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Day: February 13, 2024

Using the Cake Dataset

Published 2024-02-13 by Kevin Feasel

Rasmus Baath bakes a cake:

Now that I’ve got my hands on the source of the cake dataset I knew I had to attempt to bake the cake too. Here, the emphasis is on attempt, as there’s no way I would be able to actually replicate the elaborate and cake-scientifically rigorous recipe that Cook followed in her thesis. Skipping things like beating the eggs exactly “125 strokes with a rotary beater” or wrapping the grated chocolate “in waxed paper, while white wrapping paper was used for the other ingredients”, here’s my version of Cook’s Recipe C, the highest rated cake recipe in the thesis:

Click through for the ingredients and instructions, as well as Rasmus’s results in the test that counts the most: the taste test. H/T R-Bloggers.

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Building Plausible Random Geographies with PostGIS

Published 2024-02-13 by Kevin Feasel

Dian M Fay has fun building a map:

Squaria is a continent of highly unstable geography defined by a single SQL query (with, as we’ll see, many, many CTEs). Its only consistent properties at the moment are its boxy shape and the two unnervingly straight mountain ranges that cross its breadth and meet on its lower eastern edge. Those mountains are impossible, but today’s topic is fluviation, that is, rivers and riverine lakes; we’ll see about plausible plate tectonics some other time, maybe.

The ever-shifting border of Squaria is defined by a Voronoi diagram within a 100-unit envelope, similar to Paul Ramsey’s random polygon generation. Other shapes are of course easily achievable, and I’m probably going to steal his circular envelope outright in the future, but squares are easy to demo.

Read on to see how Squaria got its geographic features.

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Programmatic Power BI Datamart Refreshes

Published 2024-02-13 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld looked like he was going to violate Betteridge’s Law of Headlines but ultimately doesn’t:

Last week, I was attending and speaking at the first ever Fabric February, a great in-person conference dedicated to Microsoft Fabric taking place in Oslo – Norway. (I recommend attending future editions of this event!) During the conference, someone walked up to me and asked if I knew a way to programmatically refresh Power BI Datamarts. Cause I shared many PowerShell or API related blog posts in the past, this person (apologies, I don’t remember your name) asked if I knew a way to automate Datamarts as well.

Read on to see what Marc tried along the way.

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SQL Server Versions: ConstantCare Winter 2023 Update

Published 2024-02-13 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar performs an implicit survey:

The short story: SQL Server 2019 continues its utter domination of the Microsoft data platform landscape this quarter.

The long story: ever wonder how fast people are adopting new versions of SQL Server, or what’s “normal” out there for SQL Server adoption rates? Let’s find out in the winter 2023 version of our SQL ConstantCare® population report.

Click through to see the results for Brent’s sample of data.

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Adding Pagination to Bar Charts

Published 2024-02-13 by Kevin Feasel

Riqo Chaar turns the page:

Good User Experience (UX) design is crucial in enabling stakeholders to maximise the insights that they are able to derive from Power BI reports.  One common challenge of report design is effectively managing and displaying large datasets in bar charts without overwhelming the user. This article will describe the process behind a method that can mitigate this issue: adding pagination to bar chart visuals. This visual will provide the following functionality:

  • A number of categories filter: users can specify how many categories they would like to see per bar chart page
  • A page filter: users can navigate to different pages to see more categories

Click through to see how. I tend to prefer Power BI dashboards be glanceable, so pagination defeat that purpose to some extent. But so does having to scroll through a large list.

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Forced Quorum Failures with WSFC

Published 2024-02-13 by Kevin Feasel

Eitan Blumin can’t reach quorum:

The incident started with a late-night phone call from one of our customers (it’s always a late-night phone call, isn’t it?).

They reported that during a DR exercise on their production environment (Chaos Engineering, anyone?) their entire cluster failed and they weren’t able to bring any of the replicas back online.

Click through for the full story, including what happened, why it happened, and what you can do to prevent similar problems in the future.

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