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Author: Kevin Feasel

RevoScaleR With Power BI

Published 2017-03-21 by Kevin Feasel

Tomaz Kastrun looks at several methods for using RevoScaleR packages in a Power BI dashboard:

I was invited to deliver a session for Belgium User Group on SQL Server and R integration. After the session – which we did online using web based Citrix  – I got an interesting question: “Is it possible to use RevoScaleR performance computational functions within Power BI?“. My first answer was,  a sceptical yes. But I said, that I haven’t used it in this manner yet and that there might be some limitations.

The idea of having the scalable environment and the parallel computational package with all the predictive analytical functions in Power BI is absolutely great. But something tells me, that it will not be that straight forward.

Read on for the rest of the story.

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What’s In A Name?

Published 2017-03-21 by Kevin Feasel

Kenneth Fisher explains the different parts of an object name in SQL Server:

One Part Name
vIndividualCustomer
This is just the name of the object. This is probably the most common usage and yet the only one I would recommend never using. (I’ll freely admit I’m not great at this myself btw.) When you only use a single name the schema is implied by the default schema of the user running the statement. That means that the same statement run by two different users could have two different meanings. Since most users have a default schema of dbo this would probably hit the object dbo.vIndividualCustomer. Assuming one even existed.

Click through for more.

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Compressed Backup Errors

Published 2017-03-20 by Kevin Feasel

Kenneth Fisher explains why you might get “out of space” errors when taking compressed backups:

Compressing your backups has very few downsides. It’s usually faster (the additional time for compression is less than the time saved by reduced IO) and of course, the backups are smaller. I have run into a few issues, however.

On one occasion there was 75gb free on a drive, the last full backup was only 50gb and the database had not grown significantly in size. Interestingly there was an error when we tried to run a backup. Not enough disk space.

Read on for the explanation as well as the solution.

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Cost Threshold For Parallelism Testing

Published 2017-03-20 by Kevin Feasel

Tim Peters shows that the Dynamics people are probably right with their assertion regarding Cost Threshold for Parallelism:

These plans are from a SQL Server 2008 R2 SP3 instance that runs a version of Microsoft Dynamics. The MS Dynamics team knows their product issues a bunch of really small queries and recommend a Max Degree of Parallelism of 1. In my case there is one query plan with a cost of 34,402 query bucks that a MAXDOP = 1 can’t afford. Increasing the MAXDOP from 1 while keeping the Cost Threshold at 5 will keep all of my little queries running in their single threaded paradise while allowing some infrequent biguns to spread their lovely wings across a few more threads. My Cost Threshold For Parallelism is set to 5 and I hope to never have to defend my settings in a dark alley with Erik Darling.

Different systems will behave in different ways, so it makes sense that they might require different settings.  In the case of Dynamics, it appears that almost all of the queries are extremely low-cost, so relatively few plans would go parallel and the ones that do, you probably want going parallel.

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TDE And Encrypted Backups

Published 2017-03-20 by Kevin Feasel

Arun Sirpal shows that Transparent Data Encryption will also lead to encrypted backups:

Ok great let’s check this backup file using a cool tool (XVI32). I really want the contact number of a guy called SQLDOUBLEG because I need his help tuning my SQL Servers so I go looking for a text string, hopefully the phone number will be close by.

As Arun points out, you don’t need TDE to get encrypted backups, but it does the job.

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Testing Backups With dbatools

Published 2017-03-20 by Kevin Feasel

Sander Stad shows how to test database restorations en masse using dbatools:

Testing your backups is a tedious job and it takes a lot of time which I as a DBA don’t have. I don’t have the time to restore a database, run a DBCC command for every database that’s backed up.

There is a solution and it’s called “Test-DbaLastBackup” which is part of the dbatools module.

Rob Sewell also has a recent post on the topic.

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Restoring Databases With dbatools

Published 2017-03-20 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Sewell shows how to restore a slew of databases using one dbatools command:

In my lab I had installed SQL 2016 on a server running Server 2016 TP5 which expired so I needed to re-install Windows and therefore needed to restore all of my user databases again. This was so easy using the dbatools module that I thought it was worth sharing to show how easy your disaster recovery process could be.

Having re-installed Windows and SQL and copied the backup files back to the server (although I could have used a network location), I then had to restore all of the user databases.

This is how I restored all of my user databases using the dbatools module command Restore-SQLBackupFromDirectory

Read on for the answer, as well as a warning that the upcoming dbatools 1.0 release may change some things.

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Power BI Matrix Preview

Published 2017-03-20 by Kevin Feasel

Matt Allington reports that Power BI Desktop supports a new type of matrix (in preview):

Expand, Collapse, Drill and Filter

Expand and collapse behaves just like a pivot table however with a slightly different UI. The new matrix experience is however entirely consistent with the chart drill experience so it is very intuitive.

The new cross filter behaviour is of course not possible in a regular pivot table in Excel (without VBA). You can select any column, row or cell in the matrix and it will cross drill the other visuals on the canvas as can be seen above.

This looks like an interesting change, and Matt shows how to enable the preview.

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SSRS: SendGrid Without Encryption

Published 2017-03-20 by Kevin Feasel

Denny Cherry shows how to configure Reporting Services to use SendGrid (sans encryption) to send e-mails:

We setup our nice new SQL 2016 SSRS servers to authenticate using the new SQL 2016 GUI which just supports it now. One problem with the GUI is that it requires that you use encryption. No big deal, SendGrid supports encrypted SMTP.

The problem with SendGrids encrypted SMTP is that it has a funky certificate chain which isn’t trusted by default. And it’s a convoluted process to get the correct certificate chain installed on a few servers (we have an SSRS farm as there’s thousands of reports being delivered every morning).

Click through for the solution.

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