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Day: February 15, 2023

Making Star Maps in R

Published 2023-02-15 by Kevin Feasel

Benjamin Smith builds a map:

Continuing my explorations in developing custom map art, I decided to take a detour from developing the mapBliss package to explore another type of map which is very popular in the map-art space- star and constellation maps! This initially started out as an issue opened on the mapBliss Github. However, I quickly realized the framework required for making star maps is completely different from making regular maps for custom fight paths and road trips.

Read on to learn more about the problem and what libraries are available to help in R.

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Blank Rows and Limited Relationships in DAX

Published 2023-02-15 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari cover the blank row:

We dedicated a previous article to the blank row in DAX. In that article, the goal was to explain the differences between VALUES and DISTINCT. This article here focuses on how important it is to generate the blank row to guarantee that totals are always correct.

The blank row is created for regular relationships that are invalid – that is, when there is at least one row on the many-side that does not have a matching row on the one-side of the regular relationship. The same does not happen for limited relationships, which do not generate a blank row in similar conditions. Therefore, if a model contains a limited invalid relationship, developers must pay extra attention to how they create reports to avoid obtaining inaccurate results.

Read on for an example of what they mean.

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Working with Power BI Paginated Report Subscriptions

Published 2023-02-15 by Kevin Feasel

Olivier Van Steenland performs a conversion:

As a first step, I tried to “migrate” an example report from SQL Server Reporting Services to Power BI. In a previous blog post, I described the steps required to migrate successfully. You can find that blog post using the following link: Converting SSRS Reports to Power BI Paginated Reports.

In this blog post, I will look at the subscription functionality for Paginated Reports.

Read on for the process, as well as one limitation (and workaround).

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Data Updates in Azure Data Explorer

Published 2023-02-15 by Kevin Feasel

Hiram Fleitas updates the data:

I recently ran into a Kustomer that migrated from TSI to ADX (Azure Data Explorer). They were really excited about using Kusto Trender but one item they couldn’t wrap their head around was how to update their hierarchy table(s) in ADX. i.e.  

- Contoso WindFarm Hierarchy (Levels: Plant > Unit > System > Name)
-- Plant
--- Unit
---- System
----- Name

As a big data platform ADX is an append-only data store, so we don’t have the options to do updates, right? Well, that’s not completely true. We absolutely don’t support updates, but we do have a couple options to simulate updates.

Read on to see what options are available to you.

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Degree of Parallelism Feedback

Published 2023-02-15 by Kevin Feasel

Deborah Melkin looks at a nice feature in SQL Server 2022:

A couple of months ago, I wrote about my initial thoughts to SQL Server 2022. I think a lot of what I wrote still holds true. It feels like it’s building on the functionality from previous versions, especially when it comes to Intelligent Query Processing and its feedback capabilities.

The feature I’m most curious to find out more about is the Degree of Parallelism Feedback. (You can read more about it here.) One of the main reasons for this is I know very little about the settings.

Read on for Deb’s thoughts and a situation where it would have helped.

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Praise for Purvi’s List

Published 2023-02-15 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Yun is a fan:

By sheer coincidence, I had the privilege of being invited to a private SQL Server 2022 workshop taught by Bob Ward last week. And through my job, I also had the privilege of doing some testing work around QAT backups and S3 Data Virtualization during the private preview phase last summer. So while I had exposure and access to SQL Server 2022 for much longer than others, there were many things that Microsoft loaded into the 2022 release that I barely skimmed over or knew were even there.

Towards the end of the workshop, Bob presented a slide called Purvi’s List. Purvi Shah is an engineer on the SQL performance team and as Bob said, “spends her time finding ways to make SQL Server and Azure SQL faster.”

Read on to learn what had Andy so excited.

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