Press "Enter" to skip to content

Month: September 2024

Building an App to Use Fabric AI Skills Locally

Published 2024-09-04 by Kevin Feasel

Sandeep Pawar takes us on-premises:

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you probably know I have been testing Fabric AI Skills extensively. I have written three blogs so far on various ways the AI Skills endpoint can be used. The feature is still in preview but I am excited to see how it can be used to create new solutions as it matures.

I was curious to test if the AI Skills endpoint can be used locally and in other applications. This will open many opportunities to integrate it in different tools, inside and outside of Fabric ecosystem. So, I built an app using Gradio to make API calls to the endpoint and show the results in a local browser along with interactive plots.

Click through for a link to the code and some instructions on how to build it yourself.

Comments closed

Core Concepts of Vector Databases

Published 2024-09-04 by Kevin Feasel

Brendan Tierney continues a series on vector databases:

In this post on Vector Databases, I’ll look at the main components:

  • Vector Embedding Models. What they do and what they create.
  • Vectors. What they represent, and why they have different sizes.
  • Vector Search. An overview of what a Vector Search will do. A more detailed version of this is in a separate post.
  • Vector Search Process. It’s a multi-step process and some care is needed.

Read on for more about these terms and ideas.

Comments closed

Connecting Snowflake to Microsoft Fabric

Published 2024-09-04 by Kevin Feasel

Stephanie Bruno makes a connection:

If you’re new to Snowflake and you need to mirror a Snowflake database in Microsoft Fabric, where do you begin? The steps are straightforward enough, but when trying something new, I often get tripped up by the basics. In this case, the configuration screen for mirroring. The documentation tells us to simply enter the server and warehouse, and provides some helpful information on where to find the details, but I prefer step by step instructions with pictures. If you do, too, then this post is for you.

Click through for a walkthrough.

Comments closed

Missing Columns in the Extended Events Live Data Explorer

Published 2024-09-04 by Kevin Feasel

Grant Fritchey explains a UI oddity:

Let me be extremely clear up front, this is not my original work. I saw this post on DBA.StackExchange.com and I wanted to share and promote it. Nice work FevziKartal.

The rest of this post is just me replicating work already done by others. I just want to see it in action.

Read on for the example and what happens when you don’t have any events in the live data explorer.

Comments closed

Thoughts on T-SQL Snapshot Backups

Published 2024-09-04 by Kevin Feasel

Anthony Nocentino has a two-parter for us. First is the idea of how T-SQL snapshot backups work:

Traditional SQL Server backups can struggle with large databases, resulting in longer backup times and resource contention. T-SQL Snapshot Backup, a new feature in SQL Server 2022, addresses these challenges by allowing storage-based snapshots to be coordinated through T-SQL. This feature delivers faster, more efficient backups, especially for large-scale environments with the most aggressive of recovery objectives.

The follow-up is for point-in-time recovery from a T-SQL snapshot backup:

In this post, the second in our series, I will guide you through using the new T-SQL Snapshot Backup feature in SQL Server 2022 to take a snapshot backup and perform point-in-time database restores using a snapshot backup as the base of the restore. We will explore how to manage storage-level operations, such as cloning snapshots and executing an instantaneous point-in-time restore of a database from the snapshot with minimal impact on your infrastructure. Additionally, I will demonstrate a PowerShell script that utilizes dbatools and the PureStoragePowerShellSDK2 modules to automate the process.

Check out both posts and be on the lookout for subsequent entries in the series.

Comments closed

Explaining a Causal Forest

Published 2024-09-03 by Kevin Feasel

Michael Mayer wants to suss out the effects of inputs into a causal forest model:

We use a causal forest [1] to model the treatment effect in a randomized controlled clinical trial. Then, we explain this black-box model with usual explainability tools. These will reveal segments where the treatment works better or worse, just like a forest plot, but multivariately.

Read on for the example, as well as several mechanisms you can use to gauge feature relevance.

Comments closed

Comparing Azure Event Hubs to Apache Kafka

Published 2024-09-03 by Kevin Feasel

Dharmbir Kashyap makes a comparison:

In the realm of event streaming and real-time data processing, choosing the right platform is critical to the success of your project. Two of the most popular options available today are Azure Event Hub and Apache Kafka. Both platforms offer robust solutions for handling large volumes of streaming data, but they are designed with different architectures, features, and use cases in mind. This blog post will delve into the key differences between Azure Event Hub and Kafka, helping you determine which platform is best suited for your specific needs.

Read on for an overview of each product and where each product fits.

Comments closed

Automating Unforcing of Failed Query Store Forced Plans

Published 2024-09-03 by Kevin Feasel

Kendra Little has a script for us:

tldr; I’ve published a script to loop through all databases on an instance, identify if there are any query plans in a problematic “failed” forced state (which can hurt query performance), and un-force them if found. Get the dbo.dba_QueryStoreUnforceFailed stored procedure on GitHub.

This script is designed to work on SQL Server on-prem, in a VM, or in Azure SQL Managed Instance or SQL Server RDS. Since the script is instance-level and loops through all databases, this isn’t really designed for Azure SQL Database – and you don’t get a SQL Agent there anyway, so you probably want to change this around for that use case. The script is shared under the MIT license, feel free to contribute code and/or adapt away for your own uses.

Read on to learn more about what might cause these failure to occur and what you can do about them.

Comments closed

SPNs, Linked Server Security, and the Double-Hop Problem

Published 2024-09-03 by Kevin Feasel

Greg Dodd enables another hop:

The main issue with the security is when you map a login on the source server to a destination server. When you do this, you provide anyone who can access the source server access to the linked server. Sure, you can lock it down with different logins in the top section there, but whenever I’ve seen this, people take the lazy option and choose “Be made using this security context:” and fill in an account that has quite privileged access on the linked server. Hopefully you can see the security issue here…

Read on for Greg’s recommendations around this. I mean, it’s just so much easier to give everybody the sa account (and make the password something they can remember like “sa”). That solves all of these silly security issues no problem.

Hang on, someone just dropped an important table on accident again. Be right back.

Comments closed