Press "Enter" to skip to content

Author: Kevin Feasel

RANKX in DAX

Published 2022-09-27 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari do some ranking:

Ranking is one of the most frequent calculations in Power BI reports. Needing to determine the top products, countries, customers and such is extremely common. RANKX offers a powerful and very fast way to produce ranking. Nonetheless, its use takes some understanding.

In this article we introduce the RANKX function and provide a few interesting examples of how it can be used. RANKX is not a complex function to learn. Nonetheless, most newbies find it intimidating because they do not fully grasp its internals. Once they learn exactly how RANKX works, its use becomes really simple.

Click through to learn how it works.

Comments closed

CI/CD for Synapse Link for SQL Server 2022

Published 2022-09-27 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Chant makes some changes:

In another post I showed how you can use CI/CD to update both ends of Azure Synapse Link for SQL Server 2022 using Azure DevOps. Allowing you to update both a SQL Server 2022 database and an Azure Synapse Analytics dedicated SQL Pool in the same deployment pipeline.

By my own admission, that method can become complex. Plus, I showed some more advanced concepts in that post. With this in mind, I have decided to cover an easier way in this post.

Read on for the simpler technique.

Comments closed

Understanding Purview Pricing

Published 2022-09-27 by Kevin Feasel

Rolf Tesmer disambiguates:

Like all services in Azure, there’s associated costs when using the service, and naturally Microsoft Purview is no different. If interested in reading the standard pricing model for Microsoft Purview it has been outlined here – and follows a similar layout to all Azure price models.

However – as a result of such a broad range of capabilities, its pricing model is one of the more difficult to understand!

Read on for a PDF which hits the various charges you’ll see.

Comments closed

Modulus Computations on Large Numbers

Published 2022-09-27 by Kevin Feasel

Daniel Hutmacher does the math:

The modulus is the remainder of a division of two integers*. Suppose you divide 12 by 4, the result is 3. But divide 11 by 4, and the result is 2.75. This could also be expressed by saying that 11/4 is 2 with a remainder of 3. Computing that 3 is the work of the modulo operator, which in T-SQL is represented by the % operator.

Let’s explore how to compute the modulus of large numbers in SQL Server, and how this is useful in the real world.

Daniel’s example includes IBAN validation, though I think he’s secretly working on breaking asymmetric encryption…

Comments closed

Event-Driven Microservices in Python with Kafka

Published 2022-09-26 by Kevin Feasel

Dave Klein demonstrates how event-driven microservices work:

Along came microservices. Individual, smaller applications that could be changed, deployed, and scaled independently. After some initial skepticism, this architectural style took off. It truly did solve several significant problems. However, as is often the case, it brought new levels of complexity for us to deal with. We now had distributed systems that needed to communicate and depend on each other to accomplish the tasks at hand.

The most common approach to getting our applications talking to each other was to use what we were already using between our clients and servers: HTTP-based request/response communications, perhaps using REST or gRPC. This works, but it increases the coupling between our independent applications by requiring them to know about APIs, endpoints, request parameters, etc., making them less independent.

Read the whole thing.

Comments closed

Kafka Advisory CVE-2022-34917

Published 2022-09-26 by Kevin Feasel

Debaditya Bhattacharyya reviews the impact of a Kafka security advisory:

The Apache Kafka® project announced on September 19, 2022 that a security vulnerability has been identified in Apache Kafka, CVE-2022-34917. After being informed of this, Instaclustr began investigating its potential impact on customers of our Apache Kafka offering. This vulnerability allows malicious, unauthenticated clients to allocate large amounts of memory on the brokers. This can lead to OutOfMemoryException in the brokers causing denial of service.

Read on to learn more about the impact and techniques for mitigation.

Comments closed

Performance on Azure SQL DB Standard Tier

Published 2022-09-26 by Kevin Feasel

Reitse Eskens continues a series on performance comparisons for Azure SQL DB:

This tier is more expensive than the basic, but starting at 12 euro’s per month up to 3723 euro’s you have a wider range of spending your money and with that a wider performance range. The standard tier is suited for general purpose workloads and can be compared with the general purpose tier whereas the latter works with cores. Standard tier works with DTU’s. The concept of a DTU is a difficult one as the documentation states it’s a blend of CPU, Memory, reads and writes. If you hit a limitation, you’ll be throttled. You can read more about the DTU model here.

One thing I wish Reitse had done in the images was to show them in log scale—there’s a consistent L curve for each (which is good) but makes it hard to see anything after about Standard S4.

Comments closed

Cost Optimization Tips for Azure

Published 2022-09-26 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Kean saves us money:

I constantly see customers with so many managed disks which are unattached and orphaned. Recommendation here would be to delete these if you know you can. Else (from a VM within Azure in the same region where the disks are (to save on egress costs)) use Azure Storage Explorer, download the managed disks as VHD disks, then copy to an Azure Storage account and mark the storage account as Archive (tape storage backend).

Archive storage is estimated less than 10% the cost of managed disk storage. Note, VHDs can be brought back and imported again as managed disks at any time if they are needed.

Pricing can be confirmed by using the Azure Pricing Calculator

There’s a lot of solid guidance in here.

Comments closed