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Month: May 2018

Why You Should Read Gartner Critical Capabilities Reports

Published 2018-05-29 by Kevin Feasel

Jen Underwood explains the value behind Gartner Critical Capabilities reports, specifically the one for analytics and BI platforms:

Notably, the three Magic Quadrant Leaders except Tableau were ranked near the middle in all use cases. MicroStrategy, Birst, Sisense, TIBCO, YellowFin, Salesforce, SAS and a few other players excelled above the rest with high scores on this report. These results are a bit refreshing to see. Gartner Critical Capabilities scores seem to better align with Forrester’s rankings of Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms and also my own understanding of several top offerings. I admit that I was surprised by these results. I was rarely – if ever – asked about several of the top scoring vendors over the past three years.

Read the whole thing, and then read the report.

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Azure Data Factory V2 Pricing

Published 2018-05-29 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Seferlis gives us the details on how Azure Data Factory V2 pricing works:

2. Volume of data moved – this is measured in DMUs (data movement units). This is one you should be aware of as this will default to auto, which is basically using all the DMUs it can use and this is paid for by the hour. Let’s say you specify and use 2 DMUs and it takes an hour to move that data. The other option is you could use 8 DMUs and it takes 15 minutes, this price is going to end up the same. You’re using 4X the DMUs but it’s happening in a quarter of the time.

This is good to look at and do some comparisons since how many DMUs you’re using is where the bulk of your spend if going to be.

There are a few moving parts here, so the calculation is not trivial.  But Chris makes good sense of it all.

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Power BI Color Palattes

Published 2018-05-29 by Kevin Feasel

Meagan Longoria helps us choose a color palette for Power BI reports:

A color palette is simply a collection of colors applied to the visual elements in your report. What we typically refer to as color is a combination of three main properties: hue (base color on the color wheel), intensity (brightness or gray-ness) and value (lightness or darkness). You can build an engaging and professional looking report with just 6 colors. It’s possible to have fewer colors or more colors, but 6 should cover many common visualization needs. If you are using more than 6 colors, you might want to check that you are optimizing engagement and cognitive load.

  1. Main color – default color on graphs

  2. Color 2 – used when multiple colors are needed in a graph or report

  3. Color 3 – used when multiple colors are needed in a graph or report and Color 2 has already been used

  4. Highlight color – a color used to highlight important data points to make them stand out from other points on the page

  5. Border color – a light color used for borders on tables and KPIs where necessary

  6. Title color – color used for visual titles and axis labels as appropriate

There’s a lot of good advice in here.

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Finding Procedure Parameters Which Don’t Match Column Names

Published 2018-05-29 by Kevin Feasel

Shane O’Neill has a process to update procedures to make input parameter names match output column names:

I was asked to standardise stored procedures we use for common support cases before we hand them over to IT Helpdesk.

One of the comments that came back from the Helpdesk while testing was that the parameter names that they had to put values in for didn’t match what they saw in the application.

Luckily for me (or unluckily) the application was a third party developed one and they didn’t bother renaming the columns. So if the column is called create_date in the database then the application is going to show create_date.

However, if I created a parameter called DateCreated or even CreateDate, then they don’t want it.

Shane has a Powershell script which uses the Find-DbaStoredProcedure method in dbatools; click through to see it in action.

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Probabilities And Poker

Published 2018-05-25 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Miller has a notebook on 5-card draw probabilities:

The population of 5 card draw hands, consisting of 52 choose 5 or 2598960 elements, is pretty straightforward both mathematically and statistically.

So of course ever the geek, I just had to attempt to show her how probability and statistics converge. In addition to explaining the “combinatorics” of the counts and probabilities, I undertook two computational exercises. The first was to delineate all possible combinations of 5 card draws from a 52 card deck, counting occurrences of relevant combinations such as 2 pair, a straight, or nothing in a cell loop.

Steve has made his notebook available for us.

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Picking An Azure SQL Database Tier

Published 2018-05-25 by Kevin Feasel

Esat Erkec has various methods you can use to figure out your Azure SQL Database tier:

When we are beginning to think of migrating our on-premises databases to Azure SQL, we have to decide on a proper purchase model, a service tier, and a performance level. Before starting the Azure SQL migration process, we have to find logical and provable answers to the following questions:

  • Which purchase model is suitable for my apps and business requirements?
  • How much budget do I need?
  • Which performance level meets my requirements?
  • Can I achieve the acceptable performance of my apps?

The purchase model and service tiers will certainly affect the Azure bills. On the other hand, we have to achieve the maximum performance with the selected service tier.

It’s a good article with helpful tips for people thinking of moving to Azure SQL Database.

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Gartner’s Cloud IaaS Magic Quadrant Changes

Published 2018-05-25 by Kevin Feasel

Bruno Aziza analyzes Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service offerings:

The first and most drastic change that occurred over the last year is the number of players that Gartner decided to highlight in its report: the number of vendors went from 14 to just 6 this year.  

Why is that?! Have the big become bigger and the small smaller?! Or has the space shrunk?   The latter is highly improbable.  All the contrary: earlier last year, forecasted that the highest growth in the cloud market would be coming from the sector this MQ covers: Gartner predicted that the cloud system infrastructure services would grow over 36% to reach $34B+ in 2017.

So, what gives?!

Read on to learn what gives.  As far as the rankings themselves go, I think it’s reasonable:  AWS and Azure can generally go head-to-head on features though Amazon does have the advantage.  Google is a distant third and the rest aren’t major players.

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Bitwise Logic To Make Values Negative

Published 2018-05-25 by Kevin Feasel

David Fowler is working with arcane magic:

The short answer to the question is to simply apply a bitwise NOT to the number that you want to convert and add 1 to the result.  I wrote about bitwise logic in The Arcane Science of Bitwise Logic and SQL Server but didn’t mention the bitwise NOT.

If you want to apply a bitwise NOT to a value, simply use the ~

Give it a go, try converting 10 to a negative,

SELECT ~ 10 + 1

The result, -10.

One of my rules of thumb (given how many I have, I need more thumbs) is that if you’re using bitwise logic in SQL Server, something has likely gone wrong somewhere along the way.  But read David’s explanation, which is quite clear.

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What TDE Does To Query Performance

Published 2018-05-25 by Kevin Feasel

Matthew McGiffen has a few tests on using Transparent Data Encryption:

By the time it had been executed 5 times (with the memory flushed between each execution) each query read about 600,000 pages sized at 8kb each – just under 5GB. If it took 50 seconds on the decryption of those pages, then each page took about 1 twelfth of a milli-second to decrypt – or alternatively, TDE decrypted about 12 pages per millisecond. Or in terms of disk size, 100MB per second. These were tests on a server with magnetic spinning disks (not SSDs) and you can see from the above figures, the straight disk access took about 40 seconds on its own.

When TDE doesn’t read from disk it doesn’t add any overhead, but how do we quantify what the overhead to queries is when it does have to access the disk?

Matthew has some good advice here, and I’d be willing to say that his experience is within the norm for TDE and doesn’t directly contradict general guidelines by enough to shift priors.

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