Press "Enter" to skip to content

Day: October 10, 2018

Multi-Threaded R With Microsoft R Client

Published 2018-10-10 by Kevin Feasel

David Parr shows us how to get started with Microsoft R Client and performs some quick benchmarking:

This message will pop up, and it’s worth noting as it’s got some information in it that you might need to think about:

  • It’s worth noting that right now Microsoft r Client is lagging behind the current R version, and is based on version 3.4 of R, not 3.5. This will mean your default package libraries will not be shared between the installations if you are running R 3.5.

  • It’s using a snapshot of CRAN called MRAN to source packages by default. 90% of the time it will operate just as you expect, but because it takes a ‘snapshot’ of packages, newer features and changes that have hit CRAN may not be in the version of the package you are grabbing.

    • RevoScaleR and probably the ggplot2 and dplyr packages will likely be installed for you already as default in Microsoft R Client. The other two you will probably have to install yourself.

  • Intel MKL will have scanned your system on install and attempted to work out how many cores your processor has. Here it’s identified 2 on my old Lenovo Yoga. This is where the speed boost will come from.

I had an old two-core Lenovo Yoga too, so this article really spoke to me.

Comments closed

Using Biml To Read Excel Files Without Excel

Published 2018-10-10 by Kevin Feasel

Bill Fellows follows up on his prior post and shows how you can write BimlScript to parse an Excel file without having Microsoft Office installed:

My resources are quite simple: Excel Spreadsheet containing meta data, a driver program and a package template.

The template is your standard truncate and reload pattern with the target table being specified by a parameter. The client validates data by running processes in parallel so the existing mainframe process delivers data to the Billing table while ours delivers to a Billing_NEW table. Once they accept the new process, the target table becomes Billing and the NEW table is dropped. I decided the most native SSIS route would be use specify the target table in as a parameter. We originally have a boolean parameter indicating whether we were loading the new table or the production one but that was more logic and overhead that just specifying which table to load. I force their queries to be dirty reads as some of these queries can be rather messy.

Click through for the script and explanation.

Comments closed

Calculating Effective Rights For A SQL Server Principal

Published 2018-10-10 by Kevin Feasel

Louis Davidson gives us a procedure which provides effective rights for a principal:

In my blog Calculating a Security Principal’s Effective Rights. I built a view, named Utilty.EffectiveSecurity that you could query to fetch a security principal’s rights to objects in a database. In that blog I tested the code and showed how it works. Now I have taken this to the extreme and expanded the view to include all of the user’s security by finding all of their rights to all of the things that the get rights for.

The list of possible permissions you can fetch can be retrieved from:

This returns the following 26 types of things that can have permissions assigned and returned by the sys.fn_my_permissions function:

Read on for the code.

Comments closed

Uninstalling A SQL Server Feature

Published 2018-10-10 by Kevin Feasel

Marek Masko shows how to uninstall a particular SQL Server feature:

If you wonder if it is possible to uninstall particular SQL Server feature instead of uninstalling the complete instance, then I have a good news. It is possible and it is very easy.

Let’s assume you want to uninstall PolyBase because you want to install it with a newer version of SQL Server (PolyBase can be installed on only one SQL Server instance per computer).

It brings me mild sadness that the feature Marek chose for this demo was Polybase, but slightly greater joy for the reason.

Comments closed

Help Make dbatools Even Better

Published 2018-10-10 by Kevin Feasel

Patrick Flynn wants you to improve dbatools:

As part of dbatools participation in this event we are encouraging contributors to assist “the road towards 1.0” by improving the examples available in the comment-based help, which power the new docs site at docs.dbatools.io.

The activity is available to anyone who wants to help and does not require any expertise in PowerShell. Any of the following actions are desirable:

  •  Fix typos in examples
  •  Fix obvious errors in examples
  •  Add examples to illustrate use of all possible parameters
  •  Add examples to illustrate use of pipeline support
  •  Add examples to illustrate combining multiple dbatools commands.
  •  Add examples that illustrate use of dbatools commands in new or interesting ways.

We are a looking for a max of 6-8 examples per command.

Patrick also shows you how easy it is to edit the documentation, so check that out and get contributing.

Comments closed