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Day: January 28, 2020

ACID Transactions with Cosmos DB

Published 2020-01-28 by Kevin Feasel

Hasan Savran shows how you can use the Cosmos DB SDK to create ACID transactions:

What about Azure Cosmos DB? It’s a NoSQL database, probably you can’t do ACID Transactions right? WRONG! Azure Cosmos DB has been supporting ACID transaction for some time now. We were able to create ACID transactions by using stored procedures of Cosmos DB. Last year (2019) Cosmos DB team introduced ACID transactions to Cosmos DB SDK. Now, we can create transactions by using C# just like writing transactions by using SQLClient class for SQL Server!

      To create an ACID transaction in Cosmos DB SDK, we need to use TransactionalBatch object. You need add all operations in transaction to TransactionalBatch object. All the operations attached to the TransactionalBatch object must share the same partition key. In the following example, I created three objects and attach them to TransactionalBatch object. To start the transaction, I ran the ExecuteAsync() function.  This function runs the transaction and returns the responses for each operation.

I’d think you would need to set a strong consistency level as well.

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Data Lake Storage and Data Processing

Published 2020-01-28 by Kevin Feasel

Ashish Kumar has started a series on data lake essentials:

Data Lake architecture is all about storing large amounts of data which can be structured, semi-structured or unstructured, e.g. web server logs, RDBMS data, NoSql data, social media, sensors, IoT data and third-party data. A data lake can store the data in the same format as its source systems or transform it before storing.

The main purpose of a data lake is to make organizational data from different sources, accessible to a variety of end users like business analysts, data engineers, data scientists, product managers, executives, etc, in order to enable these personas to leverage insights in a cost-effective manner, for improved business performance. Today, many forms of advanced analytics are only possible on data lakes.

Click through for more information on what a data lake should provide—whether that be in-house or a cloud provider.

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Fixing Screen Repainting Issues in SSMS

Published 2020-01-28 by Kevin Feasel

Greg Low has a workaround for an annoying problem:

Once again, I’m seeing lots of customers reporting screen repainting issues in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). It mostly seems to affect version 18 but I’ve also seen it in version 17. And it’s most prevalent on Windows 10.

The typical issue is that you click on another open tab, and the contents of the tab doesn’t repaint. You are still seeing the previous tab. If you click into the tab, you start to see bits from both tabs.

Click through to see the fix. I’ve seen this issue pop up though I don’t remember seeing it on the latest version of SSMS 18…though now that I say that, I’m guaranteed to have the problem hit me today.

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Managed Identity with Azure Functions

Published 2020-01-28 by Kevin Feasel

Taiob Ali shows how you can safely store credentials which your Azure Function apps need:

With the announcement of Powershell support in Azure Functions, it has become easier for data professionals to use functions to manage cloud resources such as Azure SQL Database, Managed Instances. A common challenge when using functions is how to manage the credentials in function code for authenticating databases. Keeping the credentials secure is an important task. Ideally, the credentials should never appear in the code or in the source control.

Manged Identity can solve this problem as Azure SQL Database and Managed Instance both support Azure AD authentication. You can read mode about Managed Identity here.

In this article, I will show how to set up Azure Function App to use Managed Identity to authenticate functions against Azure SQL Database.

The example connects Azure SQL DB, but this is a general-purpose solution.

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Financial Statements in Power BI

Published 2020-01-28 by Kevin Feasel

Joseph Yeates has started a series on creating financial statements in Power BI:

This post is part 1 in my series on creating financial statements in Power BI! I’m starting with creating an Income Statement. The source data and Power BI file used in the example below can be found here.

I loaded the source data into the Power BI report. It consisted of three tables:

– Fact table: contains dollar amount of transactions
– GL table: contains categorization of transactions
– Calendar table: contains date information for the data model

This will be interesting to watch, especially because this kind of task is generally handled in a tool like Reporting Services instead of Power BI.

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