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Month: November 2023

A PBIX Report for Microsoft Fabric’s Support Page

Published 2023-11-03 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers checks the status of Microsoft Fabric services:

What I wanted to show you is that I have created a Power BI report which shows the Microsoft Fabric Support page details.

I created one for Power BI which I receive daily, and it is great to get the subscription so that I am aware of any potential issues or changes affecting the Power BI Service.

I now have done the same thing for the Microsoft Fabric Support page; I have enabled the report subscription which I get daily.

Click through to see what it looks like and how you can get a copy of it for your own nefarious purposes.

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Fun with Tables in the Microsoft Fabric Lakehouse

Published 2023-11-03 by Kevin Feasel

Nikola Ilic dives into tables:

Probably the biggest confusion is: should I use a lakehouse or warehouse in Fabric? Or, what is the difference between Direct Lake and DirectQuery mode for Power BI reports?

And, while these two points mentioned above are of paramount importance to clarify, in this article I’ll focus on explaining another potential caveat, which is relevant when working with the lakehouse in Microsoft Fabric.

If only Nikola dove onto tables, I could make him an honorary Buffalo Bills fan.

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Building a Multinomial Distribution in R

Published 2023-11-02 by Kevin Feasel

Steven Sanderson isn’t satisfied with the binomial:

The multinomial distribution is a probability distribution that describes the probability of obtaining a specific number of counts for k different outcomes, when each outcome has a fixed probability of occurring.

In R, we can use the rmultinom() function to simulate random samples from a multinomial distribution, and the dmultinom() function to calculate the probability of a specific outcome.

Click through to see how you can build a multinomial distribution and what the difference is between rmultinom() and dmultinom().

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An Overview of Data Lake Operations with Apache NiFi

Published 2023-11-02 by Kevin Feasel

Lav Kumar gives us a 10,000 foot view:

In the world of data-driven decision-making, ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) processes play a pivotal role. The effective management and transformation of data are essential to ensure that businesses can make informed choices based on accurate and relevant information. Data lakes have emerged as a powerful way to store and analyze massive amounts of data, and Apache NiFi is a robust tool for streamlining ETL processes in a data lake environment.

Read on for a brief primer on NiFi and how some of its capabilities can assist in ETL and ELT processing.

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Using SQL Doc to Find Object Dependencies

Published 2023-11-02 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones looks for links:

In the SQL Doc application, you can dive down into the various objects in your database. As I’ve shown below, I navigated on the left side down to a specific object.

This gives me the basics of this object, but I can scroll down and see more. The lower part below the script shows what this object depends on (Uses) and what other objects depend this one (Used By). In this case, this object depends on dbo.ErrorLog and dbo.uspPrintError.

Read on to learn more about how it works and some tips from Steve.

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The Benefits of Checklists

Published 2023-11-02 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Bertrand checks a box:

If there has been one constant throughout my career, it’s change. As applications become more complex and we continue improving reliability, there will always be the next patch, upgrade, new replica, new cluster, and even new cloud region – or moving to the cloud in general. For complex architectures, multiple teams are often actively involved, and even more who want to be “in the know” during any changes.

We use tickets (JIRA) to track and document the work, and incidents (FireHydrant) to expose the status to internal and external customers. But these are complex systems to keep current in real-time. And while nearly everything we do is scripted, broad audiences can’t consume code – even when saturated with comments. Since multiple teams are involved, the code is scattered across disparate things like runbooks, which are not easy or desirable to combine. How can a wide range of people stay coordinated during a major change?

For more complicated tasks, I’m all-in on creating either checklists or dedicated runbooks. I have a client that uses merge replication, and every once in a while, we need to rebuild replication. In that case, we have a more detailed runbook with step-by-step instructions, but this is great for keeping track of complex processes, whether or not they go cross-team.

Also, callout to the greatest Site Reliability Engineer ever to play the game, Mario Lemieux.

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Moving VMs and Disks between Azure Tenants

Published 2023-11-02 by Kevin Feasel

Dennes Torres makes a move:

Move objects on Azure is not simple. Move between Tenants is extremely difficult or not possible. I faced the challenge to move a virtual machine and disks between tenants recently and found the solution.

Some Years ago, I wrote an article about the Azure Resource Mover when it was still being created. Today the resource mover is integrated with the entire azure portal, although there are already many limitations in relation to moving resources. Anyway, this will not affect us on this blog post.

Click through for the step-by-step, as well as a few gotchas you might run into along the way.

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Uniform Random Number Generation in R

Published 2023-11-01 by Kevin Feasel

Steven Sanderson digs into the uniform distribution:

Randomness is an essential part of many statistical and machine learning tasks. In R, there are a number of functions that can be used to generate random numbers, but the runif() function is the most commonly used.

Something mildly embarrassing for me is that it took me a while to figure out why they call the command runif(). That’s because, at first, I didn’t pronounce it r unif but rather run if.

In reality, *unif() means “uniform distribution” and r stands for “random number.” There are several other functions based on the uniform distribution and Steven looks at those as well in this post.

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An Overview of 4th Normal Form

Published 2023-11-01 by Kevin Feasel

I continue a series on database normalization:

In this video, [I] explain what Fourth Normal Form (4NF) is and why I consider 5NF to be significantly more important. Even so, 4NF does make it easy to explain a certain common class of problem, allowing it to provide some measure of utility.

4th Normal Form is a special case of the much more exciting 5th Normal Form, but I do have a bit of a soft spot for it.

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Formatting DAX Expressions with Python

Published 2023-11-01 by Kevin Feasel

Sandeep Pawar makes the code a bit more readable:

There is an old Italian saying “If it’s not formatted, it is not DAX”

When you get the list of measures from SemPy, it’s not formatted and is hard to read and understand. Thankfully, the SQLBI team has made the DAX parser and the formatter available via an API. I wrote a quick function to return the formatted DAX expression of a measure. You can either pass a DAX expression or the FabricDataFrame returned by fabric.list_measures()

Click through for the process, including the Python code to do the work.

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