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Author: Kevin Feasel

Controlling Power BI Interactions

Published 2016-11-29 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad shows how to control what happens when you interact with a Power BI visual:

This behavior also can be set to None. For example let’s say you want to have a total of sales amount regardless of gender selection, and then a total of sales amount for the selected gender in slicer. To do this copy the SalesAmount Card Visual, and then click on Gender Slicer. click on Edit Interaction, and set one of the card visuals to None, the other one as default with Filter.

Count me among the people who did not know about this.

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Downloading Power BI Reports

Published 2016-11-29 by Kevin Feasel

Ginger Grant notes that it is now possible to download Power BI reports as PBIX files:

Now that anyone can use a report which has been uploaded to the service as a starting point for a new report, there may be a decreased use of the template feature. Any report created on the desktop can be saved as a template, by selecting save on a desktop report file and changing the file type to a template. Unfortunately, templates do not contain links to the datasource used. The person creating the report must determine what data to use and if there was a dataset presently used which is refreshing the data, or create a dataset and it’s respective refresh features as part of creating a report.  Content packs provide the connections to datasets, but since the reports cannot be saved as a file for versioning, this feature is not often used instead of templates. Downloading the file and then modifying it is does resolve the issue as the starting point is then a working report with a connection to an existing dataset.

Read the whole thing.

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LOB In Columnstore

Published 2016-11-29 by Kevin Feasel

Niko Neugebauer discusses LOB support in SQL Server vNext:

In the upcoming version of SQL Server (for the moment known as SQL Server vNext), Microsoft has finally announced the upcoming support for the LOBs within Columnstore Indexes – thus enabling the usage of the NVARCHAR(MAX), VARCHAR(MAX), and VARBINARY(MAX) data types on the tables with Columnstore Indexes that include those columns.

For the tests, I have decided to spin a Virtual Machine in Azure with an installation of the currently available CTP1 of the SQL Server vNext, which has a version 14.0.1.126.

Read the whole thing.  It’s hard to tell at this point if these are bugs, incomplete functionality, or what, so it’ll be interesting to track changes over the CTPs.

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Displaying SSRS Indicators Horizontally

Published 2016-11-29 by Kevin Feasel

Derik Hammer shows how to display a set of indicators horizontally instead of vertically in a Reporting Services report:

If you are looking for a tabular report you can stop here. This does not look very nice on a dashboard, however. Now I will show you how to convert this into a grouping of colorful indicators.

Remove the [Rating] field from the bottom row and create an indicator by right-clicking on the placeholder and selecting Insert > Indicator. Then select the type you would like.

There are several steps, but Derik lays it all out nicely with screenshots.

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The Data Science Delusion

Published 2016-11-28 by Kevin Feasel

Anand Ramanathan has a strong critique of “data science” as it stands today:

Illustration: Consider the sentiment-tagging task again. A Q1 resource uses an off-the-shelf model for movie reviews, and applies it to a new task (say, tweets about a customer service organization). Business is so blinded by spectacular charts [14] and anecdotal correlations (“Look at that spiteful tweet from a celebrity … so that’s why the sentiment is negative!”), that even questions about predictive accuracy are rarely asked until a few months down the road when the model is obviously floundering. Then too, there is rarely anyone to challenge the assumptions, biases and confidence intervals (Does the language in the tweets match the movie reviews? Do we have enough training data? Does the importance of tweets change over time?).

Overheard: “Survival analysis? Never heard of it … Wait … There is an R package for that!”

This is a really interesting article and I recommend reading it.

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Building A Hadoop Cluster

Published 2016-11-28 by Kevin Feasel

I have a post on building a five-node Hadoop cluster using Docker containers:

Notice how 3bd shows up for pretty much all of these services.  This is not what you’d want to do in a real production environment, but because we want to use Docker and easily pass ports through, it’s the simplest way for me to set this up.  If you knew beforehand which node would host which service, you could modify the run.sh batch script that we discussed earlier and open those specific ports.

After assigning masters, we next have to define which nodes are clients in which clusters.

Click through for a screenshot-laden walkthrough.

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Learning About HCatalog

Published 2016-11-28 by Kevin Feasel

Adam Diaz explains the basics of HCatalog:

HCatalog, also called HCat, is an interesting Apache project. It has the unique distinction of being one of the few Apache projects that were once a part of another project, became its own project, and then again returned to the original project Apache Hive.

HCat itself is described in the documentation as “a table and storage management layer” for Hadoop. In short, HCat provides an abstraction layer for accessing data in Hive from a variety of programming languages.  It exposes data stored in the Hive metastore to additional languages other than HQL. Classically, this has included Pig and MapReduce. When Spark burst onto the big data scene, it allowed access to HCat.

Given HDInsight’s predilection toward WebHCat over WebHDFS, this does seem like a good thing to learn.

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Understanding Status In DMVs

Published 2016-11-28 by Kevin Feasel

Ewald Cress looks at a number of DMVs and how they expose query status:

sys.dm_exec_sessions: status

This metric is completely disjunct from the above ones, and mostly reflects attributes of a CSession class instance. The respective values are derived through the following decision tree:

  • If the internal Boolean member m_fIsConnReset is set, return dormant

  • Else if a flag living outside of CSession itself is set, return preconnect (I’ll touch on the source of this mystery flag below)

  • Else if a flag within the CSession itself is set (indicating that it has been provided some work to do) return running

  • Else return sleeping

It’s interesting to see how something so very similar can have so many different understandings.

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Azure VM Auto-Shutdown

Published 2016-11-28 by Kevin Feasel

Dave Bermingham shows how to configure automatic shutdown of Azure VMs:

If you are like me, I try to make my Azure MSDN subscription credits stretch the entire month. I’m typically just building labs to try out new features or to demonstrate SQL Server Failover Clusters in Azure. A lot of the time I am testing some pretty large instance sizes with plenty of premium storage. As you can imagine, you can burn through $150 pretty quick with a few GS5 instances running.

I try to be mindful and shutdown or destroy instances once I am done with them, but occasionally I’ll get pulled away for other business, only to log in the next day and see my credit has expired because I forgot to turn off the VMs.

Click through for details, including a warning about storage.

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Using SET NOCOUNT ON

Published 2016-11-28 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Levy discusses the SET NOCOUNT operation:

So what happened here?  When you execute a query against SQL Server, both your data and some additional information is sent back to the client. This additional information is sent via a separate channel which is accessible via the SqlConnection.InfoMessages (or if you’re still using classic ADO, the InfoMessage) event. When you run queries in SSMS, you see this information in the Messages tab of the results pane most often as X row(s) affected.

That’s where my new stored procedures were causing problems. Where the original procedures were returning only one event which corresponded to the number of records returned by the single query in each procedure. But now that I’m loading temp tables, I’m getting multiple messages back – at a minimum, a count of the records affected when loading the temp table plus a count of the records returned to the calling application.

Data layers which can’t handle information streams are rare, but they do show up in the wild sometimes.

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