A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Brent Ozar performs an implicit survey:
The short story: SQL Server 2019 continues its utter domination of the Microsoft data platform landscape this quarter.
The long story: ever wonder how fast people are adopting new versions of SQL Server, or what’s “normal” out there for SQL Server adoption rates? Let’s find out in the winter 2023 version of our SQL ConstantCare® population report.
Click through to see the results for Brent’s sample of data.
Comments closedLast week, I was attending and speaking at the first ever Fabric February, a great in-person conference dedicated to Microsoft Fabric taking place in Oslo – Norway. (I recommend attending future editions of this event!) During the conference, someone walked up to me and asked if I knew a way to programmatically refresh Power BI Datamarts. Cause I shared many PowerShell or API related blog posts in the past, this person (apologies, I don’t remember your name) asked if I knew a way to automate Datamarts as well.
Read on to see what Marc tried along the way.
Comments closedEitan Blumin can’t reach quorum:
The incident started with a late-night phone call from one of our customers (it’s always a late-night phone call, isn’t it?).
They reported that during a DR exercise on their production environment (Chaos Engineering, anyone?) their entire cluster failed and they weren’t able to bring any of the replicas back online.
Click through for the full story, including what happened, why it happened, and what you can do to prevent similar problems in the future.
Comments closedGood User Experience (UX) design is crucial in enabling stakeholders to maximise the insights that they are able to derive from Power BI reports. One common challenge of report design is effectively managing and displaying large datasets in bar charts without overwhelming the user. This article will describe the process behind a method that can mitigate this issue: adding pagination to bar chart visuals. This visual will provide the following functionality:
- A number of categories filter: users can specify how many categories they would like to see per bar chart page
- A page filter: users can navigate to different pages to see more categories
Click through to see how. I tend to prefer Power BI dashboards be glanceable, so pagination defeat that purpose to some extent. But so does having to scroll through a large list.
Comments closedSteven Sanderson is looking for a date:
As an R programmer, you may often encounter datasets where you need to determine whether a column contains date values. This task is crucial for data cleaning, manipulation, and analysis. In this blog post, we’ll explore various methods to check if a column is a date in R, with a focus on using the
lubridatepackage and thets_is_date_class()function from thehealthyR.tspackage.
Click through to see how, using lubridate and healthyR.
Comments closedErik Darling makes a proposal:
So, here’s where indexed views are tough: THERE ARE SO MANY RESTRICTIONS ON THEM IT’S ABSURD.
They are borderline unusable. Seriously, read through the list of “things you can’t do” I linked to up there, and note the utter scarcity of “possible workarounds”.
Aside from that, indexed views often are counter-productive, as Erik shows.
Comments closedKevin Chant enables a feature:
In this post I want to cover accessing the new Microsoft Purview portal in your own Microsoft Fabric environment.
To clarify, I mean a Microsoft Fabric environment you have created for your own use. Like the one I covered in a previous post.
You can do this in a trial environment thanks to the new capability provided by Microsoft last year to infuse Microsoft Fabric items into Microsoft Purview. Which Microsoft covered in a blog post about Microsoft Fabric items in Microsoft Purview.
Read on to see how.
Comments closedSoheil Bakhshi does some scaling:
In a previous post I explained how to manage the capacity costs of a Fabric F capacity (under Pay-As-You-Go pricing model) using Logic Apps to Suspend and Resume it.
A customer who read my previous blog asked me “Can we use a similar method to scale up and down before and after specific workloads?”. This blog post is to answer exactly that.
This is pretty neat, though I wonder how long it takes and how much downtime it produces.
Comments closedChris Webb taps into the source:
There’s a new M function in Power Query in Power BI that allows you to read the data from a Parquet file: Parquet.Metadata. It’s not documented yet and it’s currently marked as “intended for internal use only” but I’ve been told I can blog about it. Here’s an example of how to use it:
Click through to see what you can get in a Parquet file. This is part of the secret of why the Parquet file format is so fast.
Comments closedJohn Mount runs a series of notebooks:
In my opinion, a number of “moving data science to production” problems are solved if one could just use a Jupyter notebook inside a for-loop. The wvpy package supplies the tools put Jupyter notebooks inside for-loops using nbconvert capabilities, which I will demonstrate here.
Click through to see how it all works.
Comments closed