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Month: September 2022

Deleting Rows in Order

Published 2022-09-16 by Kevin Feasel

David Fowler understand the order of things:

This was an interesting question that I was asked yesterday and something that I’d never really thought of before. Can you delete the top x number of rows based on an ORDER BY?

Why would you want to do that? Well let’s just assume that we have a ‘people’ table and some strange bug in the application has cause the need to delete the top 10 oldest females for whatever reason (I know, it’s very contrived example and not the situation that my colleague was facing but it’ll do to illustrate the point).

Click through for one way which doesn’t work and two ways which do.

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Lack of Training on the Edge

Published 2022-09-15 by Kevin Feasel

Pete Warden explains a phenomenon:

One of the most frequent questions I get asked from people exploring machine learning beyond cloud and desktop machines is “What about training?”. If you look around at the popular frameworks and use cases of edge ML, most of them seem focused on inference. It isn’t obvious why this is the case though, so I decided to collect my notes in a post here, so I can have something to refer to when this comes up (and organize my own thoughts too!).

Pete’s reasons make sense. I think the last one is the most important.

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Declaring a Minimum R Version in Packages

Published 2022-09-15 by Kevin Feasel

Hugo Gruson and Maelle Salmon show how to set a minimum version of R itself in a package:

There have been much talk and many blog posts about R package dependencies. Yet, one special dependency is more rarely mentioned, even though all packages include it: the dependency on R itself. The same way you can specify a dependency on a package, and optionally on a specific version, you can add a dependency to a minimum R version in the DESCRIPTION file of your package. In this post we shall explain why and how.

Read on for that explanation, as well as a lot of depth on why you might choose a particular R version, popular R versions (at least by number of packages), and what some of the largest maintainers do.

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SQL Server and the Slow Registry

Published 2022-09-15 by Kevin Feasel

Michael J. Swart diagnoses issues when the Windows registry slows down operations:

I want to describe some symptoms that SQL Server may display when its Windows Registry is non-responsive or slow. From the symptoms, it’s hard to know that it’s a slow registry and so if a web search brought you here, hopefully this helps.

Read on for some of the various operations which request data from the registry, as well as thoughts from Michael on some of the effects of a slow registry. It sounds like there’s not a whole lot we can do about it and this is rare.

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Date Calculation (and Calendar Tables) in SQL Server

Published 2022-09-15 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Bertrand makes the case for calendar tables:

In a previous tip, Simplify Date Period Calculations in SQL Server, I described how to easily calculate certain dates, like the first day of a given month, quarter, or year. Another common scenario is trying to find the last weekday of the month, or the nth Monday or Wednesday. In this tip, I will show ways to simplify these calculations, both with and without a calendar table.

Click through for Aaron’s approach to the problem. I have a blunter approach in creating an expansive calendar table and using it. You do the heavy lifting one time and are good for life on that server.

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Getting User Access Lists to All Power BI Reports

Published 2022-09-15 by Kevin Feasel

Tomaz Kastrun wants to know what you can see:

This way, you will have a better view of users, and their access to data and reports (if these are containing sensible data). You can always retrieve the list of workspaces and access the list of all users with the PowerShell cmdlet Get-PowerBIWorkspace.

I have also added the Join-Object module. It can join two objects or two arrays, based on the given matching columns.

Click through for a Powershell script which does the job.

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Contained SQL Agent Jobs in SQL Server 2022

Published 2022-09-15 by Kevin Feasel

Allan Hirt looks at contained SQL Server Agent Jobs:

I previously wrote about Contained AGs in SQL Server 2022 and demonstrated how to create a contained login. In this blog post, I’m going to talk about contained SQL Server Agent jobs because just like logins, they are a bit confusing from an administative standpoint in their current pre-release implementation (this blog post was written using SQL Server 2022 RC0 using SSMS 19 Preview 3).

It sounds like there’s still a ways to go on the tooling side of things.

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Creating Multiple Audiences in a Power BI App Workspace

Published 2022-09-15 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers plays to the audience:

With the recent announcement (Announcing Public Preview of Multiple Audiences for Power BI Apps | Microsoft Power BI Blog | Microsoft Power BI) it is now possible to create multiple audiences in a single App Workspace.

What this means you can now have a single app workspace but create a view for specific users (each view is known as an Audience)

This blog post will detail how to manage multiple audiences with AAD Security Groups, where the only requirement will be to update the app when new reports get created and to which audience to make them available.

There’s also a big warning on Gilbert’s post that you will not want to miss.

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Feathr in the Linux Foundation

Published 2022-09-14 by Kevin Feasel

Hangfei Lin and Jinghui Mo make an announcement:

We’re excited to announce today that Feathr is joining LF AI & Data, the Linux Foundation’s umbrella foundation supporting open source innovation in artificial intelligence (AI) and data. Feathr is a feature store that simplifies machine learning (ML) feature serving and improves developer productivity.

“We’re excited to welcome Feathr to LF AI & Data and for it to be part of our technical project portfolio (41 projects and growing) with a community of over 17K developers,” said Dr. Ibrahim Haddad, Executive Director of LF AI & Data. “We aim to support Feathr to expand its user base, grow its community of developers, become a leader within its own category, and enable collaboration and integration opportunities with other projects. We look forward to the project’s continued growth and success as part of LF AI & Data.”

Alex Woodie has more background:

Feathr was originally developed at LinkedIn to help manage and serve features used in its machine learning applications. Instead of manually working with features as part of an individual data pipeline, Feathr automates and standardizes the interaction with the data type, which is used in both the training and inference stages of machine learning.

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Restoring Azure SQL MI Databases to SQL Server 2022

Published 2022-09-14 by Kevin Feasel

Garry Bargsley restores a backup:

My post for T-SQL Tuesday #154 is going to be a demo of the new SQL Server feature that allows you to restore an Azure SQL Managed Instance backup to a SQL Server 2022 instance. Actually, I am not sure if this is a feature or just an enhancement that allows for this behavior to work.

Current versions of SQL Server do not allow the restoration of backups taken on Azure SQL Managed Instance.  Managed Instances are considered “vNext” and runs a different version that is beyond anything on-premises could keep up with due to the frequent changes being applied to Managed Instance. There has always been a disconnect with the restorability between the two platforms, so it is good that Microsoft has found a solution to this limitation.

I’d still like to see the ability to fail from SQL MI to on-prem (or VM) SQL Server—you can go from on-prem to Azure SQL MI, though it sounds like right now, failback is a database restore.

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