Press "Enter" to skip to content

Author: Kevin Feasel

Power Automate and Dataset-Driven Power BI Subscriptions

Published 2022-08-31 by Kevin Feasel

Dan English follows up on a prior topic:

In the last post I went over using Power Automate to perform a data driven report subscription using a Paginated report referencing an AAS database. The flow referenced an Excel file with the information to make the process data driven and generate 2000 PDF files that could then be emailed to users. In the flow the PDF files were simply placed in a OneDrive folder for testing purposes to validate the flow would run as expected and to review the metrics after the fact to evaluate the impact of running the process.

For the follow up there were two items that I wanted to compare against the original flow

1. Moving the AAS database being referenced to a Power BI dataset hosted in the same capacity as the Paginated report

2. Using a Power BI report instead of a Paginated report

In this post I will cover the first comparison. 

Check out what changes and what stays the same between using Azure Analysis Services and Power BI-hosted datasets.

Comments closed

Data Modification with Synapse Link for SQL Server 2022

Published 2022-08-31 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Chant changes some data:

In this post I want to cover some things that happen internally when you do updates and deletes with Azure Synapse Link for SQL Server 2022 whilst it is running.

Because recently somebody asked if Azure Synapse Link for SQL Server 2022 captures updates and deletes after they had read a previous post. Where I covered my initial tests for Azure Synapse Link for SQL Server 2022.

Anyway, short answer is that Azure Synapse Link for SQL Server 2022 captures updates and deletes. In this post I will go into more detail about some of the things that appear to happen along the way.

Click through for Kevin’s tests and what the results look like.

Comments closed

The SQL ConstantCare Population Report

Published 2022-08-31 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar surveys the SQL Server landscape:

Ever wonder how fast people are adopting new versions of SQL Server, or what’s “normal” out there for SQL Server adoption rates, hardware sizes, or numbers of databases? Let’s find out in the summer 2022 version of our SQL ConstantCare® population report.

Out of the 3,151 servers sending in data recently, the most popular version of SQL Server is still 2016:

Every time I link to this, I say the same two things: one, that it’s important to keep in mind that this is necessarily a biased sample (in that it includes the subset of organizations which has people who are familiar with Brent’s work, spends enough money to get ConstantCare support, and has a need for this support); and two, that I appreciate this sample. Yes, it’s biased and not necessarily indicative of the broader market but it’s also useful information, especially seeing trends over time.

Comments closed

Azure Synapse Analytics August 2022 Updates

Published 2022-08-31 by Kevin Feasel

Ryan Majidimehr has a changelog for us:

Full support for MLflow

MLflow is a platform for managing the machine learning lifecycle and streamline machine learning development, including tracking experiments, packaging code into reproducible runs, and sharing and deploying models. We are very happy to announce that SynapseML models now integrates with MLflow with full support for saving, loading, deployment, and autologging!

To learn more, read MLflow in SynapseML getting started guide and SynapseML Autologging.

There are quite a few changes on this list, so they’ve definitely been busy.

Comments closed

Understanding Write-Ahead Logging

Published 2022-08-30 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Sookocheff explains how write-ahead logging protects data in databases:

A central tenet of databases is that any committed data survives a crash or a failure. Write-ahead logging is a fundamental primitive that ensures all changes to data are first written safely to stable storage before being applied. Coupling that with some careful use of sequence numbers and we can guarantee that changes made to a database can survive system crashes.

This is a core feature in pretty much every relational database and Kevin dives into how one of the key algorithms behind it works.

Comments closed

KQL BETWEEN

Published 2022-08-30 by Kevin Feasel

Robert Cain proves it’s not the end of the line in his KQL series:

It’s not uncommon to want to use a range of values when creating a Kusto query. This might be a range of numeric values, or perhaps a range of dates.

Kusto provides this ability using the between operator. In this post we’ll see how to use it when authoring your Kusto queries.

Click through to see how you can use between as well as logical alterations such as not between.

Comments closed

RELATED() and RELATEDTABLE() in DAX

Published 2022-08-30 by Kevin Feasel

Alberto Ferrari and Marco Russo add some context:

RELATED is one of the most commonly used DAX functions. You use RELATED when you are scanning a table, and within that row context you want to access rows in related tables. RELATEDTABLE is the companion of RELATED, and it is used to traverse relationships in the opposite direction. When learning DAX, it is easy to get confused and use RELATED when it is not necessary, or to forget about RELATEDTABLE. In this article, we describe the most common uses of the two functions, along with common misperceptions.

Click through to learn more about these two functions.

Comments closed

NESTING_TRANSACTION_FULL Latches

Published 2022-08-30 by Kevin Feasel

Paul White dives into latch contention:

This design has its roots in SQL Server 7, where read-only query parallelism was introduced. SQL Server 2000 built on this with parallel index builds, which for the first time allowed multiple threads to cooperate to change a persistent database structure. Many improvements have followed since then, but the fundamental parent-child transaction design remains today.

Though lightweight, a latch can become a point of contention when requested sufficiently frequently in incompatible modes by many different threads. Some contention on shared resources is to be expected; it becomes a problem when latch waits start to affect CPU utilisation and throughput.

Read the whole thing, as Paul dives into the latch design, provides an alternative design, and tests the alternative.

Comments closed

DAX EVALUATEANDLOG() Function Outputs

Published 2022-08-30 by Kevin Feasel

Jeffrey Wang continues a series on EVALUATEANDLOG():

Last week, we learned how to interpret the output of the EvaluateAndLog function of scalar expressions. Albeit interesting, the new function would be much less useful if it could only return scalar values. After all, Power BI users can always define a scalar expression as a measure and then study its values in various contexts. The real power of EvaluateAndLog is that it can also wrap around any table expressions, the output of which was much harder to visualize until now.

This function exposes a lot of information, as you can see in the post.

Comments closed