A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
The question came up as how to find a link from blog storage that is corrupt back to the table and row that contains that data.
The is no link from the blob storage back to the table and row, but this is a link from the data page containing the table and row off to the blob data.
Read the whole thing.
Comments closedMeagan Longoria has a couple of posts on designing Power BI reports to make them accessible to people who use screen readers. First up is a list of good tips:
Avoid auto-playing video or audio as that conflicts with the screen reader. If you must use video or audio, provide it in a way that requires the user to start it rather than stop it.
Be sure to format numbers appropriately so screen readers don’t read out a long series of insignificant digits.
Avoid the use of lots of decorative shapes and images within your report page that do not relay information to users. The screen reader reads each one. When using shapes and images to call out data points, use the alt text to explain what is being called out.
Meagan also has a follow-up blog post with more detail:
The data in the accessible Show Data table will render in the order it is shown in the visual, so you can control that in your design. One exception to this is when the data is rendered in a matrix rather than a table: the total in the accessible Show Data table is positioned at the top rather than the bottom where we see it visually. This is a purposeful design decision to help the user understand the total and then the breakdown of subtotals. Another good thing about the accessible Show Data tables is that tooltips are included, just like when we use the See Data feature.
Another nice feature (not sure if this is built in to JAWS or something the Power BI team added) is that if you have a report page that takes a while to load JAWS will say “Alert: Visual are loading” so it’s obvious to a blind/low vision user that they need to wait to get the full report page.
There is still a bit of work to be done to make Power BI truly accessible to screen readers.
Both posts are definitely worth the read.
Comments closedNigel Meakings has an introductory post to Jupyter Notebooks:
The Jupyter notebok environment consists of a browser-based notebook UI and a back-end server, running on port 8888 by default (if this port is taken it will start up on the next available port). This web server-based delivery of Notebooks means that you can browse to a remote server and execute your code there. This is the case, for example, when using a ready-made cluster such as an HDInsight Spark cluster, where all the tooling has been pre-installed for you. You open the notebook in the cluster portal within Azure, and it logs you in to the Jupyter server running on a node within the cluster. Note that if you want to allow multi-user access to your local Jupyter environment, you’ll need to be running a product such as JupyterHub.
I love using Jupyter when presenting because it’s the easiest way to intermix code, documentation, and images in one package, so it’s nice for pedagogical purposes.
Comments closedIf you are an AD admin, you are very likely a pro at managing AD group membership but for mere mortals, this can be a tedious task. Please read on to find out what I am talking about and how to address that easily
For example, you get an urgent request to
Move a bunch of users from one AD group to another
To make matters worse, you are not given any ID’s but rather just the names!
Jana shows how to whip up a script to perform this migration in a few lines of code, as well as several other scenarios.
Comments closedTim Radney explains the idea behind Azure SQL Database Managed Instances:
Managed Instances were first introduced at the Microsoft Build conference in Spring 2017, and so far the preview has been limited to a small number of customers and consultants. Managed Instances can be considered a hybrid between a full version of SQL Server and Azure SQL Database. Single and elastic databases are built upon a database-scoped programming model and Managed Instances are built on an instance-scoped programming model. This makes Managed Instances more compatible with on-premises SQL Server.
Managed Instances provide much more of a feel of an on-premises SQL Server, yet are built on the same infrastructure as Azure SQL Database. What sets it apart from Azure SQL Database is that it presents an entire SQL Server instance to the customer. In Azure SQL Database, you configure a server, which is really a container, and then can have multiple databases in that server, but they can’t easily talk to one another. With Managed Instances, all databases within the instance are on the same actual SQL Server, so you have full support for cross-database queries. This is a huge feature for many applications that otherwise were not a good fit for Azure SQL Database, and I think that’s going to allow many more SQL Server applications to move into the cloud.
Managed Instances has the potential to make an Azure migration realistic for many companies sticking to the on-prem product or managing a bunch of IaaS VMs.
Comments closedKendra Little demonstrates that clustered indexes do not give us an automatic sorting of our data:
There is no “default” ordering that a query will fall back on outside of an ORDER BY clause.
- Results may come back in the order of the clustered index, or they may not
- Even if results come back in the order of the clustered index on one run of the query, they may not come back in the same order if you run it again
If you need results to come back in a specific order, you must be explicit about it in the ORDER BY clause of the query.
Click through for a demo proving these two points.
Comments closedSander Stad wraps up his series on log shipping:
Initially log shipping was meant to be used as a warm standby. You have your data on another instance but you still have some human intervention to get it all back up.
Imagine the following situation. You have setup log shipping using either the GUI or the commands in dbatools. You have about 15 databases and everything is working fine.
Until one day the primary instance goes down and is not recoverable. For the production to continue you have to bring the log shipped databases online fast.
You have to figure what the last transaction log backup was. You have to check if it was copied to the secondary instance and if it’s restored.
To do this by running a couple of queries, copying the files if needed and run the log shipping jobs takes time. I’d rather run a command and recover one or more databases and get back to the problem of the primary instance.
Read on to see how to use dbatools to recover a log shipped database.
Comments closedIf your source system does not contain a Date entity or dimension, a better way is to create a such an entity with Power Query (aka “M”). By creating your own, you can add more attributes than just year, quarter and month…and optimize the size and performance of your model at the same time.
Not a Power Query expert? You don’t have to be. Others in the community have already shared their versions, and I will share my own modified version that you can copy and use for yourself. I’ve used the examples of Matt Masson and Chris Webb as the basis of my own Date entity. You can find their versions here and here.
Read on for Martin’s version.
Comments closedEd Elliott has a new tool available:
The main part of the UI is a graphical map of the objects in a package. I have spent quite a lot of time trying to think of a better way of showing the elements that make up a package, and it is hard to argue with the workflow approach, all the ETL tools I found do the same thing and visualizing packages as a series of interconnected tasks is useful but maybe not everything and the only way.
Because of all these issues I have really tried to stay away from SSIS development and looked for other solutions such as using biml to write packages or writing code in other languages but I keep coming back to the fact that the SSIS engine is great at what it does and if you have a lot of data or a lot of files/tables then writing a similar framework would be a lot of wasted effort. So, how can we use the SSIS engine but make better, more efficient use of our development time?
Click through to see a couple of screenshots as well as a link to download K-SSIS.
Comments closedIn our Security Advisory published 8 January, we advised of up to 20% increase in CPU utilization and small increase in latency across managed clusters in AWS and GCP following the rollout of the patches to the cloud provider hypervisors. We have since observed a reversal of this impact in the weeks following the initial announcements. That is, these effects disappeared when further AWS and GCP patches were rolled out by the cloud providers.
We assessed the risk of the vulnerabilities to our environment as Low. Our clusters run as single tenant and customer access is limited to the application layer. If a user were able to exploit either of the vulnerabilities they could only gain access to their own information.
In short, they saw a change early on, but subsequent patching has removed that performance degradation. Read the whole thing for more details.
Comments closed