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Day: November 16, 2020

Visualizing Analysis Services Tasks with the Job Graph

Published 2020-11-16 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb is excited:

More details about it, and how it can be used, are in the samples here:

https://github.com/microsoft/Analysis-Services/tree/master/ASJobGraphEvents

The data returned by the Job Graph event isn’t intelligible if you look at the text it returns in Profiler. However if you save a .trc file with Job Graph event data to XML you can use the Python scripts in the GitHub repo to generate DGML diagrams that can be viewed in Visual Studio, plus Gantt charts embedded in HTML. Of course to do this you’ll need to have Python installed; you’ll also need to have Visual Studio and its DGML editor installed (see here for details).

Read on to see how it looks and Chris’s thoughts on the matter.

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Error Handling in R

Published 2020-11-16 by Kevin Feasel

Adi Sarid compares a few methods for error handling in R:

Error catching can be hard to catch at times (no pun intended). If you’re not used to error handling, this short post might help you do it elegantly.

There are many posts about error handling in R (and in fact the examples in the purrr package documentation are not bad either). In this sense, this post is not original.

However, I do demonstrate two approaches: both the base-R approach (tryCatch) and the purrr approach (safely and possibly). The post contains a concise summary of the two methods, with a very simple example.

Read the whole thing. H/T R-Bloggers

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Import Files From Sharepoint Into Power Query

Published 2020-11-16 by Kevin Feasel

Imke Feldmann solves a problem:

When you use the UI to import files from SharePoint, you’ll end up with the Sharepoint.Files function. This function can become fairly or super slow when you use it on large SharePoint sites. This is due to the fact, that it will retrieve metadata for ALL files that lie on the site. Meaning: The root site whose URL you have to enter as the function argument. So I’ve developed a better way for File import from SharePoint.

Click through for the solution and how to use it. Imke reports 2X query performance when reading Sharepoint data, so it’s worth checking out.

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Using the READPAST Query Hint

Published 2020-11-16 by Kevin Feasel

Rajendra Gupta looks at a lesser-used query hint:

If we specify the READPAST hint in the SQL queries, the database engine ignores the rows locked by other transactions while reading data. Suppose you have a transaction that blocked a few rows in a table for updating the information in those rows. Now, if another user starts a transaction and specifies the READPAST query hint, the query engine ignores these rows and returns the remaining rows satisfying the data requirement of the query. It might return incorrect data as well.

There are some very limited uses for this hint, though they are out there.

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Linked Server Data Does Not Match Expected Data Length

Published 2020-11-16 by Kevin Feasel

Jack Vamvas looks at a linked server error:

I’ve found an issue we have with BI Connector over MongoDB. I’m extracting data from MongoDB to SQL Server – using the MongoDB ODBC Data Source Configuration and Linked Server. Basically the BI Connector fails when the string in the column gets too long.  When running the job to bring in the data to the production workflow data into a  Datawarehouse application we get the following error.

Msg 7347, Level 16, State 1, Line 1

OLE DB provider ‘MSDASQL’ for linked server ‘MongoDB_PROD_mydb’ returned data that does not match expected data length for column ‘[MSDASQL].mywork.mytasks.mytaskInfo’. The (maximum) expected data length is 5332, while the returned data length is 5970.

Completion time: 2020-11-05T17:14:10.2206504+00:00

Read on for one solution.

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Target Groups in Elastic Jobs

Published 2020-11-16 by Kevin Feasel

Reitse Eskens shares some more information about elastic jobs in Azure:

In one of my previous blogs, I wrote about how to create an elastic job agent when you need the SQL Agent functionality on Azure. You can read that one here.

This morning, I needed a job to update the stats on a database, but on just one database within the “instance” on Azure. But my first group contained all the databases, and the Ola Hallengren script isn’t available on all databases and the credential I’m using to execute the jobs doesn’t have access to all the databases.

Read on to learn how Reitse solved the problem.

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