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Author: Kevin Feasel

Switching Azure Portal Accounts

Published 2018-12-26 by Kevin Feasel

John Morehouse is happy with a change to the Azure Portal:

This means that I could have multiple email accounts that I have to use in order to sign into the portal.  Using a password manager such as 1Password, not usually a big deal and more of an annoyance rather than a headache.
Within the past month or so, Microsoft has updated the portal to allow me to easily switch accounts.  Previously you had to log out of the portal and then log back in.

This is quite convenient. Prior to this change, switching to a different account could goof with other sites I had open (like if I was sending an Outlook e-mail through one account, switching the Azure Portal signed-in account would log me out from Outlook). It’s still not a perfect experience but it’s a lot better.

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Improving The SSMS Scroll Bar

Published 2018-12-26 by Kevin Feasel

Michelle Haarhues shows how you can enable an enhanced scroll bar in SQL Server Management Studio:

There are so many tools within SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) that can make your job as a DBA or Developer easier that you may or may not be using.  One of the tools available is the customization of the Scroll Bar.  You can change the display and the behavior of the scroll bars, which can make working with code a lot easier and more efficient, especially when working with long code.  The two options we will discuss are Scroll Bar Display and Behavior.

I didn’t like this a lot at first, but as I used it a few times, it grew on me.

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Combining Windows And Linux Docker Containers

Published 2018-12-26 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Sewell crosses the streams:

This is NOT a production ready solution, in fact I would not even recommend that you try it.
I definitely wouldn’t recommend it on any machine with anything useful on it that you want to use again.
We will be using a re-compiled dockerd.exe created by someone else and you know the rules about downloading things from the internet don’t you? and trusting unknown unverified people?
Maybe you can try this in an Azure VM or somewhere else safe.
Anyway, with that in mind, lets go.

That’s the kind of intro that makes me want to try it out.

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Troubleshooting Network Issues From The Command Line

Published 2018-12-26 by Kevin Feasel

Jeff Mlakar walks us through a few tools for troubleshooting network connectivity solely from the command line:

NSLOOKUP
The nslookup command can check the name which an IP address will resolve to or which IP address resolves to a name (aka reverse lookup). This can be done either way as shown:

After having spent the long weekend futzing with Server Core instances for an upcoming project, I can also recommend learning the Powershell tools as well.

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Curated SQL Returns Wednesday

Published 2018-12-24 by Kevin Feasel

In honor of almost everybody being out of the office today and tomorrow, Curated SQL returns for its Boxing Day extravaganza, which looks exactly like any other day to me, but my producer promises me it will be extravagant.

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Higher-Order Functions In R

Published 2018-12-21 by Kevin Feasel

Holger von Jouanne-Diedrich explains the concept of higher-order functions using R as an example:

The part that causes the biggest difficulties (especially for beginners of R) is that you state the name of the function at the beginning and use the assignment operator – as if functions were like any other data type, like vectors, matrices or data frames…

Congratulations! You just encountered one of the big ideas of functional programming: functions are indeed like any other data type, they are not special – or in programming lingo, functions are first-class members.

This is one of the core tenets of functional programming: functions are things you can pass around to other functions; they aren’t special, inviolate pieces of code but are just another thing. Click through for a couple good examples of what you get in a language which supports higher-order functions.

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Thoughts On The Year’s Big Data Platform News

Published 2018-12-21 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Chant shares some thoughts on some of the biggest news stories of 2018 for data platform professionals:

Hortonworks and Cloudera announcement about their merger is certainly an interesting for the Big Data landscape. These two are thought to be the leaders in the Hadoop industry.
Undeniably, a lot of people have seen what these two Big Data giants have delivered over the years within the Hadoop ecosystem.
With this merger they are aiming to use their combined expertise to deliver an enterprise data cloud. We’ve already seen what Hadoop based cloud offerings like HDInsight are capable of, so the potential here is huge.
Certainly, there’s potential for this to have massive implications in the Big Data industry. And this merger could also encourage even more Data Platform offerings to emerge.

Read on for Kevin’s thoughts on five major stories this year.

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Getting The Latest File With Power Query

Published 2018-12-21 by Kevin Feasel

Matt Allington shows us one technique to get the latest version of a file using Power Query:

This pattern is common if your new file contains a superset of all the data.  It could be a transactional file that grows in length each time or it could be a dimension/lookup table (such as Customers) that can change slowly over time, and you always want to see the latest version.  My advice to all my Power Query students is “zero touch the file”.  In other words, your objective should always be to have the absolute minimum amount of interaction with the source files possible and push all the work into Power Query.  This will minimise the amount of work/rework you have to do in the future.  Thinking about the use case here “load the latest version of a file”, the question becomes “how can I make this zero touch”?  There are a few issues to consider including naming/renaming of the file and also archiving old copies of the file.  This doesn’t sound like zero touch to me.

Read the whole thing and check out the video.

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