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Author: Kevin Feasel

Comparing Fabric F2 to F64

Published 2024-01-11 by Kevin Feasel

Reitse Eskens enters austerity mode:

If you’ve been having fun with Microsoft Fabric, chances are you’ve been playing around with the F64 capacity trial. This one is given to you by Microsoft for free but, since the GA data, the timer attached to it is counting down the days until you need to buy your own.

Read on to see what happens when you lose out on that sweet F64 goodness. I actually do appreciate the way that Fabric works: it’s not a linear scale of “F2 means you get 1/32 the processing power of F64.” Rather, it’s closer to time slices on a mainframe: F64 gets you a bigger slice. So if you’re a small shop without an enormous amount of data, F2 really does work pretty well.

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A Primer on Direct Lake

Published 2024-01-11 by Kevin Feasel

Ginger Grant talks about a Fabric feature not in Power BI or Synapse:

With the general availability release of Fabric in November 2023, I am dedicating several posts to the features that are only in Fabric and not anywhere else. The first feature is Direct Lake. Direct Lake was created to address problems with Power BI Direct Query. Anyone who has used Direct Query knows what I am talking about. If you have implemented Direct Query, I am guessing you have run into one or all of these problems, including managing the constant hits to the source database which increase with the more users you have, user complaints about slow visuals, or the need to put apply buttons on all of your visuals to help with speed. Direct Query is a great idea. Who wants to import a bunch of data into Power BI? Directly connecting to the database sounds like a better idea, until you learn that that the data goes from Power BI to the database then back for each user one at a time, which means that Power BI must send more queries the more people are accessing reports. Users want to be able to access data quickly, have it scale well, and have access to the latest data.

Click through to learn more about Direct Lake.

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Logical Replication in Postgres

Published 2024-01-11 by Kevin Feasel

Muhammad Ali takes us through replication in Postgres:

PostgreSQL provides two main types of replication: Physical Streaming Replication and Logical Replication. In this blog post, we explore the details of Logical Replication in PostgreSQL. We will compare it with Physical Streaming Replication and discuss various aspects such as how it works, use case, when it’s useful, its limitations, and key points to keep in mind.

Logical replication is the Postgres equivalent to SQL Server replication. Read on to see how it works.

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SSIS on Linux

Published 2024-01-10 by Kevin Feasel

I am not amused:

In this video, we bang our heads against the wall repeatedly with respect to SQL Server Integration Services. I spend a lot more time than I want to but we do get a mostly-functional product mostly working.

This was a frustrating video to make, but I think it was important to make it clear just what SSIS on Linux can and cannot do.

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TidyDensity 1.3.0 Released

Published 2024-01-10 by Kevin Feasel

Steven Sanderson has an update to the TidyDensity package:

The latest release of the TidyDensity R package brings some major changes and improvements that open up new possibilities for statistical analysis and data visualization. Version 1.3.0 includes breaking changes, new features, and a host of minor fixes and improvements that enhance performance and usability. Let’s dive into what’s new!

Read on for that change list and how you can get a copy of the TidyDensity R package.

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Updates to SQL Server Troubleshooting Stored Procedures

Published 2024-01-10 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Darling shares some updates:

I’ve been doing a lot of work on all of my free SQL Server troubleshooting stored procedures lately.

If you haven’t used them, or haven’t even heard of them, now’s a good time to talk about what they are, what they do, and some of the newer features and functionality.

Read on to see what’s new. If you haven’t used any of Erik’s procedures, I highly recommend them.

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Switching between Active Relationships in Power BI Models

Published 2024-01-10 by Kevin Feasel

Meagan Longoria solves a head-scratcher:

A couple of weeks ago, I encountered a DAX question that I had not previously considered. They had a situation where there were two paths between two tables: on direct between a fact and dimension and another that went through a different dimension and a bridge table.

Click through for several examples of when this might come up, as well as how to solve the problem.

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2024 Data Professional Salary Survey Results

Published 2024-01-10 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar counts the cash:

This is the 8th year now that we’ve been running our annual Data Professional Salary Survey, and I was really curious to see what the results would hold this year. How would inflation and layoffs impact the database world? Download the raw data here and slice & dice it to see what’s important to you. Here’s what I found.

Read on for the results and Brent’s analysis.

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Thinking about Scale Up-Front

Published 2024-01-10 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword shares a warning:

A point of sale system being rolled out across hundreds of physical locations. Transaction data collected each night to be batch processed into a warehouse for usual types of analysis. Our integration preference was SSIS internally. A solution was deployed in preparation.

Rolling out of the new system started with a handful of locations which steadily increased as confidence grew. On the back of this the data hitting our solution was increasing too. With a trickle of data early on there were no issues as expected. A small volume of data from a small number of stores. The process flew. We left it doing it’s thing.

Read on to see the story take a darker turn and the importance of planning for scale.

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