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Month: June 2021

Visio Licensing Changes and Power BI

Published 2021-06-11 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb ties a new Visio announcement to Power BI:

There was an interesting announcement today regarding Visio:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2021/06/09/bringing-visio-to-microsoft-365-diagramming-for-everyone/

In summary there will soon be a lightweight, web-based version of Visio available to anyone with a Microsoft 365 Business, Office 365 E1/E3/E5, F3, A1, A3 or A5 subscription. Previously Visio was not part of the main M365 plans and was only available as a separate purchase.

So what? As a Power BI user, why should I care? 

Read on for Chris’s answer. If the web-based version of Visio is good, I’m reasonably excited by this prospect.

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A Checklist for Database Post-Restoration

Published 2021-06-11 by Kevin Feasel

Randolph West wants you to keep some things in mind after you restore that database:

Whenever I restore a database — especially one I obtained outside of my regular environment (for example a customer database, a development database, or even a sample database like WideWorldImporters) — there are a few things I like to check to make sure it’s configured for peak performance.

Note that some of this advice may apply only to non-production databases.

Click through for the list.

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Defining the Data Fabric

Published 2021-06-11 by Kevin Feasel

James Serra explains a concept:

Another buzzword that you may have been hearing a lot about lately is Data Fabric. In short, a data fabric is a single environment consisting of a unified architecture with services and technologies running on it that architecture that helps a company manage their data. It enables accessing, ingesting, integrating, and sharing data in a environment where the data can be batched or streamed and be in the cloud or on-prem. The ultimate goal of data fabric is to use all your data to gain better insights into your company and make better business decisions.  If you are thinking this sounds a lot like a modern data warehouse that I posted a video on recently at Modern Data Warehouse explained, well, I would argue it basically is the same thing except a data fabric expands on that architecture.

Read on for James’s explanation.

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CROSS and OUTER APPLY

Published 2021-06-11 by Kevin Feasel

Kenneth Fisher takes us through CROSS versus OUTER APPLY:

I love CROSS APPLY. I also love OUTER APPLY. What’s the difference though? The same difference as with an INNER vs OUTER JOINs. The CROSS APPLY only includes rows where there is a match, while OUTER APPLY includes all rows even if there isn’t a match. I’ve found over time that I have a lot easier time using an example for this rather than trying to explain in any detail. I’m going to use STRING_SPLIT for my example because it’s easy.

Click through for the example.

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Workload Management in Azure Synapse Analytics

Published 2021-06-11 by Kevin Feasel

Reiss McSporran starts a new series on workload management in Azure Synapse Analytics:

So you’ve started using Synapse SQL Pools, you’ve scaled up to improve performance, but your queries aren’t going as fast as you’d hoped. You take a look at resource utilisation and you see that as you scale up, your total resource utilisation per query goes down. But didn’t we scale up to allow our query to use more resource and run quicker? What’s going on here? A little thing called Workload Management.

What is Workload Management? At a very high level, Workload Management allows you to control how your workload uses system resources. The main problem here is defaults!

Click through for the full story. Or at least the full part 1 of the even fuller story.

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Query Store Hints

Published 2021-06-11 by Kevin Feasel

Erin Stellato takes a look at a new Microsoft announcement:

Query hints can be really helpful in some scenarios, but if you do not have direct access to the code (hello third party applications), then you cannot add a query hint to the statement.  Historically, you’ve been able to use a plan guide to apply a hint, and that doesn’t require direct code access, but plan guides are not always intuitive and I find that most people are not familiar with how to use them.

Enter Query Store Hints.  With this feature, you can now add a hint to a specific statement, even if you don’t have access to the code base.  

Read on to see what it does and how you can use it.

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Color and Emotion

Published 2021-06-10 by Kevin Feasel

Cedric Scherer explains some of the psychology behind understanding of color in visuals:

Without any intention, the two variations of my visualization triggered different emotional reactions. While the red chart likely leads you to think “Wow, Berlin summers are quite hot,” the blue version may push you to think of summers as rainy and rather cold.

In general, we should have in mind that different details might spark different emotions and expectations in our viewers. Some of these details will make it easier for them to understand the chart in the manner the designer intended. 

Having experienced (parts of) a Berlin summer, let me confirm that they are not hot when compared to the midwestern or southeastern US.

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Caching in R

Published 2021-06-10 by Kevin Feasel

Bernardo Lares takes us through the lares library’s caching functionality:

If you’ve never heard of cache (/kaSH/) before, Google it and you’ll quickly find that it is “a collection of items of the same type stored in a hidden or inaccessible place”. Basically, you have “something” stored “somewhere” so you can fetch it “sometime” later. If it sounds basic, it (can be) is! This simple technic can come quite handy when you are coding functions that take some time to gather and/or process the data you’re working with. In other words, think of those processes that take some time to run and there’s really no need to re-run it “every time” because the outcome will be exactly the same. Also, you are unnecessarily spending time, computer power, and real energy when you re-process cache-able stuff.

Today I’ll show you how I use cache in R to accelerate results, avoid re-processing, and improve UX for my users using the lareslares library. Let’s see a couple of functions that actually leverage cache usage and how can you start using them.

Read on for a walkthrough of the process.

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Setting up a Full-Text Index in SQL Server

Published 2021-06-10 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones walks us through setup for a new full-text index in SQL Server:

A full text index allows you to search a little more freely than standard T-SQL with a LIKE or wildcards. It’s useful for going through large amounts of text, mainly hundreds or thousands of words.

To get started, you need to know a few things. First, this system in modern SQL Server (2008+) is set up on all instances. You don’t enabled FTS like you would for In-Memory OLTP tables or FILESTREAM.

Next, you need a catalog for the FTS indexes, which is a logical container.

Next, a table with data.

Finally, you create the index. In this post, I’ll look at SSMS and the GUI. In another one, I’ll look at the T-SQL itself.

With all that in mind, click through to read Steve’s post and set up your own full-text search process.

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Maximizing Availability Group Performance

Published 2021-06-10 by Kevin Feasel

Jonathan Kehayias has a few tips for improving performance of your Availability Groups:

Since Microsoft first introduced the Always On Availability Groups (AGs) feature in SQL Server 2012, there’s been a lot of interest in using AGs for both high availability and disaster recovery (HADR), as well as for offloading read-only workloads. The combination of the best features for failover clustering, the simplicity of data movement and synchronization from database mirroring, and the ability to offload read-only workloads to secondaries has given businesses a compelling reason to upgrade to leverage AGs.

But, as the saying goes, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and there are several performance implications and considerations you must be aware of to have a successful deployment using AGs. This blog post will explore some of the considerations and look at how to plan, architect, and implement an AG with minimal latency and performance impact on the production workload.

Click through for those tips.

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