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Month: February 2018

Power BI Cumulative Totaling

Published 2018-02-01 by Kevin Feasel

Martin Schoombee runs into an interesting issue with cumulative totals in Power BI:

A common practice in the data warehousing world is to use a Date Key as unique identifier in a date dimension. This attribute is usually a number in the format yyyymmdd. I’m not going to dive into all the reasons why it is used in data warehouse environments here, but (for fun) let’s change our data model to use the Date Keyattribute in the relationship between the two tables.

If we look at our visualizations again, we see a very different picture. Sales by date still looks the same, but the sales by month seems a little out of whack (image below). If you had cumulative sales at any other aggregated level (quarter, year, etc.) it would also have been incorrect.

The answer is not immediately intuitive, so it’s good to know this ahead of time rather than have to struggle with it later.

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Processing Tabular Models With Helpful Information

Published 2018-02-01 by Kevin Feasel

Ust Oldfeld has a stored procedure which runs a SQL Agent job and provides notice when processing completes:

Recently, at a client, I was challenged to create a stored procedure that would process a tabular model. This stored procedure would then be executed from a web application. The process behind it being: a user enters data into a web application, which gets written to a database. That data then needs to be immediately surfaced up into reports, with additional calculations and measures along the way. Therefore the tabular model, which does all the additional calculation and measures, needs to be processed by a user from the web application.

Click through for the script.

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Ungrouped Results In Query Store

Published 2018-02-01 by Kevin Feasel

Erin Stellato explains why you might see two rows for the same query plan in Query Store’s run-time stats:

You can see that there are two rows for the same query_id and plan_id, but the count_executions is different, as are the avg_duration and avg_logical_io_reads values .  The data is not truly a duplicate.  This behavior occurs because the Query Store data is stored in memory before it is flushed to disk, and when you query the data SQL Server is pulling it from both locations (and doing a UNION ALL) and displaying it in the output.  If I waited a bit and ran the query again, the two rows for that interval would probably disappear – most likely because the in memory data had been flushed to disk.

Read the whole thing.

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Wrapping Up SSMS Tricks

Published 2018-02-01 by Kevin Feasel

Wayne Sheffield wraps up his 31 SSMS tricks in 31 days series.  First, he shows off the presentation settings in SSMS.  Presenter mode isn’t nearly as full-featured as I’d like to see it be, but it’s an improvement over the old version, at least.

He then shows standard reports built into SSMS.

The last post in the series is all about the Activity Monitor:

The Activity Monitor can be useful for seeing a mile-high view of a SQL Server instance. However, leaving it running can be as big a drag on the instance as is the use of SQL Profiler. The Resource Waits section of Activity Monitor, which would have been one of the strongest features, has been dumbed down by the filtering of wait types, and that many others are grouped together into categories. Sure, using the Activity Monitor convenient – but spend the time to develop your own scripts or XE sessions to get this information in a more efficient, with less impact. Overall, refrain from using it… and especially don’t set up SSMS to open it automatically on startup.

Agreed.  For all of Wayne’s tips and tricks, check out his index page.

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