February 2023 – Page 10

Referencing an Intermediate Step in Power Query

Published 2023-02-08 by Kevin Feasel

Imke Feldmann has a clever solution to a problem:

When you reference another query in Power Query you will automatically get the results of the final step. But what if you want to reference a step that sits within that referenced query?

One solution would be to split up that query into 2 and reference the final result of the splitted query. But that could result in additional query time, as the data might be pulled from the source twice (once for each query).

Read on for a better way to do it.

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Diagnosing VSCode + R Integration Problems

Published 2023-02-07 by Kevin Feasel

John MacKintosh troubleshoots an issue:

I recently updated my R installation, and then realised that I’d broken my VSCode/ R set up in the process – I could not launch an R terminal either directly or via radian.

I have a repo where I’ve collated various blog posts relating to setting up VSCode for R, but that didn’t solve all my problems.

I did get it resolved eventually, and here’s how.

Read on for that resolution. H/T R-Bloggers.

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Cumulative Measurement Functions in R

Published 2023-02-07 by Kevin Feasel

Steven P. Sanderson provides an overview of an R package:

If you’re looking for an easy-to-use package to calculate cumulative statistics in R, you may want to check out the TidyDensity package. This package offers several functions to calculate cumulative measurements, including mean, median, standard deviation, variance, skewness, kurtosis, harmonic mean, and geometric mean.

Click through for a quick description of each function, as well as examples of each. H/T R-Bloggers.

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Summations in KQL

Published 2023-02-07 by Kevin Feasel

Robert Cain continues a series on KQL:

In my previous post, Fun With KQL – Max, MaxIf, Min and MinIf, we looked at the aggregation functions max and min. In this post we’ll talk about another aggregation function, sum. We’ll also look at a variant of it, sumif.

Check out the details and examples in Robert’s post.

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Working with Enumerations in Powershell

Published 2023-02-07 by Kevin Feasel

Patrick Gruenauer counts the ways:

The enum statement can be used to declare an enumeration. Microsoft describes this statement as follows:

The enum statement allows you to create a strongly typed set of labels. That enumeration can be used in the code without having to parse or check for spelling errors.

Click through for more description, as well as an example of how to create, instantiate, and operate on enumerations.

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Working with Write-Output in Powershell

Published 2023-02-07 by Kevin Feasel

Nicholas Xuan Nguyen doesn’t just echo to the screen:

The PowerShell Write-Output cmdlet writes objects to the output stream and displays the output of a command or message in the console. But you will be surprised how this tool makes the output more meaningful and valuable.

Read on to see what you can do with the cmdlet and why it’s better than Write-Host.

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Unsupported Characters in Azure SQL DB Database Names

Published 2023-02-07 by Kevin Feasel

Nithya Bondalapati notes a discrepancy:

ARM (Azure Resource Manager) API does not support specific T-SQL resource naming formats and that’s why when Databases are created using T-SQL/SSMS, unsupported characters could get allowed into the names.
Azure Portal UI does not have this issue, because when you use Portal UI for creating a Database, the creation goes through ARM, and hence when unsupported characters are entered in the Name field, it immediately throws error, as shown in the below image.

None of the restrictions or onerous, but Nithya explains what actions fail or don’t quite work right if you have a database with special characters or ending in a period or space.

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Plan Explorer Integration in SSMS 19

Published 2023-02-07 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Yun does us a solid:

If you’re like me, Plan Explorer has always been a must-have tool in your performance tuning arsenal. And one of the things that made it so useful was a simple little SSMS Integration that would allow you to right click on an Execution Plan and see “View with […] Plan Explorer.”

Unfortunately, I started hearing reports of that no longer being available in SSMS v19. But I know a thing or two, so was willing to bet 30 minutes of time that I could get it back.

Andy won that bet, so shower him with accolades.

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When to Use OPTIMIZE_FOR_SEQUENTIAL_KEY

Published 2023-02-07 by Kevin Feasel

Chad Callihan explains a feature:

If you’re running into problems caused by concurrent inserts and you’re on SQL Server 2019 or above, it’s worth testing out OPTIMIZE_FOR_SEQUENTIAL_KEY. This may alleviate those issues by handling inserts a little bit differently to reduce contention. OPTIMIZE_FOR_SEQUENTIAL_KEY will “control the rate at which new threads are allowed to request the latch, and favor threads that are likely to keep the throughput high.”

Read on to see how you can enable it but also when it makes sense to enable it.

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Working with Kafka using .NET 6

Published 2023-02-06 by Kevin Feasel

Jaydeep Patil adds a NuGet package:

We will go over Apache Kafka basics, installation, and operation, as well as a step-by-step implementation using a .NET Core 6 web application.

Click through for a demo-heavy walkthrough. And if you’re interested in ksqldb or Kafka Streams, also check out Tomas Fabian’s library. Both are under active development and each forms a piece of the whole Kafka solution.

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Month: February 2023