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Day: May 17, 2023

Updates to SqlPackage and DacFx

Published 2023-05-17 by Kevin Feasel

Drew Skwiers-Koballa has an update for us:

As the primary command-line interface to DacFx, SqlPackage often benefits from dependency changes in DacFx, including the Microsoft.Data.SqlClient driver. In SqlPackage 162.0.52, the SqlClient driver has been updated from v5.0.1 to v5.1.0, bringing support for TLS1.3 encrypted connections to the .NET Core builds of SqlPackage and the ServerCertificate connection string setting for validation of SQL Server’s TLS/SSL certificate. 

Many of the fixes in this release were triaged out of issues submitted on the DacFx GitHub repository and are visible in the release milestone.  The full list of SqlPackage fixes from the release, including eight deployment-related fixes, are also listed in the SqlPackage release notes. To improve our ability to service and enhance SqlPackage, SqlPackage now collects usage data, including anonymous feature usage and diagnostic data. For more information, see the documentation section on Usage data collection.

Read on for the full set of changes.

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Migrating Multiple SSRS Reports to Power BI Paginated Reports

Published 2023-05-17 by Kevin Feasel

Olivier Van Steenlandt doesn’t do things one at a time:

A few weeks ago I released a blog post about migrating SSRS Reports to Power BI Paginated Reports. At that point in time, I wasn’t aware of any way to migrate multiple SSRS Reports in one go.

Meanwhile, I have done some research and experimented a bit. In this blog post, I will be going through 2 different ways to migrate multiple SSRS Reports at once to Power BI.

Click through for Olivier’s findings and how you can migrate en masse.

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SandDance in Polyglot Notebooks

Published 2023-05-17 by Kevin Feasel

Matt Eland continues a series on dotnet Polyglot Notebooks:

As I’ve been doing more and more dotnet development in notebooks with Polyglot Notebooks I’ve found myself wanting more options to create rich data visualizations inside of VS Code the same way I could use Plotly for data visualization using Python and Jupyter Notebooks.

Thankfully, Microsoft SandDance exists and fills some of that gap in terms of doing rich data visualization from dotnet code.

In this article I’ll talk more about what SandDance is, show you how you can use it inside of a Polyglot Notebook in VS Code, and show you a simple way you can use it without needing a Polyglot Notebook.

Most of my experience with SandDance was with Azure Data Studio, but it’s nice to see this capability in notebooks as well.

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Troubleshooting Issues with Full-Text Indexing

Published 2023-05-17 by Kevin Feasel

Jose Manuel Jurado Diaz digs into a customer problem:

Today, we got a new service request where our customer asks about the time spent populating the full-text. Following, I would like to share with you some lessons learned during this process, specifically working with Azure SQL Database.

For this example, we are going to use a General Purpose database with 8 vCores. Let’s get started with the creation of the table and fulltext.

Read on for a walkthrough of setting up full-text indexing and figuring out what the indexing engine is doing at any point in time.

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Quick Tips for SQL Server Performance Troubleshooting

Published 2023-05-17 by Kevin Feasel

Matthew McGiffen has a two-parter for us. Part 1 covers useful tools for performance troubleshooters:

When you’ve got the symptoms of a database issue you can run a series of diagnostic queries to try and drill down on the problem and then start figuring out solutions. There are a number of free tools out there though that can speed up that process immensely. In this post we’re going to look at my favourites.

Part 2 takes us through the mechanics of measuring query performance:

Attendees have come up with a range of answers from “With a stopwatch” (which I like a lot) to the slightly more technical “Using Profiler”. I like the first answer just because that’s where we all start. We run something from an application and we literally time how long it takes, or we run something in SSMS and we use the counter near the bottom right of our query window to tell us how long it took. We may even run something 100 times in a loop and capture the overall time so we can take an average.

Incidentally, if you are using SET STATISTICS IO ON and are sick of the way it writes out results, Richie Rump’s Statistics Parser tool is great for converting the blob of text into something humans can easily parse.

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Trying NTILE

Published 2023-05-17 by Kevin Feasel

Chad Callihan looks at the fourth ranking window function:

Have you ever used the NTILE function? Or have you even heard of the NTILE function? It seems to be one of the lesser known, lesser used window functions in SQL Server. I’ve never come across it in the wild but maybe there are those that use it all the time. Either way, let’s have a look at what it does and how it can be used.

Click through for a demo. I definitely use it a lot less than ROW_NUMBER(), RANK(), and DENSE_RANK(), but I have used it to some good effect in the past, mostly in cases where I’ve wanted to focus on the top X% of data for an analysis.

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