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Day: May 20, 2020

R 4.0 Improvements: stopifnot()

Published 2020-05-20 by Kevin Feasel

Bob Rudis looks at one of the R 4.0 changes hidden in the changelog:

R 4.0.0 has been out for a while, now, and — apart from a case where merge() was slower than dirt — it’s been really stable for at least me (I use it daily on macOS, Linux, and Windows). Sure, it came with some headline-grabbing features/upgrades, but I’ve started looking at what other useful nuggets might be in the changelog and decided to blog them as I find them.

Today’s nugget is the venerable stopifnot() function which was significantly enhanced by this PR by Neil Fultz.

Read on for a quality of life improvement with error handling in R.

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Mongo Shell Preview for Azure Cosmos DB

Published 2020-05-20 by Kevin Feasel

Hasan Savran takes a look at the preview for a native Mongo shell in Cosmos DB:

Native Mongo Shell became available as In-Preview mode in Azure Cosmos DB on March. I had chance to check it out this week and I decided to write about it this week. Mongo Shell let you execute Mongo database commands in Cosmos DB Data Explorer! Currently, It is not available in all Azure regions. If you don’t see this option, your database might be in a region that does not support this option yet. 
     Click on Data Explorer to see the Mongo Shell button. If you have never used it before, you will need to activate the Mongo Shell by clicking Complete Setup button. This box will open up when you click on Open Mongo Shell.

It sounds like it’s a little bit limited at the moment, but Hasan takes you through the things you can do today.

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Azure Synapse Analytics in Preview

Published 2020-05-20 by Kevin Feasel

Simon Whiteley clarifies a Build announcement:

Today’s the day! There’s much buzz & excitement as we FINALLY get to see Azure Synapse Analytics in public preview, ready for us all to get our hands on it. There’s a raft of other announcements that come hand & hand with it too.

What’s that? You thought Azure Synapse Analytics was already available? You’ve been using all year and don’t see what the fuss is about??

I’m expecting this to be the common reaction. The marketing story for Synapse has been… interesting… to say the least. I’ve been asked several times in the last week exactly what the new story is and, given today’s news, I thought I’d clarify.

The big picture is the version of Azure Synapse Analytics I’ve been interested in for a bit, so it’s nice to see the movement here.

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When Visual Header Icons Obscure Slicer Items in Power BI

Published 2020-05-20 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers fixes a problem of overlap:

Recently a user sent me a message saying that they could no longer click on a slicer item. I tried to myself and I had no issues clicking on the slicer item.

I then had an online screen share with the user, so that I could see what was happening when they were trying to click on the Slicer item. What had happened is they were using a lower screen resolution. What this did then was to place the Visual Header Icons over multiple lines, which then did not allow the top slicer item to be clicked on.

Click through for the solution.

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The Risks of Offloading CHECKDB

Published 2020-05-20 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar follows Betteridge’s Law of Headlines:

You want to check for corruption, but you don’t want to slow down your primary production server.

In this post, I’m specifically talking about offloading the corruption checking process. I’m not talking about doing corruption checking on both the primary and other servers – that’s wonderful, and if you’re doing that, you should hug yourself. You’re doing a good job. Who’s a good dog? You are! Good dog.

Now, for the rest of you – your production server is slow, and you wanna know what the drawbacks are of running CHECKDB on other servers instead. Here are the issues to consider. 

Click through for the list of drawbacks.

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Tips to Improve Power BI Performance

Published 2020-05-20 by Kevin Feasel

Dan Szepesi has a few tips for improving Power BI performance:

Now that we have talked through the general Power BI system components, let’s talk performance!  The scope of this blog will cover import models (where data is imported to Power BI Desktop and built into a data model) in the Power BI Pro service tier.  Power BI Premium and Direct Query performance tuning will not be included in this blog post, but if there is interest in those areas, please let us know.

In part I of this performance series, we will look at improving performance in your model, the heart of an import Power BI report solution.

Read on for these tips.

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Microsoft Azure SQL Edge Now in Public Preview

Published 2020-05-20 by Kevin Feasel

Asad Khan announces the public preview of Azure SQL Database Edge:

Optimized for IoT gateways and devices, Azure SQL Edge extends the industry-leading performance and security of Microsoft SQL engine to the intelligent edge. This small but mighty database engine (<500 MB startup memory footprint) is backed by the same engine that powers Microsoft SQL Server and Azure SQL and combines all the goodness of the SQL Engine with all new IoT-specific capabilities such as:

– data streaming and time series
– in-database machine learning and graph capabilities
– run on any ARM64- and x64-based devices (*Linux only during preview phase)
– deploy connected, semi-connected or completely disconnected environments

This has the makings of a really good product.

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