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Day: November 27, 2020

Image Modification with R in Machine Learning Services

Published 2020-11-27 by Kevin Feasel

Rajendra Gupta messes with The Mouse:

There is a famous adage in English: “A picture is worth a thousand words”. You can represent your information using the image in various formats such as JPEG, PNG, GIF. Usually, we use various client tools such as MS Paint, Photo, photoshop or other client applications for working with the images. You can convert image format, modify the size, applying various effects, multiple animated images.

SQL Machine Learning language – R makes us capable of working with the images directly with the SQL Server. In this article, we will use SQL Machine Learning using R scripts for image processing.

Click through for examples.

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The Performance Cost of AT TIME ZONE

Published 2020-11-27 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Darling shows that AT TIME ZONE does not scale well when used in filters against columns:

Databases really do make you pay dearly for mistakes, and new linguistic functionality is not implemented with performance in mind.

I’ve written before about how to approach date math in where clauses: Where To Do Date Math In Your Where Clause

And it turns out that this lesson is brutally true if you need to pass time zones around, too.

Read the whole thing. In this respect, AT TIME ZONE is similar to pretty much all other date operators and functions.

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GREATEST and LEAST in Azure SQL Database

Published 2020-11-27 by Kevin Feasel

Arun Sirpal shows off some missing functionality in SQL Server:

Being in the cloud does have many benefits, from lower administration to fast scaling but another “side effect” of operating in Azure SQL Database is the cloud first nature of changes. By this I basically mean new features always get pushed to Azure first before the classic on-premises version so some gems come to light.

Here is one for you. Have you ever wanted MySQL’s functinality to apply LEAST() and GREATEST() argument? Well, you can now, in Azure.

I can’t say that I would use this every day or anything, but I have felt the pain of not having it. There are workarounds, though nothing as convenient as syntax. Hopefully this shows up on-prem in the next version of SQL Server.

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Saving Transcripts in Powershell

Published 2020-11-27 by Kevin Feasel

Garry Bargsley shows how easy it is to save a transcript in Powershell:

This week we are going to launch a blog series geared towards folks that are new to PowerShell. The growing popularity of automation is seeing people getting started with the PowerShell scripting language.

The Start-Transcript is a built-in command that allows you to quickly build a log of actions being taken by your script. There are other ways to build logs, but for beginners using the commands that are available to you is pretty easy.

Read on for a demo.

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Beyond 10GB for Power BI Users

Published 2020-11-27 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers wants to go to infinity and beyond:

By default, when using Power BI Premium or Power BI Premium per user the dataset size is set to 10GB.

I have had the wonderful experience of refreshing my dataset and getting the following error:

In the steps below I will show you how to change this setting to allow for larger dataset sizes.

There are a few steps involved, but hey, if you’re paying for Premium, it’s worth a few steps to get this.

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How Foreign Keys Appear in Execution Plans

Published 2020-11-27 by Kevin Feasel

Hugo Kornelis shows us how foreign key contraints modify certain execution plans:

The top left of this execution plan looks very unsurprising. A Clustered Index Scan to read all rows from the #Products temporary table, and those rows are then passed to a Clustered Index Insert operator for insertion into our permanent table dbo.Products. But wait? Why is there no table or index name listed below the operator name? That’s actually because the operator has not one but three items in its Object property. When a Clustered Index Insert targets just a single index, SSMS can work out the name and show it. But when Clustered Index Insert targets multiple objects, SSMS plays it safe and displays none.

Read on to learn more.

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