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Month: June 2024

Branch-Out in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2024-06-27 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld covers a new bit of functionality in Microsoft Fabric:

Yesterday, Microsoft released a new option called “branch-out” that allows you to easily setup a new branch from an existing Fabric workspace. Obviously, this was already possible but involved a lot of manual work. With this new option, you can create your own feature branch to work in isolation before you commit your work to the central repository.

In this blog, I will deep dive more in this branch-out feature, how it works, including some things to keep in mind working with this feature.

Read on to learn more about the feature.

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New Video: Multi-Class Classification

Published 2024-06-26 by Kevin Feasel

I have a new video:

In this video, I get past two-class classification and explain how things differ in the multi-class world.

What’s really interesting is that, in many cases, when it comes to code, the answer is “not much.” That’s because libraries like scikit-learn do a lot to smooth over differences between single-class and multi-class classification. But there are still differences that can bite you if you don’t understand how the cases differ.

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Tips for Databricks Asset Bundles

Published 2024-06-26 by Kevin Feasel

Dustin Vannoy has a new video:

This post and video is covering some specific examples people have brought up when defining their Databricks Asset Bundles. The video includes a bit of review, but for more introduction please see my first post on Databricks Asset Bundles. The github repository I use will probably be first to update with new examples, however I hope to continue to add to the examples in these posts plus additional videos.

Click through to check out those tips.

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SQL as a Language

Published 2024-06-26 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar shares some thoughts:

I’m not talking just about Microsoft SQL Server specifically here, nor T-SQL. Let’s zoom out a little and think bigger picture for a second: is the SQL language itself a problem?

Sometimes when I talk to client developers, they gripe about the antiquated language.

Brent goes on to list some common complaints with SQL in general and explains why there isn’t a better solution.

I should note that he also summarizes Feasel’s Law near the end of the post:

Remember when NoSQL came out, and everybody was all “databases r doomd”? And remember what business users said when they wanted to run their reports? NoSQL persistence layers pretty quickly changed their tune, saying, “Oh, well, uh, we meant Not Only SQL, that’s what we meant,” as they struggled to quickly slap in SQL compatibility. Even MongoDB, king of NoSQL, implemented SQL support.

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Copying an Azure SQL Database

Published 2024-06-26 by Kevin Feasel

Josephine Bush makes a copy:

It’s as simple as this for each db you want a copy of. Just run it from the master db. This works if you want to make a copy on the same server. If you want to make a copy from another server, you would have to connect via PowerShell.

Click through for the T-SQL syntax. I’ve used this before on some reasonably large databases and it can take a while for that copy command to finish, but if you’re feeling impatient, you can check the status of the job using sys.dm_operation_status.

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xp_cmdshell and Security

Published 2024-06-26 by Kevin Feasel

Jeff Iannucci talks xp_cmdshell:

That most likely means the hacker in the incident gained access to SQL Server, and then used xp_cmdshell to open a Windows command shell. With that shell opened, they could then pass DOS and/or PowerShell commands to collect information and download malware onto the server.

It sounds dangerous. It is. But whether or not xp_cmdshell is enabled is irrelevant.

Exactly. This is something Sean McCown has harped upon for years, and I’ve done my best to follow. You can do bad things with xp_cmdshell, but disabling it doesn’t actually help for reasons Jeff mentions. Instead, assuming you need xp_cmdshell for some work, don’t go beyond the pre-set limitations (where a user needs sysadmin or CONTROL SERVER) and it’s fine.

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The Core of a Window Function’s Execution Plan

Published 2024-06-26 by Kevin Feasel

Grant Fritchey lays it out:

I showed the missing index suggestion (and let’s remember, they’re just suggestions) just for completion and to show I’m not hiding anything. Potentially, adding an index could speed up the query. However, that doesn’t affect what we’re going to talk about within this plan.

Logically, what’s happening here?

Click through for this overview, as well as a very helpful comment from Hugo Kornelis on what the Segment operator does.

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Scaling Fabric Capacity Up and Down via E-Mail

Published 2024-06-26 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers takes on a challenge:

I always enjoy a good challenge and I got it working! In this blog post I will use the same method where I am sending an email to scale up or scale down my Fabric Capacity.

The good news is that this works if the Capacity is paused or running (It might take a bit more time when running).

brb, sending Gilbert’s task an e-mail.

Actually, Gilbert does a good job in making sure that the sender has to be his e-mail address and not just some rando’s.

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Debugging Failed Function Calls in ADF

Published 2024-06-26 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword troubleshoots a problem:

I recently ran into an issue when trying to call a function from an ADF pipeline. The function returned a generic Internal Server Error with no details exposed. Here we’ll look at how to dig into the logs to identify the true cause of the failure.

In this instance the function was performing PGP encryption but this could apply to any function. Let’s start with the problem.

Click through for the very generic error message and how you can get the real details.

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An Introduction to the healthyR.ai Package

Published 2024-06-25 by Kevin Feasel

Steven Sanderson explains the purpose of a package:

The ultimate goal really is to make it easier to do data analysis and machine learning in R. The package is designed to be easy to use and to provide a wide range of functionality for data analysis. The package is also meant to help and provide some easy boilerplate functionality for machine learning. This package is in its early stages and will be updated frequently.

It also keeps with the same framework of all of the healthyverse packages in that it is meant for the user to be able to use the package without having to know a lot of R. Many rural hospitals do not have the resources to perform this sort of work, so I am working hard to build these types of things out for them for free.

Read on to see how it works, including several examples of the package in action.

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