A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Tibor Karaszi thinks about plan ages:
So what if your oldest plan is 3 only days old? Or 3 hours? Or 3 minutes?
Finding your most expensive queries based on such short “tail” is pretty meaningless and you end up wasting time tuning a set of queries that in the end wasn’t the most important ones, after all.
This isn’t necessarily something we always think about but Tibor makes a great point here.
Comments closedShabnam Watson shares some questions and answers:
Are Hybrid Tables tied to a developer license type?
No. Incremental Refresh and Hybrid tables are tied to workspace (dataset) type. They are set up in Power BI Desktop. A developer must have Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license to publish the report to the service. See the next two paragraphs for workspace (dataset) limitations.
Click through for the FAQs and answers.
Comments closedErik Darling plugs in the variables:
I’m a really big fan of using operator properties for a lot of things, at least visually. Where things sort of fall down for that is copying and pasting things out.
For some stuff, you still need to head down to the XML.
Click through to see how. Also read the comments for more information.
Comments closedJoe Pollock has to turn the clocks forward:
At the start of Daylight Saving Time (DST), which is this weekend in the UK, the clocks will move forward by one hour at 1am. Apart from the fact that we all lose an hour of our night’s sleep, what effect will this have on your scheduled jobs in SQL Server?
As we saw in my last blog post, we know that the SQL Server engine always carries on regardless of when the clocks change, it knows that this has happened, but nothing unusual occurs in the engine itself. However, SQL Server Agent, which runs scheduled tasks, is not the same, as this directly impacts how it works.
Read on to see what can happen. Also, this can be relevant when you have unique key constraints on datetime values.
Comments closedImke Feldmann provides some answers:
Have you ever come across the case where you open your dataflow and find 2 additional steps at the end of your query? Why are Power Platform Dataflows adding steps automatically at the end?
It will be a step that replaces errors on certain columns followed by a step that transforms these columns into text.
Read on to understand why.
Comments closedElayne Jones gives us an introduction to Power Apps:
The starting point for working with Power Apps is an environment. Environments house your business’ apps, data, chatbots, and flows. By building apps in a single environment, users can isolate content aimed at a specific use case or target their content towards a specific team or department. A common practice is to build separate environments for Development, Test, and Production stages. Power Apps Environments can even connect to GitHub, streamlining source control within an organization.
An Azure Active Directory tenant is required to create an environment, and only users within that tenant can access the content within the environment. After the environment is created, users deploy data sources to that environment. Thereafter, the content created can only connect to the data sources within the same environment. You can create a database in each environment, but there can only be one database in each environment.
Read on for a lot more.
Comments closedBefore I share some considerations for presenting data internationally, I want to acknowledge that I am not an expert on different cultures and audiences. In this post, I simply share some of my experiences with the hope that others will provide additional commentary for increased learning. If you have related thoughts, please share in the comments.
Let’s consider five observations of regional differences I’ve encountered while communicating data.
Read on for those observations.
Comments closedAdam Aspin looks at paginated reports:
To conclude this short set of articles on using Power BI datasets as the source of data for paginated reports, I want to outline a few classic solutions to common challenges in paginated report development with DAX.
Clearly, I cannot recount every paginated report challenge that I have ever met (or heard of) when creating reports from a Power BI dataset. However, as a report developer, it helps to be aware of some of the standard solutions to the challenges that many users encounter.
This article uses the accompanying sample data (CarsDataWarehouse.pbix) as the basis for the DAX that you will use to solve these problems.
Click through for several tips, as well as some tricks.
Comments closedTeo Lachev has some things for us to consider:
Over the past few years, the BI industry has come up with new file formats, such as Parquet, ORC, and Avro, which are widely used today. To facilitate its vision for cross-industry data integration, Microsoft introduced a few years ago the Common Data Model (CDM) and CDM Folders. Power BI dataflows output CSV files to CDM folders and each table is saved in its own folder. You can bring your own data lake to directly access these files. If do so, you’ll find the following folder structure:
Although accessing the dataflow files might open all sorts of data integration scenarios, here are some things to watch for concerning the dataflow output:
Read on for five things.
Comments closedSean Gallardy files events to the circular file:
Getting back on track instead of listening to me complain, many DBA’s and internal security folks like writing to the Windows Security Event Log because the word security is in the name and they have some tool like Splunk that automatically collects these details. I like automation, so that’s a nice win. However, you may be running into SQL Server error 33204 which is a failure to write an audit event to the security event log.
Read on to find one reason why this might happen.
Comments closed