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Author: Kevin Feasel

SSIS And SSRS Practices

Published 2016-10-31 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Seferlis has a list of practices which he’s learned over the years:

Use Source Control

  1. For anyone who was a developer in their past life, or is one now, this is a no-brainer, no-alternative best practice.  In my case, because I come from a management and systems background, I’ve had to learn this the hardway.  If this is your first foray into development, get ready, because you’re in for some mistakes, and you’re going to delete or change some code you really wish you didn’t.  Whether it be for reference purposes on something you want to change, or something you do by accident, you’re going to need that code you just got rid of yesterday, and we both know you didn’t back up your Visual Studio jobs… Hence, source control.  Github and Microsoftoffer great solutions for Visual Studio, and Redgate offers a great solution for SSMS.  I highly recommend checking them out and using the tools!  There are some other options out there that are free, or will save your code to local storage locations, but the cloud is there for a reason, and many of us are on the go, so having it available from all locations is very helpful.

Regarding source control for Integration Services packages, that’s a good reason to learn Biml—it works much better for source control than the native packages (which change every time you open the package and contain a lot of noise).

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Filegroups And RTO

Published 2016-10-31 by Kevin Feasel

Raul Gonzalez explains the importance of filegroups in minimizing RTO:

So if we don’t create additional filegroup[s] in our databases not only all the data will go to the same logical container but also in case we have to restore that database from a backup, we will have to wait until all of it it’s restored.

Imagine you have a lot of historical data for instance and there is a disaster, if you had different filegroups, one for current data and another for the historical, you would be able to get your live data first and quickly (to get you up and running), and then restore all the historical which is not critical.

To show you how, I’m going to create a database with different filegroups so you’ll see how we can do.

Click through for the scripts, as well as more information.

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Semantic Layers

Published 2016-10-31 by Kevin Feasel

Melissa Coates explains the relevance of Analysis Services as a semantic layer:

Part 1: Why a Semantic Layer Like Azure Analysis Services is Relevant {you are here}

Part 2: Where Azure Analysis Services Fits Into BI & Analytics Architecture {coming soon}

Fundamentally, Analysis Services serves as a semantic layer (see below for further discussion of a semantic layer). Because the business intelligence industry now embraces an array of technology choices, sometimes it seems like a semantic layer is no longer valued like it once was. Well, my opinion is that for many businesses, a semantic layer is tremendously important to support the majority of business users who do *not* want to do their own data wrangling, data prep, and data modeling activities.

We (I) spend so much time thinking about the Brave New World of massive blobs of semi-structured data that it’s a good idea to step back every once in a while and remember that yes, there is a need for sanitized, easy-to-consume data which answers known business questions.  The percentage of people at a company willing to create an R or Python notebook or run a MapReduce job is typically well under 5%.

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Passing Values To Bash

Published 2016-10-31 by Kevin Feasel

Steph Locke shows how to send input parameters to Bash scripts:

This is a very quick post on how you can make a bash script that allows you to provide it values via the command line. Passing values to a bash script uses a 1-based array convention inside the script, that are referenced by prefixing with $ inside the script.

This means that if I provide .\dummyscript.sh value1 value2, inside the dummyscript.sh I can retrieve these by referencing their positions:

Read on for more information, including how to use named parameters.  Given that Bash is now officially supported in Windows 10 (well, in beta form), it might be worth checking that scripting language out.

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Polybase As Ersatz StretchDB

Published 2016-10-31 by Kevin Feasel

Ginger Grant has a great idea:

PolyBase, which was released with SQL Server 2016, provides another method to access live data either locally or in the cloud, very similar to the SQL Server Stretch database feature. Polybase can also provide the ability to provide a more cost-effective availability for cold data, streamlines on-premises data maintenance, and keeps data secure even during migration. Polybase differs from Stretch database in a few ways, as the SQL must be different, the speed is noticeably slower, and it is a lot less expensive. The cost is significantly less because storing data in a Azure blob store starts at 1 cent a month and Stretch database starts at $2.50 an hour. In this post,I will show how to take data which was archived due to the age of the data, which was created in 2012 and store it in an Azure Blob Storage file which will be available via Polybase when I needed.

The ideal scenario for this solution is extremely cold data which is nonetheless required as part of regulatory compliance, where having a query run for 3 hours once every six months or so is acceptable.

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Finding Duplicate Indexes With Biml

Published 2016-10-31 by Kevin Feasel

Ben Weissman shows how to find duplicate indexes using Biml:

This little piece of Biml will check all your tables for indices sharing the same columns.
It does not generate any SSIS tasks etc. but might be a good starting point to build your own Index-Monitoring or Index-Clinic – because Biml is NOT just for SSIS

Depending upon your definition of a duplicate index, this might generate false positives.  Regardless, it’s a nice way of showing that Biml is about more than SSIS.

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No Curation Today

Published 2016-10-28 by Kevin Feasel

Today marks the last day of PASS Summit for 2016.  Unfortunately, the curation staff became wrapped up in the excesses of this conference and will wake up in a couple hours wondering why the alarm clock is going off so early.  Curation will continue this upcoming Monday.

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Migrating To Azure SQL Database

Published 2016-10-27 by Kevin Feasel

Tim Radney walks us through steps to migrate an on-prem database to Azure SQL Database:

When planning to migrate on premises databases to V12, the size of the database is a huge factor in how long the migration will take. The export of the database, the transfer of the data, and the import will all increase in proportion to the size of the database.

Another big factor in the restore/import time when moving your databases to V12 is the performance tier you are restoring too. The restore/import process requires a lot of horsepower, so to help expedite your migration, you should consider restoring to a higher performance tier. When the database is online, you can easily and quickly drop down to a lesser tier that meets your daily performance needs. Being able to change performance tiers with a few mouse clicks is one of the big benefits of Azure SQL Database.

There are some design considerations for moving to Azure SQL Database, and once those are covered, Tim’s article helps with the actual migration process.

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Excel To Power BI

Published 2016-10-27 by Kevin Feasel

Robert Sheldon shows how to import Excel data into Power BI:

We have two basic approaches for bringing Excel data into Power BI Desktop: the Get Data process and the import process. For the most part, we’ll use the Get Data process to bring in spreadsheets and use the import process to pull in the non-spreadsheet components.

Where things get a little tricky is if we have a spreadsheet table based on a query. (No doubt there are other tricky areas that I’ve yet to discover.) You can use the import process to bring in the query, in which case you have to take the extra steps of creating and populating your table, or you can use the Get Data process to bring in either the table or query. If the query exists without as associated spreadsheet table, your only option is to import the Excel file.

There’s a pretty good chance that you’ve got important Excel spreadsheets somewhere in the organization, making this a valuable article.

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