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Day: April 25, 2022

Debugging a Production Failure

Roel Hogervorst diagnoses trouble:

When you are in panic mode you focus on what is right in front of you and make suboptimal decisions. Here is some I have made.

Read on for a couple stories as well as a practical implementation of debugging as an OODA loop. Something that Sean McCown mentioned before has always stuck with me: it’s amazing just how few people know how to troubleshoot issues. Our inclination seems to be one of two things: adduce a conclusion from the first piece of evidence (usually just a flimsy error message) or immediately give up.

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PyODBC vs C# ODBC Performance Differences

Jose Manuel Jurado Diaz explains a performance difference:

A customer asked today, why using ODBC Driver 17 for SQL Server in Python with PYODBC we have a slightly difference in terms of time taken if we compare with C# System.Data.Odbc. Following, I would like to share my lesson learned about it.

Read on for Jose’s explanation. My short version is, it seems particularly important when using the Python ODBC driver to write the exact query you want rather than a SELECT * or query which returns rows/columns you don’t need.

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Microsoft.Build.Sql for Database Projects

Drew Skwiers-Koballa announces a new way of handling database projects:

Declarative development creates an environment where developers can focus on creating database objects while relying on the support of tooling locally and and in deployment pipelines to manage applying the differential changes calculated on the current state of the target database. Developers create objects such as tables or stored procedures by writing their definition with CREATE statements in scripts that live in source control just as if it is source code for any component of an application. Existing functionality for SQL projects in Visual Studio, Azure Data Studio, and VS Code provides developers with declarative development capabilities, however the existing SQL project file format has a few limitations.  With Microsoft.Build.Sql and SDK-style SQL projects, we look forward to unlocking new scenarios for your development practices.

It does sound interesting.

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Rounding Differences in Power BI

Marco Russo explains the importance of data types for rounding in Power BI:

In one of the last classrooms I delivered, students were wondering why the results of their formulas were close but not identical to the proposed solution. We quickly identified the problem being an issue of data type conversion already covered in Understanding numeric data type conversions in DAX. However, the issue is interesting as a simpler example to show that different DAX calculations can produce different results because of a different way of rounding numbers!

Read on for Marco’s example.

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Keeping Secrets in Azure DevOps

Kevin Chant has a secret:

In this post I want to cover how you can keep your Azure Synapse secrets secret in Azure DevOps. Because you need to do this if you are working with production deployments.

With this in mind, I want to raise more awareness about it and make sure others avoid putting secrets directly in their pipelines like in the below example.

Read on to understand what options are available to you. My preference involves Key Vault references but there are alternatives available.

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