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Day: December 31, 2015

Bad Fixes

David Alcock looks at a few common “fixes” which end up causing their own problems:

I’m seeing lots of CXPACKETS waits, how do I fix these?

Bad Advice = Set the maximum degree of parallelism to 1, no more CXPACKET waits!

I’m seeing index fragmentation occur quite frequently on some of my indexes, what should I do?

Bad Advice = Set fill factor on the server to 70, no more fragmentation problems!

I’m worried about TempDB contention. What should I do?

Bad Advice = Set the number of files to the number of cores, no more contention issues!

Read the post for better advice.

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Power BI And R

Jan Mulkens has started a series on combining Power BI and R.

Part 1:

Fact is, R is here to stay. Even Microsoft has integrated R with SQL Server 2016 and it has made R scripting possible in it’s great Azure Machine Learning service.
So it was only a matter of time before we were going to see R integrated in Power BI.

Part 2:

From the previous point, it seems that R is just running in the background and that most of the functionality can be used.

Testing some basic functionality like importing and transforming data in the R visual worked fine.
I haven’t tried any predictive modelling yet but I assume that will just work as well.

Part 3:

So instead of printing “Hello world” to the screen, we’ll use a simple graph to say hello to the world.

First we need some data, Power BI enables us to enter some data in a familiar Excel style.
Just select “Enter Data” and start bashing out some data.

I’m looking forward to the rest of the series.

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Populating Lookup Query Using A Variable

Meagan Longoria shows us how to use a variable to populate a lookup query in SSIS:

I already had my data flow populated with the lookup for MSA. I set it to full cache and entered a query in the connection to initially populate the fields that would be returned (simply my lookup query without the where clause).

Next, I opened the data flow properties, located Expressions and clicked on the ellipses to open the Property Expression  Editor. I found the SQLCommand property for my MSA lookup and set it to my package variable that contained my query.

I had issues in the past with full cached lookups and variables.  Fortunately, you can get around a lot of problems with expressions.

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