A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Matt Allington throws one in for free:
The May 2022 version of Power BI Desktop includes a very interesting and useful feature – Field Parameters. Today I will show you how to use this new feature illustrating with 3 (no, wait, 4) use cases – Chart Elements, Chart Axis, Table Contents and Permanent Ad hoc Hierarchies.
Read on to see how to use this preview feature in Power BI.
Comments closedDavid Klee loops us in on a tricky-to-catch problem:
We’ve been tracking a weird state with SQL Server virtual machines on VMware and possible warnings on database corruption while VM backups are running, largely centered around (but not isolated to) the tempdb database.
TLDR: We’ve now got a VMware KB article on this situation that you and your VM admins should read if you hit the condition and fall into the specifics listed below. Reference VMware KB 88201 for more details.
Read on for David’s thoughts and what to do if you hit this problem.
2 CommentsCraig Porteous explains the benefit (and pain) behind resource locks in Azure:
In theory, these are perfect for preventing accidental (or deliberate) deletion of resources in Azure. They don’t prevent the deletion of data though, only operating at the “control plane” of a resource. That still sounds great though. Turn them on everywhere! That’s another layer of security in your cloud data platform. Right?
Yeah, here’s where the pain comes in. I tried using resource group locks but there are some resources which use delete capabilities, such as Azure Media Service. A delete lock means no ability to delete uploaded videos.
Comments closedChad Callihan tempts Betteridge’s Law of Headlines:
When you’re specifying WITH CHECKSUM as you’re backing up databases, SQL Server will use checksums to help catch any inconsistencies with pages. This seems like a setting that you should always use and would expect to be a default setting. So why doesn’t SQL Server include it by default?
Using the principle that a backup isn’t valid until it’s verified, CHECKSUM acts as a useful but not sufficient check.
Comments closedThe Hadoop in Real World team wants to dig deeper:
Let’s say you have a Hive table and the Hive table is pointing at a location or directory which has several sub directories and each subdirectories has files underneath it.
When you query the table however, Hive is only reading the files at the top level folder and ignoring all the files under the subdirectories.
Click through for the solution.
Comments closedOver the last decade I’ve helped hundreds of product teams ship ML-based products, inside and outside of Google, and one of the most frequent questions I got was “How do I protect my models?”. This usually came from executives, and digging deeper it became clear they were most worried about competitors gaining an advantage from what we released. This worry is completely understandable, because modern machine learning has become essential for many applications so quickly that best practices haven’t had time to settle and spread. The answers are complex and depend to some extent on your exact threat models, but if you want a summary of the advice I usually give it boils down to:
– Treat your training data like you do your traditional source code.
-Treat your model files like compiled executables.
Read on to see why Pete came to this as the appropriate answer, as well as what I have to consider a sly mention of duck boat tours.
Comments closedPatrick Gruenauer wants to monitor login activities:
Domain-Controllers monitor successful logon attempts by default. All events of all login attempts are logged in the Event Viewer. In this article I will cover how to monitor all logon events with PowerShell. Let’s dive in.
Check out Patrick’s solution and also the solution that Olivier has put together in the comments.
Comments closedGavita Regunath shows off a capability in Azure Synapse Analytics:
We will build a machine learning solution to predict churn using Azure Synapse Analytics and Azure Machine Learning.
Azure Synapse Analytics is Microsoft’s limitless analytics platform that combines enterprise data warehousing and big data analytics. In simple terms, it is a one-stop-shop that allows you to ingest, prepare, and manage data that can then be used for machine learning and business intelligence, all from a single place. It provides a unified platform and encourages collaboration between data and machine learning professionals.
This article will show you how to build an end-to-end solution to train a machine learning model from Azure Synapse analytics using AutoML functionality within Azure Machine Learning. Using the T-SQL Predict statement, we can then use the trained machine model to make predictions against the churn dataset stored in the SQL Pool table. One of the key benefits of working from within Azure Synapse is that all the necessary steps required to train and make predictions with the trained model can be done from a single platform, Azure Synapse.
Click through for the three-step process and a demonstration.
Comments closedKristyna Hughes makes use of the Tabular Object Model:
Power BI hierarchies are a powerful and easy way to enable end users to dig deeper into their visuals and data. While hierarchies can be a useful resource for self-serve analytics, maintaining hierarchies can be a pain as new levels get added or removed. Thankfully, if you have Power BI premium you can use the XMLA endpoint to add code into existing .NET applications to dynamically add or remove levels from hierarchies as they are created/removed in your application.
Unfortunately, while we can manipulate, add, and delete hierarchies and their levels, visuals already containing the hierarchy will not be automatically adjusted with any new levels/ordinals.
In spite of that limitation, click through to check out what you can do.
Comments closedMelissa Coates takes us through tenant settings management in the Power BI Service:
The tenant settings in the admin portal of the Power BI Service are incredibly important. The tenant settings include a wide-ranging number of things that significantly affect the user experience. It’s really important to manage the tenant settings effectively.In this post I’m going to talk about the process you should go through for reviewing and specifying your tenant settings.
The following is a high-level overview of what’s involved:
Read on for a helpful image as well as a flow of what to think about before you act.
Comments closed