Press "Enter" to skip to content

Day: October 15, 2020

Issues Using EF Core Database First to Reverse Engineer SQL Server Databases

Erik Ejlskov Jensen takes us through several things to watch out for when reverse engineering a SQL Server database in Entity Framework Core:

Issue

SQL Server allows blank column names in tables, but this causes the following error when scaffolding: The string argument 'originalIdentifier' cannot be empty.

Workarounds

– Use EF Core Power Tools, which contains a fix for this. (Fix will also be in EF Core 6.0)
– Rename the column 🙂

Click through for several more issues and solutions in this vein.

Comments closed

Spark Infer Schema vs ADF Get Metadata

Paul Andrew compares two techniques for retrieving metadata:

For file types that don’t contain there own metadata (CSV, Text etc) we typically have to go and figure out there structure including; attributes and data types before doing any actual transformation work. Often I’ve used the Data Factory Metadata Activity to do this with its structure option. However, while playing around with Azure Synapse Analytics, specifically creating Notebooks in C# to run against the Apache Spark compute pools I’ve discovered in most case the Data Frame infer schema option basically does a better job here.

Now, I’m sure some Spark people will probably read the above and think, well der, obviously Paul! Spark is better than Data Factory. And sure, I accept for this specific situation it certainly is. I’m simply calling that out as it might not be obvious to everyone

Read on for a comparison of the two techniques.

Comments closed

Azure Data Studio, October 2020 Edition

Alan Yu shows off this month’s changes in Azure Data Studio:

You can now deploy Azure SQL resources from the deployment wizard in Azure Data Studio. These new options sit alongside local options like SQL Server on-premises and on Big Data Clusters and hybrid options, like SQL Managed Instance on Azure Arc. The deployment wizard includes UI-assisted Notebook experiences to deploy Azure SQL virtual machines and links to the Azure portal to create SQL databases, database servers, and elastic pools (SQL managed instances are not yet included).

Click through for more information.

Comments closed

Calculation Groups with Disconnected Tables in Power BI

Gilbert Quevauvilliers shows how to build a calculation group based on a disconnected table in Power BI and Azure Analysis Services:

I know that some of this might be able to be done with other calculation groups. I find I have more flexibility when combining Calculation Groups with a disconnected table.

Below are some of my previous calculation group blog posts that might also be of interest:

Create Currency Formatting Strings using Calculation Groups in Power BI Pro & Premium / Azure Analysis Services / SQL Server Analysis Services 2019

How to create and use Calculation Groups in Power BI Pro & Premium / Azure Analysis Services / SQL Server Analysis Services 2019

Click through for the demo.

Comments closed

Data Masking Improvements in dbatools

Sander Stad walks us through some changes to the data masking algorithm in dbatools:

If you’ve used the data masking command in dbatools you’ve probably noticed that the PowerShell session becomes memory intensive when it has to handle larger tables with one or more unique indexes.

The reason that happens is that during the data masking process the command looks for any unique indexes in the table. If it finds a unique index it will create a unique row for all the columns in the unique index.

Read on to see how Sander handled this.

Comments closed

Transactional Replication Error: Remote Server Does Not Exist

Garland MacNeill takes us through a replication issue:

For the past couple of days, I’ve been working on getting transactional replication set up between a couple of servers in between other projects I’ve been working on. For the last day I kept running into the following error:

“The remote server <“server name”> does not exist, or has not been designated as a valid Publisher, or you may not have permissions to see available Publishers. ” 

Click through for the solution.

Comments closed