A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Steven Sanderson thinks in percentages:
A log-log plot is a type of graph where both the x-axis and y-axis are in logarithmic scales. This is particularly useful when dealing with data that spans several orders of magnitude. By taking the logarithm of the data, we can compress large values and reveal patterns that might be hidden on a linear scale.
Let’s start with a simple example using base R.
Read on to see how you can create these plots and what you can do to customize them.
Comments closedI decided to test a common narrative:
A common theme among Buffalo Bills fans is the idea that the Bills run too many plays out of shotgun near the opposing team’s goal line, and this is hampering their ability to score points. Instead, these fans argue, they should run from under center, either a direct handoff or a quarterback sneak. If you were to press fans on this, I believe you’d also hear that the Bills are unique, or at least uniquely bad, at running such plays.
I’m going to use the nflfastR package to analyze play-by-play data and see just how well this bit of fan wisdom holds up.
Spoiler alert: it doesn’t.
Comments closedSteve Jones points out one of the changes to T-SQL I really like:
This assumes I’ve added a table called dbo.Order with a PK of OrderID.
However, I can do this in the CREATE TABLE statement, like shown below. I add a new section after a column with the CONSTRAINT keyword. Then I name the constraint, which is always a good practice. I can then add the FK keyword, the column and the references that connects this child column to the parent column.
This came about in SQL Server 2014, along with In-Memory OLTP and the ability to create indexes inline with the table create script. It’s a minor quality of life thing but I do enjoy it.
Comments closedEmre Gokoglu goes through a customer issue:
In this technical article, we will delve into an interesting case where a customer encountered problems related to isolation levels in Azure SQL Managed Instance. Isolation levels play a crucial role in managing the concurrency of database transactions and ensuring data consistency. We will start by explaining isolation levels and providing examples of their usage. Then, we will summarize and describe the customer’s problem in detail. Finally, we will go through the analysis of the issue.
This post describes an interesting difference between on-premises SQL Server and Azure SQL Managed Instance in terms of how they handle wrapping multiple connections in a single transaction scope. It’s also the type of thing I would not have thought of when testing a cloud solution like Azure SQL MI or Azure SQL DB versus on-premises SQL Server.
Comments closedGerhard Brueckl has been busy:
I am working a lot with Power BI in my daily business and there have always been a couple of things that bothered me since the very beginning. Most of this is related to the web UI and its usability, mainly that you need too many clicks to get to where you want (e.g. viewing Datasets refreshes) but also that some features are simply not exposed in the UI that are possible with the Power BI REST APIs (e.g. rebinding a report to another dataset). So I thought there must be some better way to do this and make management and usability of Power BI easier and I came up with the idea for a Visual Studio Code extension for Power BI to close this gap.
Read on to see how it works, how you can get it, and what Gerhard has in mind for it over the short term.
Comments closedIn a time of Fabric, it’s worth pointing out our three options for data ingestion.
- Data Pipelines with Copy Activity
- Dataflows Gen 2
- Notebooks
We must compare them to understand what each can offer us from different perspectives. To be able to compare them thoroughly, there are some guardrails that we need to set so that everything goes the same way.
My biggest takeaway from this is, don’t load important business data into Sharepoint Lists to begin with.
Comments closedSteven Sanderson performs a logistic regression:
Logistic regression is a statistical method used for predicting the probability of a binary outcome. It’s a fundamental tool in machine learning and statistics, often employed in various fields such as healthcare, finance, and marketing. We use logistic regression when we want to understand the relationship between one or more independent variables and a binary outcome, which can be “yes/no,” “1/0,” or any two-class distinction.
Click through to learn how to do this.
Comments closedWolfgang Strasser doesn’t want to click around:
Hi Fabricators, Hi Fabric-Admins,
I know this page existed for a longer period, but only for Power BI – https://support.fabric.microsoft.com/en-us/support/.
Read on to see what that page gives you in terms of information.
Comments closedSabrin Alsahsah keeps backups around:
In this blog article, we will cover how to prevent and deny the automated backup retention days for Azure SQL database to be lower than X number of days.
We have received some service requests from customers that would like to ensure that they have for example 14 days as a retention period for their automated backup and would like to do this using a custom policy since they have multiple databases.
You can follow the steps below to create a custom policy and ensure this:
Click through for that process.
Comments closedChris Webb shares an update with us:
If you’re a fan of using Log Analytics for monitoring Power BI activity, then you may have noticed there’s some new data in the ApplicationContext column of the PowerBIDatasetsWorkspace table. Up until recently the ApplicationContext column only contained IDs that identify the report and the visual that generated a DAX query (something I blogged about here); it now contains additional information on the type of Power BI report that generated the query and an ID for the user session.
This is quite useful for seeing not just that people are using your Power BI services, but also who and what they are using to consume the information. Though do beware Chris’s warning about consumption method before you get too excited.
Comments closed