A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Chad Callihan doesn’t have time for the UI:
If you need to make changes to multiple servers, you may want to avoid the GUI approach and all of the clicks that come with it. In that case, msdb contains a stored procedure called sysmail_update_account_sp that might be a more efficient approach. Let’s take a quick look at sysmail_update_account_sp and what it can do for you.
Read on to see how the procedure works and what you can do.
Comments closedThe Big Data in Real World team doesn’t have time to mess around:
If you work with Apache Hadoop, you may find yourself needing to kill multiple YARN applications at once. While you can kill them one by one using the yarn application -kill command, this can be a tedious and time-consuming process. Fortunately, there is a faster way to kill multiple YARN applications at once using the yarn application command in combination with awk.
Click through to see how. I will say, though, remembering some of these sed+grep+awk solutions I’ve written in the past makes me happy that Powershell is object-based…
Comments closedRichard Swinbank configures some deployments:
In earlier posts in this series, I talked about to developing and deploying standalone Power BI datasets and automating report deployment into different environments. I’ll bring together those approaches in this post, to enable deployment of shared datasets into multiple environments. This has consequences for automated report deployment, and I’ll take a look at that too.
Read the whole thing.
Comments closedMatthew McGiffen sets up Always Encrypted on a SQL Server instance:
In this post we’re going to go through the steps to set up Always Encrypted and create an encrypted column. As with my last post we’re looking at the flavour of Always Encrypted without enclaves, we’ll look at working with enclaves in detail later on.
It is a straightforward process to set up everything required for Always Encrypted. In fact, there is a wizard provided in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) that will do it all for you. In these examples, however, we will focus on performing the individual steps manually as that gives you a better view of what is going on. For all the objects involved we’ll look in detail at what is created so that you have a good level of understanding.
Click through for the instructions.
Comments closedChris Webb has had a busy month:
Maybe the fourth- or fifth-most exciting Power BI-related announcement last month (admittedly it was an exciting month) was that Log Analytics for Power BI datasets is now GA and you can now link multiple Power BI workspaces to a single Log Analytics workspace. This, for me, means that enabling Log Analytics has gone from being useful to essential for anyone interested in monitoring Analysis Services engine activity in an enterprise Power BI/Fabric deployment. It also works with Direct Lake datasets too!
Read on for a few KQL queries which allow you to get pertinent information from your Log Analytics workspace.
Comments closedMeagan Longoria deals with the unpleasantness:
Although you can now specify an Oracle database using the EzConnect format, it’s still very common to use a tnsnames.ora file. This file specifies a connection name and connection details for an Oracle database. It’s helpful in that you can provide a “friendly name” to the database specified in the file and then reference the file from multiple client tools.
Read on to learn how you can use it.
Comments closedSalman Ahmed wants to be highly available:
We are thrilled to announce the release of pg_cirrus! First of all, you might be wondering what “cirrus” means. The term refers to the thin and wispy clouds that are often seen at high altitudes.
pg_cirrus is a simple and automated solution to deploy highly available 3-node PostgreSQL clusters with auto failover. It is built using Ansible and to perform auto failover and load balancing we are using pgpool.
Read on to see how it works. It’s also licensed under GPLv3, so it’s not only highly available but also freely available.
Comments closedHasan Savran points out the overloaded nature of switch in C# 8 and later:
It works great but the break and the case syntaxes are getting duplicated, new switch syntax gets rid of the case, and the break statements. Here how this example looks like using the new switch syntax.
Click through for Hasan’s demo. Basically, this is the difference between a statement and an expression. C#’s switch keyword has historically been a statement: given some input, perform an action but do not return an output. Performing an action within the function is known as a side effect and it adds some mental overhead to the way we process things, especially as your methods get more complex and you have to keep track of more things in your mind at once.
By contrast, Hasan’s second example is switch as an expression, which is more in the F# style and an example of why I like to joke about how what you’ll find in C# vNext is what you got in F# two versions ago. An expression is an operation which takes an input and returns an output without performing any actions causing side effects along the way. This makes expressions easier to diagram and conceptualize than statements, though statements offer more flexibility, especially when you do want to take radically different actions depending on some given input.
Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari build a regression:
LINEST and LINESTX are two DAX functions that calculate a linear regression by using the Least Squares method. Both functions return multiple values, represented in a table that has a single row and one column for each of the values returned.
LINEST gets column references as arguments, whereas LINESTX explicitly iterates over the table provided in the first argument and executes the other arguments in a row context. Internally, LINEST invokes LINESTX and provides to it the table that contains the column references specified in the LINEST arguments. This article describes the more generic function LINESTX.
This is pretty neat for adding a visual element, though I’d probably include an R or Python visual and do the regression in there, myself.
Comments closedReza Rad explains how licensing of Microsoft Fabric will work:
To understand the licensing for Microsoft Fabric, You first need to understand the Capacity structure. In Fabric, there are three important sections that the content can be organized into those; Tenant, Capacity, and Workspace.
Tenant is the most fundamental part of the structure of Fabric. Each domain can have one or multiple tenants.
The capacity is the substructure under the tenant. You can have one or multiple capacities in each tenant. Each capacity is a pool of resources that can be used for Microsoft Fabric services. There are different SKUs for different levels of resources. I’ll explain the pricing and SKUs shortly after.
Inside capacities, you will have workspaces. Workspaces are sharing units that will be used for developers and users. For example, you will create Lakehouse, Data Pipeline, and Dataflow inside a workspace, and you can share them with the rest of the developer team. A workspace is assigned to a capacity. However, you can have more than one capacity associated with one workspace. The screenshot below shows how Tenant, Capaicy, and Workspace work together.
Read on to understand at what level billing occurs, what the options are, and what it means. My gut is saying that F8 is probably the lowest acceptable tier for a real company’s production environment and F2 is more for dev environments or people trying things out. But we’ll know more, I think, in the next few months as people try things out.
Comments closed