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Month: January 2025

Useful Tidyverse Functions

Published 2025-01-02 by Kevin Feasel

Tomaz Kastrun shares some code snippets:

Data engineering is important step that helps improve data usability, data exploration and data science. Preparing the data needs therefore needs to be done in a manner, that is easy to read, repeat and exchange between others engineers.

Tidyverse has a lot of data engineering functions, chaining different functions for getting most of your data. All six examples will show combinations of functions chained together for great result set.

Click through for those examples.

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Automating tSQLt Test Execution via Azure DevOps Pipeline

Published 2025-01-02 by Kevin Feasel

Olivier Van Steenlandt automates some tests:

Before we dive into “how to automate”, I would like to explain why bothering about Unit Test Automation. Unit Tests in general are a good practice to identify potential issues with new source code upfront. Therefore, executing Unit Tests is a good idea. By automating Unit Tests, developers can be sure that Unit Tests will be executed for every single deployment that happens.

In the upcoming step-by-step guide, Unit Test automation will be implemented in a YAML pipeline. The pipelines I’m using are very simplified in comparison with many other pipelines I have seen in the past.

Read on for the process.

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Replacing Images in PBIR Reports

Published 2025-01-02 by Kevin Feasel

Meagan Longoria performs a switcharoo:

With the PBIR format of Power BI reports, it’s much easier to make report updates outside of Power BI Desktop. One thing you may want to do is to switch out an image in a report. Maybe you need to rebrand a report, updating some of the images (logos and background images). You could import the images or use image URLs with DAX, but that comes with its own problems. If you have some dev ops or automation skills, this becomes pretty easy.

Read on to see how.

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An Overview of Managed SQL Server(ish) Offerings

Published 2025-01-02 by Kevin Feasel

Mika Sutinen rounds up the usual suspects:


AWS, Azure and GCP all have a fully managed services for SQL Server databases. In this post, I’ll provide a brief overview of the offerings from these hyperscalers. While the main promise of the service remains the same across the hyperscalers, the capabilities, scale, and occasionally, the best use scenarios for each, differ.

Read on for a quick comparison of four offerings from the three cloud providers.

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Thoughts on LLM Ethics

Published 2025-01-02 by Kevin Feasel

Eugene Meidinger has some thoughts:

The more I tried to research practical ways to make use of ChatGPT and Power BI, the more pissed I became. Like bitcoin and NFTs before it, this is a world inextricably filled with liars, frauds, and scam artists. Honestly many of those people just frantically erased blockchain from their business cards and scribbled on “AI”.

There are many valid and practical uses of AI, I use it daily. But there are just as many people who want to take advantage of you. It is essential to educate yourself on how LLMs work and what their limitations are.

I am saddened that my rants on the topic didn’t merit Eugene explicitly mentioning me. My natural response will be to rant harder until I receive the attention I desire. In the meantime, read the whole thing.

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Free Azure SQL Offerings

Published 2025-01-02 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword has the right price in mind:

Its the time of year where things may winding down for the new year and we can get a bit of breathing room. With that free time you might want to try something new, let’s say some SQL Server in the cloud?

It could be a good time to start brushing up on new skills, seeing what the services have to offer, or maybe you want to start blogging!

You’re not going to be able to do a tremendous amount at these tiers, but it’s hard to beat that price.

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