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Day: September 29, 2022

Using the Confluent Terraform Provider

Published 2022-09-29 by Kevin Feasel

Spencer Shumway has a tutorial:

As part of our recent Q3 Launch for Confluent Cloud we announced the general availability of the Confluent Terraform Provider. HashiCorp Terraform is an Infrastructure as Code tool that lets you define both cloud and on-prem resources in human-readable configuration files that you can version, reuse, and share, using standardized resource management tooling, pipelines, and processes.

Click through for a getting started video as well as the tutorial.

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Azure Synapse Analytics September 2022 Update

Published 2022-09-29 by Kevin Feasel

Ryan Majidimehr has an update for us:

Serverless SQL pool relies on statistics to generate an optimal query execution plan and resource allocation. Previously, you had to manually create statistics for your CSV datasets when querying with OPENROWSET to get optimal performance due to the lack of CSV auto-statistics feature. With this improvement, serverless SQL pool will automatically create statistics for CSV datasets when needed to ensure an optimal query execution plan is generated. This feature is currently enabled for OPENROWSET only. 

How much performance improvement CSV statistics will bring depends on query complexity and the amount of data processed.

Click through for the full list of updates.

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Non-Updating Updates

Published 2022-09-29 by Kevin Feasel

Michael J. Swart has an update for us:

According to Microsoft’s documentation, an UPDATE statement “changes existing data in a table or view”. But what if the values don’t actually change? What if affected rows are “updated” with the original values? Some call these updates non-updating. This leads to a philosophical question: “If an UPDATE statement doesn’t change any column to a different value, has the row been updated?”

I answer yes to that question. I consider all affected rows as “updated” regardless of whether the values are different. I think of the UPDATE statement as more of an OVERWRITE statement. I also think of “affected rows” rather than “changed rows”. In most cases SQL Server thinks along the same lines.

I list some features and areas of SQL Server and whether non-updating updates are treated the same or differently than other updates:

Click through for multiple scenarios and to see whether SQL Server is smart enough to ignore non-updating records in an UPDATE statement.

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Using DaxDebugOutput when testing EvaluateAndLog()

Published 2022-09-29 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers hooks us up:

I have seen a few great blog posts with regards to the new DAX function EvaluateAndLog which can be used to show/debug what happens with DAX Measures.

When I tried this out myself one of the challenges I had was where to download DaxDebugOutput, and then how to use it with Power BI Desktop.

In this blog post I will show you how I downloaded, installed, and used DaxDebugOutput application with Power BI Desktop.

Read on to see how the tool works, as well as where you can get it.

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The Power of Bookmarks in Power BI

Published 2022-09-29 by Kevin Feasel

Mara Pereira likes bookmarks:

Yes, I know some of you are not a fan of this incredible feature, but hopefully I can change your mind with this blog post.

I feel that for you to like bookmarks, you really need to know all the ins and outs of it, otherwise it can be quite overwhelming, specially if you have to create loads of bookmarks in the same report.

Read on for more information about how you can take best advantage of bookmarks in Power BI. My main issue with them is that it’s difficult to keep bookmarks up to date, especially as you get more complicated combinations of actions (like hiding and displaying certain sets of visuals). But that is for the next post, apparently.

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Triggering Dumps for Specific Errors and States

Published 2022-09-29 by Kevin Feasel

Bob Dorr has a plan:

I had an inquiry about dbcc dumptrigger today and realized that state filtering was added to dbcc dumptrigger but not well known.

You can collect a process dump (SQL Dumper) when a specific error occurs using XEvent (error_reported/ex_raise2 events with dump capture action) or dbcc dumptrigger.

The common use of dbcc dumptrigger is: dbcc dumptrigger(‘set’, 208) to produce a dump when error 208 is encountered.

This is pretty useful, especially if you’re troubleshooting a bug in the database engine.

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