A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Reitse Eskens checks the logs:
I reported an issue yesterday with Microsoft Support and during the following call today (they’re really quick to set up an initial meeting), the support engineer showed me where I can find a lot of logging information.
Suppose you’ve got a notebook that has been run a few times. The front-end will only retain the information from the last run. If you see an error, for example this one
Click through to learn where you can find these execution logs.
Comments closedGilbert Quevauvilliers pulls back the curtain:
I was once again working with the grouping feature in Power BI Desktop.
This time I had a lot of values that I wanted to put into multiple groups. I also did not want to select the individual values (I have previously shown this in my blog post Creating a group with all values (Even if not in the data) in Power BI)
It is amazing that sometimes it takes me a while to fully understand how to use some features in Power BI and today was one of those days!
Click through to see what Gilbert learned and how you can use that information to group by ranges instead of individual values.
Comments closedBink the Data Goblin is a Data Analyst who supports her department by making, maintaining and helping others with Power BI solutions. Bink is quite proficient at Power BI, and is recognized in her user community as a go-to person for answers to Power BI questions. Recently, Bink was promoted to a position in their Center of Excellence to help her department make the most of Power BI.
One day, Bink receives a message on Teams from Bonk the Business Goblin. Bonk is an Analyst who works in Finance and is typically responsible for the reporting on behalf of the Finance team. Bonk asks…
I think some of this is a little idealized (or I’m a bit cynical) but it’s a good reminder that the technical domain is important but not the only thing to think about.
Comments closedSteven Sanderson simplifies things:
Today, we’re diving deep into the incredible world of R programming to explore the often-overlooked but extremely handy
unlist()function. If you’ve ever found yourself dealing with complex nested lists or vectors, this little gem can be a lifesaver. Theunlist()function is like a magician that simplifies your data structures, making them more manageable and easier to work with. Let’s unlock its magic together!
Click through to see how it works, including explanation and examples.
Comments closedAimee Johnson explains how Microsoft Fabric licensing works:
Microsoft Fabric is a Software-as-a-Service platform (SaaS) which enables you to build an end-to-end analytics solution without the need to spin up complex infrastructure. If you want to know more about Microsoft Fabric then check out our introduction blog post which you can find here.
Since Microsoft Fabric has been announced there have been many questions and queries about licensing and in this blog post I will go through everything you need to know!
One thing I keep forgetting is that Power BI Premium P1 is equivalent to Fabric F64; I keep wanting it to be F32 or F16, but that’s because I’m frugal that way.
Comments closedPaul White loads things quickly:
All this can be achieved with client-side tools and programming. It can also be done server-side by importing the raw data into a staging table before processing using T-SQL procedures.
Other times, the need arises to ingest data without using client-side tools and without making a complete copy of the raw data on the server. This article describes one possible approach in that situation.
Read on for the process.
Comments closedWolfgang Strasser keeps us informed:
It’s been a while that there were some (major) announcements around Microsoft Purview Data Governance. But it seems that August (2023) is a good month with some quite huge announcements:
Click through for those announcements. I particularly appreciate the free version. Even though it’s fairly limited, the price is right for people who are just playing around with the system and don’t want a massive bill.
Comments closedAnth Kernan has a tool for us:
Microsoft maintains 77 services across 13 service categories, everything from Artificial Intelligence to Compute to Databases to Storage to Azure Orbital – this is a lot of code and infrastructure to maintain and evolve, often at pace. Inevitably some of these services will be retired, either as new services replace them or through investments in the Microsoft Partner ecosystem.
This article will provide an overview of the tooling that exists within Azure to obtain a single centralized view of Service Retirements and reduce the reliance on manually checking the Azure Updates feed and/or Email notifications.
Click through to see where the tool is in Azure Advisor. Taking a quick look at it, this is pretty smart.
Comments closedReitse Eskens uploads some data:
In a blog from a few weeks ago, I wrote about getting data from your on-prem SQL Server into Fabric. At the time, the only option for a copy dataflow was using a direct connection over the internet. It still is, but now you can also use the PowerBI Data Gateway to get data from your SQL Server into Fabric.
In this blog, I’ll take you through the steps needed and an issue I ran into.
Read on for Reitse’s instructions and how to avoid the issue he ran into.
Comments closedKevin Wilkie min-maxes his way through life:
By the title of this post, you’re thinking “Ho hum. Sherpa will tell us about the stupid MIN and MAX functions in Snowflake and how great they are.”
Well, they are great. Let’s not kid ourselves about that one.
But Kevin pulls the rug out from under us, as this isn’t a post about MIN() and MAX().