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Month: February 2025

Finding Empty Attributes in Powershell

Published 2025-02-19 by Kevin Feasel

Patrick Gruenauer looks for what’s missing:

We are often looking for attributes, but what about the empty attributes? How can I find out if an attribute is empty? That is the focus of this article. I will show a practical example of how to find these empty attributes.

Let’s start with how to find attributes which are NOT empty. The following code retrieves all svchost process Attributes which have a value.

Read on for the pipeline to see which attributes have a value, followed by a similar pipeline to find missing values, as well as one practical use case for why you might use this.

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Migrating Azure PostgreSQL Single Server to Flex via pg_dump

Published 2025-02-19 by Kevin Feasel

Josephine Bush changes server type:

This is more complicated than using the Azure Migration method, but because it’s maxed out on resources for the last week in the east regions (and possibly central), and who knows when they will fix it, I had to resort to other methods. I’m getting on flex sooner than later. I want to get this over with and get to those performance improvements and better features. I will preface this all by saying, if you have big databases, this may not be the right path for you. Look into streaming replication or wait for Microsoft to fix their migration tool and do an online migration via that. Also, if you don’t have strong Postgres skills, this is far more complicated than the migration tool in Azure, far more complicated.

Click through for the step-by-step instructions.

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Configuring and Testing Power BI Aggregation Functions

Published 2025-02-19 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad does a bit of configuration:

Aggregation can speed up the performance of DirectQuery sourced tables significantly. To use it, firstly, you need to create an aggregation table. Secondly, you must set up proper storage modes for tables in the model. Finally, you have to configure the aggregation functions, which I will explain in this post. You can learn about aggregation in other posts of this series and continue the example here. If you like to learn more about Power BI, read the Power BI book from Rookie to Rock Star.

Read on to learn more.

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Dealing with Schema Drift in Azure Data Factory

Published 2025-02-18 by Kevin Feasel

Rayis Imayev deals with change:

I will jump straight to the problem statement without a “boring” introduction, which, in a sense, already feels like an opening statement.

Moving data between two or more endpoints is a common task. Sometimes it’s as simple as migrating data from one place to another. Other times, it’s a request to copy specific documents from source environments. In more complex cases, you might need to consolidate multiple data files into the same destination, such as loading several separate files into a single database table.

This was the bete noir of SSIS’s existence. Minor metadata changes would cause the entire system to break down.

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Receiving Notification when a Microsoft Fabric Notebook Fails

Published 2025-02-18 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers gets an e-mail:

What I have found is that when I created a pipeline in Microsoft Fabric that uses a notebook, when there is an error with the notebook, I do not get an alert that the notebook has failed.

This has happened to me in the past and I have found this pattern below to work consistently to notify me of errors.

In this blog post I will show you how I get notified when a notebook fails in a pipeline.

Read on to learn how.

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Backup to URL via Managed Identity in SQL Server 2022

Published 2025-02-18 by Kevin Feasel

Joey D’Antoni doesn’t trust user logins:

Backing up databases to the cloud is not a new thing. Microsoft introduced the BACKUP TO URL functionality to SQL Server 2012 SP1 CU2. I’m not going to tell you how long ago. Still, it wasn’t last month, and Microsoft recently celebrated the 15th anniversary of Azure so that you can get an idea. When the feature started—it was minimal; you could only backup a database of up to a single terabyte and couldn’t stripe over multiple files. Additionally, you had to use the access key to the storage account, which gave complete control over the storage account—that wasn’t a good thing.

Read on for a quick overview of the feature and guidance on how it all works.

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Migrating or Copying a Semantic Model across Microsoft Fabric Workspaces

Published 2025-02-18 by Kevin Feasel

Sandeep Pawar makes a move:

Here is a quick script to copy a semantic model from one workspace to another in the same tenant, assuming you are contributor+ in both the workspaces. I tested this for a Direct Lake model but should work for any more other semantic model. This just copies the metadata (not the data in the model) so be sure to set up other configurations (RLS members, refresh schedule, settings etc.). That can also be changed programmatically, thanks to Semantic Link Labs, but I will cover that in a future post.

Read on for the script, as well as an update from Sandeep on how you can do this even more easily.

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Reading Buffers Numbers in PostgreSQL Explain Plans

Published 2025-02-18 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar busts out the calculator:

You’re tuning a Postgres query and you’ve been told to run EXPLAIN with the BUFFERS option, like this:

EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, COSTS, VERBOSE, BUFFERS)

But the output like this is confusing, because the numbers don’t add up vertically or horizontally. It’s just a whole mess of numbers that seem unrelated:

Read on to learn more about which numbers to pay attention to and what they all mean.

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The Pain of Permissions

Published 2025-02-18 by Kevin Feasel

Hugo Kornelis talks about pain:

But I have been in contracts where I was the only employee able to spell SQL, and hence all other database tasks also fell in my lap. Including permissions.

And yes. I have been in projects where the idea was to investigate all current permissions, check which are and which are not needed, and then correct everything that was wrong.

We never got past stage 1. Even in a moderate sized company, with moderate sized database applications, getting a full overview of who has which permission was sheer hell.

The best I’ve ever been able to do is execute as each user and then query sys.fn_my_permissions. Otherwise, you won’t know the full scope of a user’s permissions because there are group permissions that querying other DMVs as a sysadmin won’t give you. And frankly, even this isn’t a foolproof operation.

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Migrating a SQL Server Password without Knowing the Plaintext Value

Published 2025-02-18 by Kevin Feasel

Vlad Drumea rebuilds a machine:

Export-DbaLogin does a great job of exporting all logins, but it doesn’t offer a way to migrate the sa password to another instance.
In this case, I didn’t have the sa password and was required to ensure that the rebuilt instance is a 1:1 copy of the original one (edition excluded).

This also meant that the existing password used for sa had to be transferred to the rebuilt instance.

Read on to see how you can accomplish this.

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