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Month: August 2024

Avoid Mixing DATETIME with other Date Types

Published 2024-08-12 by Kevin Feasel

Paul White shares some advice:

Microsoft encourages us not to use the datetime data type: 

Avoid using datetime for new work. Instead, use the time, date, datetime2, and datetimeoffset data types. These types align with the SQL Standard, and are more portable. time, datetime2 and datetimeoffset provide more seconds precision. datetimeoffset provides time zone support for globally deployed applications.

Well, ok. Sensible and well-informed people might still choose to use datetime for performance reasons. Common date and time functions have optimised implementations in the SQL Server expression service for the datetime and smalldatetime data types.

Paul has posted the full article on X.

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Storing Images in Kusto and Visualizing in Power BI or Data Explorer

Published 2024-08-12 by Kevin Feasel

Hauke Mallow shares what is probably a bad idea:

Kusto is a fast and scalable database designed to ingest, store, and analyze large volumes of structured and semi-structured data. For non-structured data like images, Azure Storage is typically the best choice. Databases can reference image data on storage via a URL, meaning images are not directly stored in Kusto. However, there are scenarios where storing image data in Kusto is beneficial. In this blog post, we will explore when it makes sense to store images in Kusto, how to store them, and how to visualize this data using Azure Data Explorer dashboards or Power BI.

I suppose the main benefit would be displaying images in Azure Data Explorer, as that tool might not support loading in external images from a storage account or other sane location. But this feels more like a neat parlor trick than something I’d actively recommend.

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Monitoring DirectQuery Connection Openings in Power BI

Published 2024-08-12 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb digs into the numbers:

In the past I have blogged about how important the number of connections from a Power BI DirectQuery semantic model to a data source is for performance. It’s also true that in some cases opening a connection, or some of the operations associated with opening a connection, can be very slow. As a result it can be useful to see when your semantic model opens connections to a data source, and you can do this with Log Analytics.

Click through to see how you can do this and some of the information it provides.

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SQL Server Compilation Time and Storage

Published 2024-08-12 by Kevin Feasel

Kendra Little explains how storage can affect query compilation time:

Up till now, I’ve thought of compilation time in SQL Server as being dependent only on CPU resources– not something that requires fast storage to be speedy. But that’s not quite right.

Slow storage can result in periodic long compile time in SQL Server. And long compile time not only extends the runtime for the query, it can also result in blocking with waits for compile locks.

Click through for more details, as well as a video by Erik Darling on compile-time locks.

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Choosing between Add-Type and New-Object

Published 2024-08-12 by Kevin Feasel

Patrick Gruenauer contrasts two options in Powershell:

Predefined .NET classes: PowerShell makes certain predefined .NET classes directly available without you having to load them with “Add-Type”.

You can simply use “New-Object, to create instances of these classes. This includes many commonly used classes such as “System.String”, “System.DateTime”, “System.IO.FileInfo”

Read on for a few examples of this, as well as when you would want to use Add-Type instead.

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Using AI Skills as Cell Magics in Microsoft Fabric Notebooks

Published 2024-08-09 by Kevin Feasel

Sandeep Pawar takes a look at a new preview capability:

The public preview of AI Skills in Microsoft Fabric was announced yesterday. AI Skills allows Fabric developers to create their own GenAI experience using data in the lakehouse. Unlike Copilot, which is an AI assistant, AI Skills lets users build a validated Q&A application that queries lakehouse data by converting natural language questions into T-SQL queries. It’s only available in paid F64+ SKUs. You can watch the below video for Copilot, AI Skills and Gen AI experiences in Fabric:

Read on for more details on how it works.

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Finding String Patterns in R

Published 2024-08-09 by Kevin Feasel

Steven Sanderson goes looking for patterns:

Welcome to another exciting blog post where we walk into the world of R programming. Today, we’re going to explore how to check if a string contains specific characters using three different approaches: base R, stringr, and stringi. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced R user, this guide will should be of some use and provide you with some practical examples.

Read on for those three examples.

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Building Real-Time Dashboards from Lakehouse Data in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2024-08-09 by Kevin Feasel

Dennes Torres gets around a limitation:

Real-Time dashboards are a great feature in Real Time Intelligence experience to monitor our data. However, by default it’s made to work only with Kusto Databases. The options to create a real time dashboard or to define its data source only accept Kusto Databases.

What if we would like to see in real time the information we have in a lakehouse as well? Let’s discover a solution for this.

Read on for the solution.

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