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Day: May 16, 2023

Dates and Times in R

Published 2023-05-16 by Kevin Feasel

Steven Sanderson talks dates and times. First up is an overview of how built-in date functionality works in R:

In this post, we will cover the basics of handling dates and times in R using the as.Date, as.POSIXct, and as.POSIXlt functions. We will use the example code below to explain each line in simple terms. Let’s get started!

The second post covers the Date type, as well as date plus time:

In the first part of our code, we use the as.Date() function to find the next Mother’s Day. Since we don’t need to consider specific times, we can simply use the Date class, which simplifies the process. We create a vector with two elements: startMothersDay and endMothersDay, both set to “2024-05-14”. This represents the range of Mother’s Day for the year 2024. Finally, we store the result in the variable NextMothersDay and print it to the console. Voilà! We have the next Mother’s Day date.

Note that this isn’t a post about date calculation, such as finding the Nth Sunday in the month of May

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Elapsed Timers in Powershell

Published 2023-05-16 by Kevin Feasel

Robert Cain keeps track of time:

I’m still working on my documentation for my ArcaneBooks project, but wanted to have something for you to read this week, so decided to show you how to create an elapsed timer in PowerShell.

It can be helpful to determine how long a process runs in PowerShell. You can use it to determine what parts of code may need to be optimized, or gather metrics around your functions.

This is the same stopwatch operation which is available in .NET generally, so if you’re using C# or F#, it’s the same basic process.

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Instant File Initialization for Log Files in SQL Server 2022

Published 2023-05-16 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Bertrand tries something new:

When I first saw a bullet item stating SQL Server 2022 would support instant file initialization for log file growth, I was excited. When I later learned it only applies to automatic growths, and only those of 64 MB or less, I was a little less excited. With those limitations, I was skeptical this enhancement could supplant my long-standing practice of using 1 GB autogrowth for log files – at least ever since SSDs and other modern storage became more commonplace.

But after playing with it, I’m a believer.

I happened to be chatting with Thomas Grohser as he presented for our user group last week, and he also mentioned how good this feature is, as well as how VLF rules changed a bit so you don’t get as heavily penalized by growing in 64MB increments. Aaron does some testing to give us an idea of how much of a benefit you might achieve in making this change.

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TDE and Database Backups

Published 2023-05-16 by Kevin Feasel

Matthew McGiffen shares some advice:

Database backups continue to work without change when you have TDE enabled. The only difference is that the backups contain encrypted data that cannot be read without the certificate and private key. There are a couple of points that are worth discussing though.

Click through for several notes, including a warning to those still on SQL Server 2016 and woefully under-patched.

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Testing a Power BI Theme on Existing Reports

Published 2023-05-16 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Svensen does a wardrobe upgrade:

But I want to see how my new theme might look on some old report where I might have used another theme or perhaps some reports other users have created where they have done some individual formatting instead of using the theme.

And did you know – we can do it and see the result for existing report in your workspaces – and we can directly modify the theme and see if we should change a color or a font size or a….

Read on for the process. This is a clever use of the embedding service, that’s for sure.

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Rounded Corners in Power BI Error Bars

Published 2023-05-16 by Kevin Feasel

Mara Pereira trims off the edges:

If you’ve been following my posts, you probably know by now that one of the things that really annoys me in Power BI is not being able to build bar charts with rounded corners, unless you use a custom visual.

However, recently I found out about a trick to make this happen without needing to use custom visuals (special shout out to Federico Pastor who shared this trick with me!).

Read on to see how you can do this. It’s definitely not ideal, but if you absolutely need rounded corners for your bar chart, you can get them this way.

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