A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Andy Levy just wants to get things done:
We need to have these meetings. They’re where consensus is reached on cross-team projects and decisions are made about timelines. They’re where we communicate to people outside our teams what’s happening. And sometimes, they’re critical for transferring knowledge to others. These are all part of the job. For better or worse, they are a nontrivial portion of The Work.
Read on for some of Andy’s tips around scheduling meetings.
Comments closedNicky van Vroenhoven asks, what’s in a name?
But I think it’s much broader than using only programming naming conventions these days.
In the context of Power BI, you can use naming conventions in (literally) all things that need a name, like gateways, workspaces, apps, etc.
Read on to understand why, as well as some thoughts on what makes sense for naming different Power BI-related objects.
Comments closedSarath Sasidharan clones an Azure Synapse Analytics dedicated SQL pool:
There are many scenarios where you want to create a new Synapse dedicated SQL pool environment based on an existing Synapse dedicated SQL pool environment. This may be required when you need to create a development or test environment based on your production environment by copying complete schemas and without copying data.
Note that this process won’t move the data itself—given that you’re starting with terabytes for an effective dedicated SQL pool, trying to create a bacpac would be an exercise in misery.
Comments closedGlenn Berry makes some recommendations:
Does making your SQL Server database backups twice as fast sound interesting? SQL Server 2022 has new options to help you improve SQL Server database backup performance. If you are on an older version of SQL Server, you still have options for Improving SQL Server Database Backup Performance.
In order to improve your database backup performance, you need to understand what is happening during a database backup and what your bottleneck(s) are.
Read on for an overview of the key considerations.
Comments closedSoheil Bakhshi calls a stored procedure:
From time to time, Excel users require to get the data from a SQL Server stored procedure. The stored procedures usually accept some input parameters and return the results. But how can we dynamically pass values to the stored procedures from cells in Excel to SQL Server?
Read on for two approaches to the problem. Like Soheil, I think the second approach is much smoother, in part because it isn’t 30-something steps long.
Comments closedMikolaj Spytek promotes an R package:
You can learn about it in this blog, but long story short, survival models (most often) predict a survival function. It tells us what is the probability of an event not happening until a given time t. The output can also be a single value (e.g., risk score) but these scores are always some aggregates of the survival function and this naturally leads to a loss of information included in the prediction.
The complexity of the output of survival models means that standard explanation methods cannot be applied directly.
Because of this, we (I and the team: Mateusz Krzyziński, Hubert Baniecki, and Przemyslaw Biecek) developed an R package — survex, which provides explanations for survival models. We hope this tool allows for more widespread usage of complex machine learning survival analysis models. Until now, simpler statistical models such as Cox Proportional Hazards were preferred due to their interpretability — vital in areas such as medicine, even though they were frequently outperformed by complex machine learning models.
Read on to dive into the topic. H/T R-Bloggers.
Comments closedAmy Esselman explains what bullet charts are and when they are useful:
A bullet graph, or a bullet chart, is a variation of a bar chart, typically consisting of a primary bar layered on top of a secondary stack of less-prominent bars. Bullet graphs are best used for making comparisons, such as showing progress against a target or series of thresholds. For example, an organization may want to measure the current year’s sales against a goal, while contrasting it with the performance of the prior year.
Bullet graphs leverage our familiarity with bar graphs to deliver a lot of information in a compact space. If you want to display metric performance against a goal or reference point, a bullet graph offers a nicely consolidated design.
Read on for examples and alternatives.
Comments closedMara Pereira does a bit of conditional formatting:
In my example, I created a report where you could switch the measure the charts were showing, and with that, the color of the charts and KPI cards changed to.
The first thing you need to do is create your base measures.
Click through for a step-by-step walkthrough with plenty of GIFs to provide a visual explanation.
Comments closedItzik Ben-Gan twiddles some bits:
The need to manipulate data at the bit level with bitwise operations isn’t common in T-SQL, but you might stumble into such a need in some specialized scenarios. Some implementations store a set of flags (yes/no, on/off, true/false) in a single integer or binary-typed column, where each bit represents a different flag. One example is using a bitwise representation of a set of user/role permissions. Another example is using a bitwise representation of a set of settings turned on or off in a given environment. Even SQL Server stores some flag-based data using bitwise representation.
Here’s the deal. I don’t mind that this new syntax exists, particularly because—as Itzik points out—there are areas built into SQL Server which use integers to store bit flags. In application code, however, this gets a sharp “No!” from me in any code review. If you need to decompose values in your table as a matter of course, your table is not in first normal form. Having a table not be in 1NF isn’t the end of the world but at that point, I think the onus is on the developer to defend the violation at that point.
Comments closedOlivier van Streenlandt hit a deployment problem:
A couple of weeks ago my team & I ran into an issue with SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS), due to a network split between companies, We weren’t able anymore to manage our SSAS access into our SSAS Tabular Model. Since deploying a Tabular Model using Visual Studio is also overwriting members & roles, we needed to find a valid alternative to execute our deployments. Manually at first and automated in the end.
Read on to see how they used Azure DevOps pipelines to solve the issue.
Comments closed