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Month: March 2023

Tracking Home Heating Oil Prices in R

Published 2023-03-09 by Kevin Feasel

Steven Sanderson charts some prices:

If you live in New York and rely on heating oil to keep your home warm during the colder months, you know how important it is to keep track of heating oil prices. Fortunately, with a bit of R code, you can easily access the latest heating oil prices in New York.

The code uses the {dplyr} package to clean and manipulate the data, as well as the {timetk} package to plot the time series.

Read on for an overview of what the code does, followed by the code itself and a time series plot at the end.

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Tracking Network Errors with WASP

Published 2023-03-09 by Kevin Feasel

Thoe Roe gives us an introduction to Network Error Logging:

Heads up! We’re about to launch WASP, a Web Application Security Platform. The aim of WASP is to help you manage (well, you guessed it) the security of you application using Content Security Policy and Network Error Logging. We’ll be chatting about it more in a full blog post nearer the time.

Read on to learn about what Network Error Logging is, how you can activate it for a website, and what information you get back as a result.

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Enabling Powershell’s Strict Mode

Published 2023-03-09 by Kevin Feasel

Patrick Gruenauer grabs the ruler:

PowerShell is very forgiving of errors. For example, if you call something that does not exist, then no error message is displayed. In this short article I want to show you how to make PowerShell a bit more strict with the strict mode.

Consider you are calling a variable that doesn’t exist. PowerShell will display no errors.

Granted, that laxity isn’t On Error Resume Next level bad, but Patrick shows us a way to toughen up the interpreter’s responses.

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Checking Percentage of Physical Memory SQL Server is Using

Published 2023-03-09 by Kevin Feasel

Mike Hays does the math:

Note: Unlike other queries I have share here at TheSQLReport, I am the author of this one.   Sharing because I could not find it in my Google Searches.  Tested this back to version SQL Server 2012.   Also please remember that physical_memory_in_use_kb may be a constantly changing number depending on how SQL Server  is configured & the activity of the operating system.

Click through for the query and an example of it in action.

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A Primer on Power BI Apps

Published 2023-03-09 by Kevin Feasel

Melissa Coates offers up an explanation:

If you hear the question: “What’s a Power BI app?” you might think there’s a straightforward answer. However, the term ‘app’ is pretty overloaded term in the world of Power BI.

One time I was presenting a session and talking about Power BI apps vs. workspaces – right in the middle, someone in the audience starts asking me a Power Apps question because they thought I was talking about that (which is a VERY different thing). That was a big reminder to not to assume that we all have the same understanding of terms.

Read on to learn what a Power BI app is, as well as why it’s a rather useful concept.

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Data Mesh Q&A Round 2

Published 2023-03-08 by Kevin Feasel

Jean-Georges Perrin didn’t hear no bell:

How does the Data Mesh concept differ from similar efforts in the past, like EDM (Enterprise Data Model) or MDM (Master Data Model)?
Data Mesh will help us achieve those goals more quickly as those EDM and MDM projects are usually slow, and the ROI starts showing only after deployment. The product approach of Data Mesh for its data products enables a product lifecycle mentality that will help get from a current state to an (end?) state like EDM through versioning. It also allows EDM to be versioned more efficiently and reduces time to market.

Read on for a series of questions and answers around the topic of data mesh architecture.

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Deploying a Database via Azure DevOps Pipeline

Published 2023-03-08 by Kevin Feasel

Olivier Van Steenlandt deploys a database:

After we successfully introduced a database development strategy in my previous blog post series, Getting Started With Database Projects & Azure DevOps, we can look at how to introduce a database deployment automation strategy using Database Projects and Azure DevOps Pipelines.

As a starter, we will first be implementing a build automation process and in future blog posts, we will go through the different ways of deployment to different environments. On top of that, we will also discuss the differences between SQL Server and AzureSQL database deployments.

Read on for the full story.

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Lateral Joins in Snowflake

Published 2023-03-08 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Wilkie makes a lateral move:

In Snowflake, you can do something akin to an APPLY, but not. That, my friends, is a LATERAL join. According to Snowflake documentation, this type of join “allows an inline view to reference columns from the table expression that precedes the inline view.”

Yes, that’s gibberish. Let’s show what you’re doing.

I’m such an APPLY apologist that the description made sense to me.

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February 2023 Updates for Azure Synapse Analytics

Published 2023-03-08 by Kevin Feasel

Ryan Majidimehr has a new round-up for us:

Azure Synapse Runtime for Apache Spark 3.3 has been in Public Preview since November 2022. We are excited to announce that after notable improvements in performance and stability, Azure Synapse Runtime for Apache Spark 3.3 now becomes Generally Available and ready for production workloads.   

The essential changes include features that come from upgrading Apache Spark to version 3.3.1, Delta Lake to version 2.2.0, and Python to 3.10. 

This month’s set of changes isn’t quite as big as some prior months, though there are a couple items of great importance to make up for it.

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