Press "Enter" to skip to content

Month: February 2020

Executing Azure Data Factory Pipelines with Azure Functions

Published 2020-02-21 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Andrew wants to execute an Azure Data Factory pipeline via an Azure Function call:

For the function itself, hopefully this is fairly intuitive once you’ve created your DataFactoryManagementClient and authenticated.

The only thing to be careful of is not using the CreateOrUpdateWithHttpMessagesAsync method by mistake. Make sure its Create Run. Sounds really obvious, but when you get code drunk names blur together and the very different method overloads will have you confused for hours!…. According to a friend 🙂

Read the whole thing.

Comments closed

Sorting When Columns are Ordered the Same Way

Published 2020-02-21 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Darling thinks outside the column:

Sorts aren’t just for the column(s) in your order by — if you SELECT *, you need to all the columns in the * by all the columns in the order by.

I know I basically repeated myself. That’s for emphasis. It’s something professional writers do.

Dig it.

The principle Erik is talking about is having a monotonic relationship (that is, as one column increases, the other always increases; and as one column decreases, the other always decreases). If you can guarantee that, and if one of those happens to be indexed already, you can get a nice performance boost.

But wait, I was told there would be no math.

Comments closed

Creating a Delimited List in .NET

Published 2020-02-21 by Kevin Feasel

Bill Fellows wants you to use a built-in library method:

There are various ways to concatenate values together. A common approach I see is that people will add a delimiter and then the value and loop until they finish. Then they take away the first delimiter. Generally, that’s easier coding, prepending a delimiter, than to append the delimiter and not do it for the final element of a list. Or add it and then remove the final delimiter from the resulting string.

Gentle reader, there is a better way. And has been for quite some time but if you weren’t looking for it, you might not know it exists. 

You do get bonus points if you knew this existed.

Comments closed

Digging Into Bar Charts

Published 2020-02-20 by Kevin Feasel

Alex Velez takes us through the humble bar chart:

Our eyes start at the base and scan towards the end of each bar. We measure the lengths relative to both the baseline and the other bars, so it’s a straightforward process to identify the smallest or the largest bar. We can also see the negative space between varying heights of bars to compare the incremental difference between them. 

Not only are these graphs easy to read, but they are also widely recognized. Chances are, you’ve already encountered a standard horizontal or vertical bar chart. But bars come in many shapes and sizes. I’ll list below a few of the most common variations, with links to examples.

Click through for some good information on bar charts, including design tips.

Comments closed

Reading Azure DevOps Results in Powershell

Published 2020-02-20 by Kevin Feasel

Mark Broadbent doesn’t let the lack of an official Powershell module get in the way:

In my post Using Azure CLI to query Azure DevOps I explained how you can use the Azure CLI to query Azure DevOps so you can obtain useful information on builds, releases, and other useful information. The solution required a certain level of skill with JMESPath to manipulate your result sets -which as explained can be a little confusing.

However once you have a bare bones result set, it is likely that you will want to consume these results in a more user-friendly environment such as PowerShell so that you can build upon these data sets. I thought this would be an easy thing to do, but as you will see below it was anything but.

Read on for some thoughts and a sample script.

Comments closed

Disaster Recovery for Your Workstation

Published 2020-02-20 by Kevin Feasel

Randolph West explains that disaster recovery isn’t just for your servers:

I just completed a chapter for another book where I spoke about the Recovery Point Objective (how much data you are prepared to lose) and Recovery Time Objective (how long you have to bring your environment up again) after a disaster, and while I never get tired of repeating myself, that’s SQL Server. What happens if your development environment — or workstation — experiences a catastrophic failure?

Or what if, say, you’re on a cruise ship in the middle of the ocean with Internet access and a phone (but no laptop) and your on-call person just died? (I’ll leave this as an exercise for the reader to decide if this really happened.)

The answer is, if we do a careful bit of planning using the same disaster recovery principles we already know, the impact could be minimal. Note that this post assumes that you have Internet access and are using Microsoft Windows as your environment.

Click through for some useful suggestions.

Comments closed

Removing Ad Hoc Plans from the Query Store

Published 2020-02-20 by Kevin Feasel

Jeff Iannucci has a script which removes ad hoc plans from the Query Store:

Now, rather than being my usual rambling self I want to be very direct here: this solution will NOT give you the same behavior as “optimize for ad hoc workloads.” That setting keeps query info without the plan during the first execution, but then keeps the plan after the second execution.

That’s kinda like a surgeon with a scalpel. What is below is much more drastic. We’re going to break out a chainsaw for Query Store.

Chainsaw solutions to scalpel problems? Now you have my interest.

Comments closed

Working with Unicode in Powershell

Published 2020-02-20 by Kevin Feasel

Mark Wilkinson takes us through various problems when working with Unicode text in Powershell on Windows:

This post is inspired by an odd situation I ran into in a project I’m working on. I have the need to pull specific revisions of files out of a git repository, save those files, and then execute the contents. This all worked fine until it didn’t. I received some complaints that unicode characters in the files we getting mangled, and sure enough they were. But why? In this post I’ll explain what happened to me, and ways you can avoid it yourself.

Read on to learn how.

Comments closed