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Day: January 1, 2016

Conformity In Self-Service BI

Paul Turley has a nice post on some of the risks of self-service BI:

In some solutions with a manageable scale and a reasonable tolerance for a certain amount of data loss and inconsistency, this approach may be just fine.  There are very good reasons for inconsistencies between sets of data that come from different sources.  When 20 million fact rows are obtained from an online ordering system and .1% don’t have matching customers records that come from the system used to manage the master customer list, it may simply be a question of timing.  Or, maybe the definition of “customer” is slightly different in the two systems.  Chances are that there are also legitimate data quality issues affecting a small percentage of these records.

Whatever the case may be, a data conformity or potential data quality issue in this design scenario falls on the model designer to either fix or ignore.  Again, this may or may not be a concern but it is a decision point and might raise the question of ownership when questions about data quality are raised.

Paul then goes on to show how this gets fixed in a traditional model and where you need to watch out with SSAS Tabular.  Good essay worth reading.

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Visualizing R In Power BI (Too)

Dustin Ryan is also looking at R visualization in Power BI:

Not only can we create and download custom visuals from PowerBI.com to extend the capabilities of Power BI, we can use R to create a ridiculous amount of powerful visualizations. If you can get the data into Power BI, you can use R to perform interesting statistical analysis and create some pretty cool, interactive visuals.

Dustin and Jan Mulkens are working on similar posts at the same time, so watch both of them.

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Trace Flags Without Sysadmin

Jack Li shows how to enable a trace flag without sysadmin or changing any application code:

The initial thought is to enable the trace flag at session level.  We ran into two challenges.  First, application needs code change (which they couldn’t do) to enable it.  Secondly, dbcc traceon requires sysadmin rights.   Customer’s application used a non-sysadmin user.  These two restrictions made it seem impossible to use the trace flag.

However, we eventually came up with a way of using logon trigger coupled with wrapping the dbcc traceon command inside a stored procedure.   In doing so, we solved all problems.  We were able to isolate the trace flag just to that application without requiring sysadmin login.

This is the very edge of an edge case.  In normal practice, change the code.

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Trustworthy Databases

Kenneth Fisher asks if you check TRUSTWORTHY settings on your databases:

I wasn’t surprised (although a little disappointed) that out of the 9 people the answered only one person was, and of the rest 5 didn’t even know what TRUSTWORTHY is. I even had one person ask me later. That’s somewhat scary because under the right circumstances if you give me a database with TRUSTWORTHY turned on I can take over your instance. I’m NOT going to show you how but it isn’t terribly difficult.

I’ll admit that I have been a bit non-chalant about TRUSTWORTHY in the past, but turning it on is the smart move.

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