A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
This strikes me as an odd chicken-and-egg problem. I’d need to create the certificate to decrypt the [master] backup on the instance I’m restoring [master] to…and the certificate is stored in [master], which I’d be overwriting. As weird as it sounds, this is exactly what needs to happen. Maybe it’s not as complicated as it sounds.
Read on for the solution. You might also want to check out that one time he met Larry Bird.
Comments closed“Power BI reports in SQL Server Reporting Services: January 2017 Technical Preview now available” This feature addition will allow Power BI reports to be published to a local SQL Server Reporting Services server, entirely-on-premises without using the Power BI cloud service.
The January 2017 Technical Preview can be downloaded from: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=54610
Reza Rad shows us installation and deployment:
We are in a world that rapidly running towards cloud. Your files are in Dropbox, or OneDrive these days, Your photos uploaded to a cloud storage, your emails are all backed up in a cloud backup media, and I’m in this thinking that in next few years, we might eat our food from a cloud kitchen! However there are still businesses and companies who require some on-premises solutions, and as long as a requirement exists, there should be an answer for it. Power BI for On-Premises bring the power of self-service, interactive reports of Power BI to these businesses. Power BI for On-premises is a great big step towards utilizing better data insight in all environments.
This will probably help more companies than you might think—Power BI is really useful as a reporting tool, but it can be hard getting sign-off to go to Azure.
Comments closedAllen White shares his list of interesting perfmon counters:
Paging File(_Total)\% Usage When Windows runs out of memory it takes large chunks of memory and swaps it out to disk, to the Paging File. Unfortunately, the slowest operation in all computing is writing to disk, regardless of the physical media involved, so swapping memory to disk is naturally going to slow down the performance of your system. Keeping an eye on this counter will help you know when you are encountering memory issues, and you can then take action to resolve the conflicts.
There are dozens of interesting counters you could use, but I appreciate that Allen stuck with 15.
Comments closedMelissa Coates has put together a glossary of terms for modern data warehousing:
Logical Data Warehouse
A logical data warehouse (LDW) builds upon the traditional DW by providing unified data access to multiple platforms. Conceptually, the logical data warehouse is a view layer that abstractly accesses distributed systems such as relational DBs, NoSQL DBs, data lakes, in-memory data structures, and so forth, consolidating and relating the data in a virtual layer. This availability of data on various platforms adds flexibility to a traditional DW, and speeds up data availability. The tradeoff for this flexibility can be slower performance for user queries, though the full-fledged LDW vendors employ an array of optimization techniques to mitigate performance issues. A logical data warehouse is broader than just data virtualization and distributed processing which can be thought of as enabling technologies. According to Gartner a full-fledged LDW system also involves metadata management, repository management, taxonomy/ontology resolution, auditing & performance services, as well as service level agreement management.
If you’re just getting started with the topic, check this out, as it will probably clear up several concepts.
Comments closedBrent Ozar rounds up T-SQL Tuesday 86:
I dunno about you, but I got a big stocking full of coal. Next year, I’m gonna be better, and I plan on asking Santa for a whole bunch of Connect requests. For T-SQL Tuesday, I asked you to name your favorite SQL Server bugs & enhancement requests, and here’s what you want in your stocking next year.
If you agree with a feature, click on it, and upvote its Connect request. These bloggers took the time to make their case – now it’s time for you to vote.
29 separate links, so there’s a lot of reading here.
Comments closedJohn MacKintosh shows how to use R for wrangling + ETL:
I had over 140 files to process. That’s not usually a big deal – I normally use SQL Server Integration Services to loop through network folders, connect to hundreds of spreadsheets and extract the source data.
But this relies on the data being in a tabular format (like a dataframe or database table).
A quick glance at the first few sheets confirmed I could not use this approach – the data was not in tabular format. Instead it was laid out in a format suited to viewing the data on screen – with the required data scattered in different ranges throughout each sheet ( over 100 rows and many columns). It wasn’t going to be feasible to point SSIS at different locations within each sheet. (It can be done, but it’s pretty complex and I didn’t have time to experiment).
The other challenge was that over time, changes to design meant that data moved location e.g. dates that were originally in cell C2 moved to D7, then moved again as requirements evolved. There were 14 different templates in all, each with subtle changes. Each template was going to need a custom solution to extract the data.
This is a good look at how R can be about more than “just” statistical analysis.
Comments closedJose Gonzalez links to a set of blog posts and videos introducing functional programming:
Since I’ve started to play with (and rave about) functional programming (FP), a lot of people have asked me how to get started.
Instead of writing the same email multiple times, I decided to create a blog post I can refer them to. Also, it’s a central place to put all my notes about the topic.
Here’s a small collection of all the resources I’ve accumulated on my adventure on learning functional programming.
I think the functional paradigm fits relational database development extremely well, better than the object-oriented paradigm.
Comments closedDeepanshu Bhalla explains what support vector machines are:
The main idea of support vector machine is to find the optimal hyperplane (line in 2D, plane in 3D and hyperplane in more than 3 dimensions) which maximizes the margin between two classes. In this case, two classes are red and blue balls. In layman’s term, it is finding the optimal separating boundary to separate two classes (events and non-events).
Deepanshu then goes on to implement this in R.
Comments closedJohn White says, spoilers, you can’t:
The bottom line of all this is that even if you use Office 365, and you think that you have disabled Groups in your tenant, the chances are that you could be in for a surprise. If any of these dependent services are in use, the chances are that you already have several created.
Groups are the bedrock of all new features in Office 365 moving forward – it is therefore a good idea that your organization understand them as soon as possible. Their inevitability is also another strong argument for paying close attention to them. If you are currently discussing whether or not they should be used, I would strongly encourage you to shifting that discussion to how they should best be used.
Read the whole thing if you’re getting into Office 365.
Update: John has a clarification, showing that it is possible, but it’s not trivial.
Comments closedSibanjan Das provides some of the basics of data analysis using R:
Let’s start thinking in a logical way the steps that one should perform once we have the data imported into R.
- The first step would be to discover what’s in the data file that was exported. To do this, we can:
- Use head function to view few rows from the data set. By default, head shows first 5 rows. Ex:
head(mtcars)- str to view the structure of the imported data. Ex:
str(mtcars)- summary to view the data summary. Ex:
summary(mtcars)
There’s a lot to data analysis, but this is a good start.
Comments closed