A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Before I share some considerations for presenting data internationally, I want to acknowledge that I am not an expert on different cultures and audiences. In this post, I simply share some of my experiences with the hope that others will provide additional commentary for increased learning. If you have related thoughts, please share in the comments.
Let’s consider five observations of regional differences I’ve encountered while communicating data.
Read on for those observations.
Comments closedAdam Aspin looks at paginated reports:
To conclude this short set of articles on using Power BI datasets as the source of data for paginated reports, I want to outline a few classic solutions to common challenges in paginated report development with DAX.
Clearly, I cannot recount every paginated report challenge that I have ever met (or heard of) when creating reports from a Power BI dataset. However, as a report developer, it helps to be aware of some of the standard solutions to the challenges that many users encounter.
This article uses the accompanying sample data (CarsDataWarehouse.pbix) as the basis for the DAX that you will use to solve these problems.
Click through for several tips, as well as some tricks.
Comments closedTeo Lachev has some things for us to consider:
Over the past few years, the BI industry has come up with new file formats, such as Parquet, ORC, and Avro, which are widely used today. To facilitate its vision for cross-industry data integration, Microsoft introduced a few years ago the Common Data Model (CDM) and CDM Folders. Power BI dataflows output CSV files to CDM folders and each table is saved in its own folder. You can bring your own data lake to directly access these files. If do so, you’ll find the following folder structure:
Although accessing the dataflow files might open all sorts of data integration scenarios, here are some things to watch for concerning the dataflow output:
Read on for five things.
Comments closedSean Gallardy files events to the circular file:
Getting back on track instead of listening to me complain, many DBA’s and internal security folks like writing to the Windows Security Event Log because the word security is in the name and they have some tool like Splunk that automatically collects these details. I like automation, so that’s a nice win. However, you may be running into SQL Server error 33204 which is a failure to write an audit event to the security event log.
Read on to find one reason why this might happen.
Comments closedMaria Zakourdaev replaces Database Mail:
Azure SQL database is a fully managed relational database in the Microsoft cloud. It is a scalable, durable and performant database engine that allows developers to focus on the business logic without worrying about storage or server uptime. The main difference between SQL Server on premises and Azure SQL Database is that in Azure SQL Database only database level features are available. Features, like SQL Server Agent or SQL Server Mail are not supported by Azure SQL Database. However, in some situations we want to send an email from inside stored procedures. This post will show how to solve this challenge.
I’ve found Logic Apps to be surprisingly easy for this kind of thing, including connectors to outside mail services like Gmail. H/T Maria via Madeira Data’s blog.
Comments closedWe are currently performing migrations with upgrade of multiple-instance SQL Servers to new servers. The migrations are going smoothly (knock on wood), and I wanted to relay some information about the migration process. There are four phases you need to perform when migrating a SQL instance to a new server. These phases are Review, Prepare, Test, and Migrate. It sounds simple enough but let’s take a deeper look into what goes into each phase.
Read on for Jon’s take on the migration process.
Comments closedVictoria Holt makes note of an improvement to Purview:
Azure Purview Workflows moved to Public Preview 10 March. This functionality enables customers to orchestrate the create, update and delete operations of data entities, have validation, and approval of these data entities using repeatable business processes.
The benefit of using Purview workflows is higher quality data, policy compliance, user collaboration, and change tracking awareness across the organization.
Read on for more information about how workflows currently work.
Comments closedJoey Jablonski brings up an important point:
Data-driven environments have a fundamentally different set of needs around testing, deployment, and visibility then traditional business applications. Data driven environments need access to fresh data on a high level of update frequency to ensure that data engineers and data scientists are able to effect outputs and recommendations on a timeline that has a positive impact on business decisions and customer experiences.
My day job involves running a predictive analytics team. We train models on production data—there’s very little value in training models on artificial dev data (outside of understanding the parameters of the modeling process), so even our development data generally comes from production. I don’t know that I’m sold on data mesh as a solution to this but it’s worth investigation.
Comments closedMaelle Salmon and Chrisophe Dervieux share some guidance on coding style:
Do you indent your code with one tab, two spaces, or eight spaces? Do you feel strongly about the location of the curly brace closing a function definition? Do you have naming preferences? You probably have picked up some habits along the way. In any case, having some sort of consistency in coding style will help those who read the code to understand, fix or enhance it. In this post, we shall share some resources about coding style, useful tools, and some remarks on etiquette.
It is pretty funny how picky we can be about coding style at the margins but ultimately, the primary goal of a coding style should be to give future maintainers as easy a time as possible in troubleshooting the code you write. This makes consistency the most important consideration. After that, there’s a lot of good advice in the post.
Comments closedMeagan Longoria brings in data from Intercom:
I needed to pull some user data for an app that uses Intercom. While I will probably import the data using Data Factory or a function in the long term, I needed to pull some quick data in a refreshable manner to combine with other data already available in Power BI.
I faced two challenges in getting this code to work:
1. Intercom’s API uses cursor-based pagination when retrieving contacts
2. I needed this query to be refreshable in PowerBI.com so I could schedule a daily refresh.
Read on to see how Meagan solved those problems.
Comments closed