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Month: September 2020

Power BI Icons for Diagrams.Net

Published 2020-09-17 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld has some icons for us:

Previously, I used a simple PowerPoint slide when I drafted technical solution proposals. This took me a whole lot of time by copy-pasting all the images, make it look nice and connect the dots together. While tools like diagrams.net are built for this purpose, I always stuck with PowerPoint as there were no icons for all Power BI objects in this tool. Until now!

The online tool Diagrams.net allow you to quickly draft your solution architecture by dragging and dropping icons on a white canvas and easily connecting the dots together.

I’ve been a big fan of diagrams.net (nee draw.io), so thank you Marc for putting this together.

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Azure Synapse Analytics Query Options

Published 2020-09-17 by Kevin Feasel

James Serra has a breakdown of what can query what in Azure Synapse Analytics:

The public preview version of Azure Synapse Analytics has three compute options and four types of storage that it can access (mentioned in my blog at SQL on-demand in Azure Synapse Analytics). This gives twelve possible combinations of querying data. Not all of these combinations currently are supported and some have a few quirks of which I list below.

Read on for a table which breaks down current functionality as well as expected GA functionality.

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Query Folding and the Power BI Dataflows Enhanced Compute Engine

Published 2020-09-17 by Kevin Feasel

Matthew Roche dives into Power BI’s enhanced compute engine:

I’ve been seeing more questions lately about the dataflows enhanced compute engine in Power BI. Although I published a video overview and although there is feature coverage in the Power BI documentation, there are a few questions that I haven’t seen readily answered online.

A lot of these questions can be phrased as “what happens when I turn on the enhanced compute engine for my Power BI Premium capacity?”

Most of my responses start with the phrase “it depends” – so let’s look at some of the factors the answer depends on.

Click through for those factors.

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Splitting a Power BI Report into a Golden Dataset and a Thin Report

Published 2020-09-17 by Kevin Feasel

Imke Feldmann walks us through separating data from report in Power BI:

The other day I discovered a neat way to split up an existing Power BI report into a Golden Dataset and a thin report file with very few adjustments to the existing setup. Imagine you have a Power BI report published for some time already in an app with row level security. Now, you want to create other reports from the dataset as well and decide it’s time to create a golden dataset from which multiple other thin reports can also be fed from as well. But ideally you want to keep your published app, that many users are working with already, unchanged.

There’s a way to do this and Imke shows us the way.

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ggwebthemes as a Package

Published 2020-09-16 by Kevin Feasel

Petr Baranovskiy has released an R package:

I was happy to see that some people liked those and suggested that I should make a package. I tended to view packages as large collections of code and functions, but as Sébastien Rochette wisely put it, “If you have one function, create a package! If this simplifies your life, why not?” And since I will be frequently using these themes in subsequent posts, I’d like to make it as convenient as possible for the reader to install and use them.

So here is the ggwebthemes package! It has the same three themes, which I have tweaked and improved some more.

Click through for instructions on how to install ggwebthemes via GitLab.

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Image Classification with Keras and TensorFlow 2 in R

Published 2020-09-16 by Kevin Feasel

Shirin Glander takes us through the task of image classification using TensorFlow version 2.2.0:

Recently, I have been getting a few comments on my old article on image classification with Keras, saying that they are getting errors with the code. And I have also gotten a few questions about how to use a Keras model to predict on new images (of different size). Instead of replying to them all individually, I decided to write this updated version using recent Keras and TensorFlow versions (all package versions and system information can be found at the bottom of this article, as usual).

Click through for the R code.

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Automating Power BI Deployments

Published 2020-09-16 by Kevin Feasel

Martin Schoombee has started a series on automating Power BI deployments. The first post covers some of the basics of Powershell:

The console works great when you’re executing single commands, but not when you’re developing entire scripts. The ISE has a built-in console and has everything you need from a development perspective.

I have recently started using Visual Studio Code to develop my PowerShell scripts, and it works pretty well and feels like a more complete development tool. You would also need to use VS Code if you want to install and use PowerShell 7, because it doesn’t work with the ISE. I don’t want to get too lengthy here, so if you’re interested in using VS Code you can read all about it here.

Click through for the entire article.

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Containerizing an IIS-Based Web App

Published 2020-09-16 by Kevin Feasel

Jamie Wick walks us through containerizing a web application which runs in IIS on Windows:

The basic application documentation provided included a zip file containing the website files along with information that the website was running on a Windows IIS server with passthrough (Active Directory) authentication.

For a Windows Server container to use Active Directory authentication, a Group Managed Service Account (gMSA) must be installed on each server that will be hosting the container. The container’s application must then be configured to run as a Network Service. The last step is to use a Credential File in the docker run command to link the container’s Network Service account to a gMSA on the host.

Note: If you are not familiar with Windows Server containers, Dockerfiles, and the Docker Build process, please refer to this post on Getting started with Windows containers & SQL Server.

Read on as Jamie takes us through the process.

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The Cost of Verifying Backups to Azure

Published 2020-09-16 by Kevin Feasel

Matt Robertshaw reminds us that TANSTAAFL:

Within two weeks of backups being written to Blog Storage, we observed a significant upward trend in cost associated with a Storage Account.  When compared to the previous month, there was an increase of c. £270.  After some further analysis, we were able to associate this increase with “bandwidth” charges.  This didn’t feel right – you don’t pay anything to upload data to Azure (ingress), you only pay when downloading data from Azure (egress).

Using Azure Monitor, we profiled the ingress and egress rates for the affected Storage Account and noticed the following pattern:

Each day, c. 150GB of backups were being written to blob storage (in blue), but shortly after, the same amount was being downloaded (in red).  Over this period, we calculated 4TB of data had been uploaded and then downloaded again.  Based on Microsoft’s latest Bandwidth pricing, whilst the first 5GB of egress per month is free, the next 5GB – 10TB is charged at £0.065 per month.  Some simple maths confirms it to be the additional £270 we observed.

Read on for three possible solutions. My preference for an on-prem solution would be to verify locally and then push to Blob Storage / S3. Backups tend to be faster that way as well, as your disk is likely faster than your network.

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Using the Geography Data Type

Published 2020-09-16 by Kevin Feasel

Edwin Sanchez takes a look at SQL Server’s GEOGRAPHY data type:

A common application in geography spatial data is called the nearest neighbor query. In this query, you want to know how far or close something is to another object or place.

In my post about the SQL graph, I described how a customer could find the nearby restaurants from the current location. Let’s refer to that example again:

Read on for a primer on the data type and some useful examples.

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