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Author: Kevin Feasel

Power BI Security Updates

Published 2017-03-14 by Kevin Feasel

Ginger Grant notes that there have been some big changes to Power BI security:

People who have been granted Power BI administrator rights will also notice a modification to the Admin screen. The March 2017 update to Power BI provides a major change to the security model in Power BI. Previously all the security settings were set at the Tenant Level, meaning that all the privileges were granted to all users. If I wanted to allow one group within the organization to be able to publish reports to the web, but I did not want to allow everyone to publish reports to the web, there was no way that this could be accomplished. All that has changed. It is now possible to include or exclude groups of users from having rights in Power BI. Users can be classified into security groups in Azure Active Directory, either through the Office 365 Admin Center or via the Azure AD Admin Center. Once created the security groups can be used in Power BI. Security Groups are not the same thing as the groups created in Power BI when a new work group is created.

Read the whole thing.

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Rolling The CHECKDB Dice

Published 2017-03-14 by Kevin Feasel

Arun Sirpal tells a harrowing story of a Recovery Pending situation:

Looks like I had open transactions while my transaction log got lost during an outage. I tried switching the database online but that failed.

Msg 5181, Level 16, State 5, Line 4 Could not restart database “FAT”. Reverting to the previous status. Msg 5069, Level 16, State 1, Line 4 ALTER DATABASE statement failed.

Accessing the database is the real challenge now.

Moral of the story:  have backups and have good luck.

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Helpful Scripts

Published 2017-03-14 by Kevin Feasel

Rolf Tesmer has published a set of helpful scripts to his Github repo:

The below is a link to my GitHub repo of my personal collection of scripts.  BTW this isn’t all of the scripts, but is probably 50% of the ones I have lurking around.

These are either scripts I have developed in my own time over the years, or adapted from various other websites which I found handy at the time for whatever reason.

Where I have remembered that web site (like most people, which is unfortunately almost never) it was typically from sites like stack overflow etc, and if so I have tried to cite it as such to provide credits.

Click through for the link to Rolf’s repo.

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Traipsing Through commondelete

Published 2017-03-14 by Kevin Feasel

Ewald Cress focuses on a function named commondelete to explain reference counting and an elegant use for vftables:

Notionally we can imagine a global portfolio of active memory allocations, each chunk uniquely identified by its starting address. When we want memory, we ask the global memory manager to lend us some from the unused pool, and when we’re done with it, we hand it back to that memory manager, who carefully locks its internal structures during such operations, because we should only access mutable global state in a single-threaded manner, and…. Oops. No, no, double no. That is not how SQL Server does things, right?

Okay, we know that there are actually a variety of memory allocators out there. If nothing else, this avoid the single bottleneck problem. But now the question becomes one of knowing which allocator to return a chunk of memory to after we’re done with it.

As usual, this is a deep and interesting blog post from Ewald.

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Adding Powershell Job Steps To Existing SQL Agent Jobs

Published 2017-03-13 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Sewell uses Powershell to add a Powershell job step to a set of existing SQL Agent jobs:

I put all of our jobs that I required on the estate into a variable called $Jobs. (You will need to fill the $Servers variable with the names of your instances, maybe from a database or CMS or a text file and of course you can add more logic to filter those servers as required.

$Jobs = (Get-SQLAgentJob -ServerInstance $Servers).Where{$_.Name -like '*PartOfNameOfJob*' -and $_.IsEnabled -eq $true}

Of course to add a PowerShell Job step the target server needs to be SQL 2008 or higher. If you have an estate with older versions it is worth creating a SMO server object (you can use a snippet) and checking the version and then getting the jobs like this

Click through for the process.

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Powershell In Bash: Cursor Issues Fixed

Published 2017-03-13 by Kevin Feasel

Max Trinidad points out that the latest alpha for Powershell in Bash has fixed an annoying display issue:

Finally, the fix we all been waiting for has arrived with the newest release of PowerShell version v6.0.0-alpha.17. Now, when you installed the Ubuntu 16.04.1 version of PowerShell 6 in Bash on Windows 10, it works this time.

Thanks God! No more crazy cursor screen issues going on when you type commands and/or display results.

Max also shows how to install the latest version of Powershell in Bash on Ubuntu in Windows 10.

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Biml And ADF, Part 2

Published 2017-03-13 by Kevin Feasel

Meagan Longoria builds Azure Data Factory pipelines using BimlScript:

The great thing about Biml is that I can use it as much or as little as I feel is helpful. That T-SQL statement to get column lists could have been Biml, but it didn’t have to be. The client can maintain and enhance these pipelines with or without Biml as they see fit. There is no vendor lock-in here. Just as with Biml-generated SSIS projects, there is no difference between a hand-written ADF solution and a Biml-generated ADF solution, other than the Biml-generated solution is probably more consistent.

And have I mentioned the time savings? There is a reason why Varigence gives out shirts that say “It’s Monday and I’m done for the week.”

Click through for the script.

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U-SQL Custom Python Libraries

Published 2017-03-13 by Kevin Feasel

Saveen Reddy explains how to build a custom Python library and use it with U-SQL:

First, let’s talk about “zipimport”. Thanks to the adoption of PEP 273 – Python had the ability to import modules from ZIP files since Python 2.3. This ability is called “zipimport” and is a built-in feature of the Python’s existing import statement. Read the zipimport documentation now.

To review the basics.

  • You create a module (a .py file, etc.)

  • ZIP up the module into a .zip file

  • Add the path to the .zip file to sys.path

  • Then import the module

Read on for the step-by-step process.

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SSAS Extended Events

Published 2017-03-13 by Kevin Feasel

Eugene Polonichko shows how to use Extended Events with SQL Server Analysis Services:

Cubes require frequent monitoring since their productivity decreases quite often (slowdowns during query building, processing time increment). To find out the reason of decrease, we need to monitor our system. For this, we use SQL Server Profiler. However, Microsoft is planning to exclude this SQL tracing tool in subsequent versions. The main disadvantage of the tool is resource intensity, and it should be run on a production server carefully, since it may cause a critical system productivity loss.

Thus, Extended Events is a general event-handling system for server systems. This system supports the correlation of data from SQL Server which allows getting SQL Server state events.

If you’re already familiar with relational engine XEs, this isn’t much of a stretch.

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Dockerizing Windows Applications

Published 2017-03-13 by Kevin Feasel

Elton Stoneman has a five-step process for turning your Windows app into a containerized application:

1. Choose Your Base Image

Docker images for Windows apps need to be based on microsoft/nanoserver or microsoft/windowsservercore, or on another image based on one of those.

Which you use will depend on the application platform, runtime, and installation requirements. For any of the following you need Windows Server Core:

  • .NET Framework apps
  • MSI installers for apps or dependencies
  • 32-bit runtime support

For anything else, you should be able to use Nano Server. I’ve successfully used Nano Server as the base image for Go, Java and Node.js apps.

This is good reading if you’re thinking of offering a containerized version of your product.

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