And then I discovered there’s an easier way! Yay 🤩
There are a couple of different flavors to this keyboard shortcut.
In Office applications like PowerPoint and OneNote, you use Shift+Alt+Up and Shift+Alt+Down:
In other applications like SQL Server Management Studio, Azure Data Studio, and Visual Studio Code, you simply use Alt+Up and Alt+Down.
Moving windows around or between screens
Similarly, I was previously dragging windows around multiple monitors using my mouse. Then I discovered you can use Win+Arrows to move windows around. And then I discovered that you can use Win+Shift+Arrows to immediately move windows to the same position on other monitors. Are you showing a full-screen application while presenting? Just win-shift-arrow it to the extended screen and you look like a total pro. Whaaat! 🤯😁
Keyboard all the things!
There you go. Two of my favorite, useful, and timesaving keyboard shortcuts! I use these so much that I don’t think about them anymore - until someone goes “whoa whoa whoa wait what magic did you just do!?” 😎
It’s December 31st, 2019. WHAAAAAT? 🤯 I have no idea how we’re almost in 2020, but here we are! Just a few hours left of the year. (Hi to my friends around the world who are already in 2020! 👋🏻) Like many others, I enjoy reflecting on the year that’s almost over. This year, I’ve decided to collect some of my highlights from 2019.
(Warning! There will be lots of tweets and pictures.)
For the past 25 days, I have written one blog post per day about Azure Data Factory. My goal was to start completely from scratch and cover the fundamentals in casual, bite-sized blog posts. This became the Beginner’s Guide to Azure Data Factory. Today, I will share a bunch of resources to help you continue your own learning journey.
I’ve already seen from your questions and comments that you are ready to jump way ahead and dive into way more advanced topics than I ever intended this series to cover 😉 And as much as I love Azure Data Factory, I can’t cover everything. So a little further down, I will share where and how and from who you can continue learning about Azure Data Factory.
But first…
That’s a wrap! Woohoo 🥳
Congratulations! You’ve made it through my entire Beginner’s Guide to Azure Data Factory 🤓 We’ve gone through the fundamentals in the first 24 posts, and now we just have one more thing to talk about: Pricing.
And today, I’m actually going to talk! You see, in January 2022, I presented a 10-minute session at DataMinutes about understanding pipeline pricing in Azure Data Factory and Azure Synapse Analytics. And since it was recorded and the recording is available for free for everyone… Well, let’s just say that after 24 posts, I think we could both appreciate a short break from reading and writing 😅
In the previous post, we looked at foreach loops and how to control them using arrays. But you can also control them using more complex objects! In this post, we will look at lookups. How do they work? What can you use them for? And how do you use the output in later activities, like controlling foreach loops?
Lookups
Lookups are similar to copy data activities, except that you only get data from lookups. They have a source dataset, but they do not have a sink dataset. (So, like… half a copy data activity? 😄) Instead of copying data into a destination, you use lookups to get configuration values that you use in later activities.
And how you use the configuration values in later activities depends on whether you choose to get the first row only or all rows.
But before we dig into that, let’s create the configuration datasets!