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Day: August 27, 2021

Estimating the Likelihood of an Underdog Winning at Soccer

Published 2021-08-27 by Kevin Feasel

Holger von Jouanne-Diedrich lays out the math for us:

The Bundesliga is Germany’s primary football league. It is one of the most important football leagues in the world, broadcast on television in over 200 countries.

If you want to get your hands on a tool to forecast the result of any game (and perform some more statistical analyses), read on!

What I would like is a tool which has SC Freiburg utterly dominating Bayern. Said tool may be more mythological than scientific (or at least a copy of Football Manager and a little bit of save scumming…), but I’ll take it.

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Security Breach in Cosmos DB: ChaosDB

Published 2021-08-27 by Kevin Feasel

Nir Ohfeld and Sagi Tzadik discovered a flaw in Azure Cosmos DB:

Nearly everything we do online these days runs through applications and databases in the cloud. While leaky storage buckets get a lot of attention, database exposure is the bigger risk for most companies because each one can contain millions or even billions of sensitive records. Every CISO’s nightmare is someone getting their access keys and exfiltrating gigabytes of data in one fell swoop.

So you can imagine our surprise when we were able to gain complete unrestricted access to the accounts and databases of several thousand Microsoft Azure customers, including many Fortune 500 companies. Wiz’s security research team (that’s us) constantly looks for new attack surfaces in the cloud, and two weeks ago we discovered an unprecedented breach that affects Azure’s flagship database service, Cosmos DB.

Read on for details about the attack. Microsoft has already mitigated the issue by disabling the functionality necessary to pull off the attack. H/T Ben Stegink.

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Multi-Cloud Pros and Cons

Published 2021-08-27 by Kevin Feasel

James Serra lays out some of the benefits and drawbacks of using multiple cloud providers:

A discussion I have seen many companies have is if they should be single-cloud (using only one cloud company) or multi-cloud (using more than one cloud company). The three major Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) that companies use for nearly all use cases are Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Without spoiling it too much, James is not really sold on the idea.

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When in Doubt, Stop Counting

Published 2021-08-27 by Kevin Feasel

Chad Callihan looks at the SET NOCOUNT ON option:

You may have a stored procedure that completes in an acceptable amount of time for the dozen or so times a day it gets called. Maybe it returns results in a few seconds and that makes the users calling it happy enough that you can move onto more pressing matters. But what about a stored procedure being called millions of times a day? The definition of acceptable can be drastically different when you consider the speed and traffic that type of stored procedure produces. When every millisecond matters, it’s worth checking to see what your setting is for SET NOCOUNT.

Click through for a demo and what you can realistically expect from SET NOCOUNT ON. This works best with big loops, and incidentally, one pattern I like to use is to combine SET NOCOUNT ON with an occasional RAISERROR('%i iterations run...', 10, 1, @loopvar) WITH NOWAIT. That way, you can still see progress on the screen, but instead of printing results every single run, you might see one every 100 runs.

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Paginated Reports in Power BI

Published 2021-08-27 by Kevin Feasel

Elayne Jones dives into paginated reports in Power BI:

Paginated Reports for Power BI offer pixel-perfect control over the format of each element of a report. They allow users to fine-tune each field of the report, such as text size, colors, spacing, and print layout, in a more precise way than using regular visuals in Power BI Desktop. Users can access Paginated Reports directly from workspaces in Power BI Service. Additionally, users can embed Paginated Reports directly onto a Power BI report page with the new visual option. This article will explain how to create a Paginated Report and how to configure the new Paginated Reports visual in Power BI Desktop. Please note that Paginated Reports require a Premium subscription. This tutorial is based on a fictional Sales Report.

If you’re familiar with SQL Server Reporting Services, you’ll find Power BI paginated reports simultaneously comfortable and confining—it’s much the same functionality as SSRS, but doesn’t feel as complete.

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