A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Sebastiao Pereira implements a function:
Solving linear equations is essential for solving real-world problems in Science, Engineering, Data Analysis, Machine Learning, Economics, Finance, and other areas. Is it possible to have a tool to solve linear equations directly in SQL Server? We will look at how to create a Gauss-Seidel method function for SQL Server.
This is one way to solve a series of linear equations, and it’s a pretty neat implementation.
Leave a CommentKendra Little shares her opinion:
“Is it just me, or is SQL Server quality slipping?”
I asked myself that question for couple/few years until I faced up to it: SQL Server is well into a period where Microsoft investment is waning, and Microsoft regularly isn’t able to deliver the features they promise.
Read on for Kendra’s take. I’m not in total agreement with this, though part of that is because my stance is closer to (if you’ll allow me the misappropriation of a famous quotation), there is a great deal of ruin in a data platform product.
But if I had a single line of demarcation to Kendra’s point, I’d probably make it when SQL Server QA shifted to “We’ll find all of the bugs in Azure SQL DB first, so we don’t need this redundancy” several years back. That doesn’t explain everything, but it does provide a relevant timeframe for all of this.
Leave a CommentGilbert Quevauvilliers doesn’t need Spark for this:
This blog below explains how to use a Python only notebook to get all the Fabric items using the Fabric REST API.
NOTE: At the time of this blog post Feb 2025, Dataflow Gen2 is not included in the Fabric items, I am sure it will be there in the future.
NOTE II: This only gets the Fabric Items, which does not include the Power BI Items.
Despite the notes, Gilbert leads off with the main reason why you might want to use this: it takes up approximately 5% of the capacity units that a Spark-based notebook does to perform the same operation.
Leave a CommentRyan Booz introduces a new free tool from Redgate:
pgNow is a free, cross-platform desktop tool created by Redgate that helps you identify key performance metrics and configuration optimizations in your running Postgres instance. Available now as a public preview application, it’s designed to help when you’re in a pinch and don’t have the Postgres experience or monitoring solution already in place to help identify why your server or database is experiencing a degradation in performance. Even in its current preview offering, pgNow is a helpful front-line tool for troubleshooting your Postgres cluster. And I couldn’t be more excited to share it with you.
Click through to see what’s in the preview. Ryan has mentioned that the tool will remain free even when it’s in a stable release.
Leave a CommentMarco Russo and Alberto Ferrari talk highlighting:
However, visual calculations are incredibly convenient when it comes to calculations that are specifically tied to a visual. Let us face it: every semantic model contains measures with intricate ISINSCOPE, HASONEVALUE, and SELECTEDVALUE function calls whose only goal is to determine the color of a font or the background of a cell. An example of the intricacy of those measures is in one of our most viewed articles here: https://www.sqlbi.com/articles/filtering-the-top-products-alongside-the-other-products-in-power-bi/.
Visual calculations can be used to control conditional formatting starting with the February 2025 version of Power BI. Several small details must be known to use them, but they are definitely worth learning.
Read on to see how it works. Conditional formatting has always seemed to be oddly difficult to do in Power BI. If you were in the happy path for conditional formatting, it’s a few mouse clicks. But if not, then good luck.
Leave a CommentJens Vestergaard extends a metaphor:
We have been working getting an enterprise grade event driven orchestration of our ETL system to operate like an airport control tower, managing a fleet of flights (data processes) as they progress through various stages of take-off, transit, and landing. All of this, because Microsoft Fabric has a core-based limit to the number of Notebook executions that a capacity can execute and have queued up in line for execution when invoking them using the REST API. Read the details here: limits (you know, it’s funny that there is no stated limits for Azure Service Bus Queues on number of messages in queue, but there is for Microsoft Fabric, which uses a Service Bus queue underneath…)
That limitation is a bit annoying, but read on to see how Jens uses this metaphor to explain the various parts of an ETL orchestration engine.
Leave a CommentChris Webb digs into the dark underbelly of a semantic model:
Following on from my recent post about refreshing semantic models with Fabric Data Pipelines and the semantic model refresh activity, a few people asked me how to refresh hidden tables because they are not displayed in the Pipeline configuration UI. I got the answer from my colleague Alex Powers (aka reddit celebrity u/itsnotaboutthecell) who kindly allowed me to blog about it.
Click through for the demonstration.
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