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Day: June 30, 2021

The Power BI Premium vs Azure Analysis Services Gap is Closing

Published 2021-06-30 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo has an update:

Almost 18 months ago I compared Azure Analysis Services and Power BI Premium for large datasets. At that time, Azure Analysis Services was a clear choice, but it is almost time to update that post with a longer article. Because of time constraints, I just want to quickly review what changed so far, promising a longer and more detailed update in a few months.

Read on to see Marco’s synopsis of what has happened since then. For my money, Power BI Premium Per User is already at a place where I’d prefer it to Azure Analysis Services.

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When Bar Charts Don’t Start at Zero

Published 2021-06-30 by Kevin Feasel

Alex Velez has a confession:

Spoiler alert: I made a bar chart that does not have a zero baseline. I should add that this was intentional and not for teaching purposes, but rather because it seemed like the more appropriate solution for my given scenario.

This is an interesting edge case, but honestly, I think a bar chart is the wrong choice for the job here. I definitely prefer a dot plot here, even if the one Alex put together was a bit noisy. I think the best answer might have been to have a vertically aligned dot plot, similar to the final bar chart except without the bars. That reduces a lot of the noise while letting you label the specific points.

As far as the topic, I defer to noted philosopher Ron Swanson: “There’s only one thing I hate more than lying: skim milk. Which is water that’s lying about being milk.”

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SQL Server: Side-By-Side Install or Direct Upgrade?

Published 2021-06-30 by Kevin Feasel

Kenneth Fisher lays out preferences between two upgrade paths:

Most discussions like this start with the fact that an in-place upgrade is far easier but riskier if anything goes wrong. Side-by-side is more work and you run the risk of forgetting something. But if something goes wrong you just move back to the old instance.

I thought about something that isn’t usually part of the discussion this week while working on a side-by-side migration.

Read on for Kenneth’s insight. My general preference is side-by-side updates on a new server, as that helps get rid of operating system bit rot as well.

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A Review of Serverless SQL Pools

Published 2021-06-30 by Kevin Feasel

Teo Lachev lays out a review of serverless SQL pools in Azure Synapse Analytics:

Being able to query files using SQL is great. Some of you might remember the U-SQL language that was introduced a few years ago alongside Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) Gen 1 which is now deprecated. It never caught up because it looked like SQL but it wasn’t (it was actually closer to C#). Now we’re talking about real SQL. To query files! This opens the possibility to implement a logical warehouse (the emphasis is on logical as everyone to my knowledge who tried to replace a data warehouse with a data lake has failed). Or, you can connect Power BI to the serverless endpoint and start querying all these files in DirectQuery mode. So, this enables real-time BI on top of file extracts.

Click through for the pros and cons of using serverless SQL pools today.

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Executing Azure Data Factory Pipelines with Power App

Published 2021-06-30 by Kevin Feasel

Rayis Imayev has a plan:

One of my university professors liked to tell us a quote, “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters”, in a way to help us, his students, to stay active in our thinking process. I’m not sure if Francisco Goya, had a similar aspiration when he was creating his artwork with the same name.

So, let me explain my reasons to create a solution to trigger Azure Data Factory (ADF) pipelines from a Power App and why it shouldn’t be considered as a monster 🙂

If that’s not an introduction enticing enough to get you to read the whole thing, I don’t know what is.

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Data Type Conversions and Query Folding

Published 2021-06-30 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb explains how data type conversions and query folding might not mix:

It’s surprisingly easy to stop query folding happening in Power Query by changing the data type of a column. This is mentioned in the docs here, and it’s something several people have blogged about already (for example here). However there is something new to note: an option that will allow you to convert text columns to number or date columns in a foldable way for SQL Server data sources.

Consider the following table in a SQL Server database that consists of a single nvarchar(50) column containing numeric values:

Click through for the example, and also check out the comments below for more info.

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