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Author: Kevin Feasel

Microsoft Defender for Azure SQL Slowdown

Published 2023-06-19 by Kevin Feasel

Iain Evans finds a hidden cost:

To find the root cause, we conducted a configuration comparison of the servers against an Aireforge configuration snapshot to check for any changes. We immediately noticed that an extended event session called SQLAdvancedThreatProtectionTraffic had recently been deployed. This session is deployed by default with Azure Defender for SQL Server. More info: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/defender-for-cloud/defender-for-sql-introduction#advanced-threat-protection

Read on to see what the symptoms were and what kind of impact this had.

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Creating a Sparkline in the New Power BI Card Visual

Published 2023-06-19 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Svensen tries out an updated visual:

In the June 23 release of Power BI desktop we has been blessed with a new card visual that not only will give a better performance compared to adding multiple cards in the past but it also gives us some formatting options we have been dreaming of for a long time.

Here is a link to the official blogpost – New card visual | Public preview | Microsoft Power BI Blog | Microsoft Power BI

On social media you have probably already seen a lot of examples of usages, and I wanted to share how you can add a sparkline to the card to make it look something like this.

Erik does a good job of showing off the capabilities of this updated card visual.

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Apache Kafka 3.5 Released

Published 2023-06-16 by Kevin Feasel

Mickael Maison has an announcement for us:

We are proud to announce the release of Apache Kafka® 3.5.0. This release contains many new features and improvements. This blog post will highlight some of the more prominent features. For a full list of changes, be sure to check the release notes.

See the Upgrading to 3.5.0 from any version 0.8.x through 3.4.x section in the documentation for the list of notable changes and detailed upgrade steps.

The ability to migrate Kafka clusters from ZK to KRaft mode with no downtime is still an early access feature. It is currently only suitable for testing in non-production environments. See KIP-866 for more details.

Click through for some of the highlights and check out the full release notes as well.

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Reviewing Always Encrypted Queries with Extended Events

Published 2023-06-16 by Kevin Feasel

Matthew McGiffen takes a look:

In previous posts we’ve looked at a number of aspects of Always Encrypted and how it works. I think it’s very useful to understand how it actually works in practice, so in this post we’re going to look at what happens in the background when you execute a query.

I’m continuing on from the examples in the last few posts on this subject. So if you want to repeat the examples for yourself you’ll need to have followed steps from Setting Up Always Encrypted and Executing Queries Using Always Encrypted.

Read on to see what actually happens when you perform a simple INSERT or SELECT operation and there are Always Encrypted columns involved.

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Implementing Multiple Retries in Powershell

Published 2023-06-16 by Kevin Feasel

Jose Manuel Jurado Diaz has a script for us:

We often encounter support cases where our customers leave the query execution timeout value at its default. In certain situations, we may find that when this value is reached, the application reports an error and does not continue. In this case, I would like to share an example implemented in PowerShell that allows incrementing the command timeout value up to 5 attempts, with a 5-second margin in each operation.

My recommendation here would be to use Polly instead, as it built in support for exponential backoff and more complex retry logic. Adam Driscoll has a Powershell wrapper called pspolly, which may also prove helpful.

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Drillthrough Support in Power BI Paginated Reports

Published 2023-06-16 by Kevin Feasel

Dan English is excited:

Last month there was a new update that has been made that provides support for drillthrough report actions in the Power BI service (Microsoft Fabric)! Those of you who are familiar with SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) know what a great feature this is to include in your reports to allow users to jump to another report for additional information such as detail level report and even allow the ability to pass the context (parameters) to the report.

Drillthrough was a big item that might have been a blocker for some companies preventing them from migrating from on-prem SSRS or Power BI Report Server (PBIRS) to the Power BI, well not anymore:)

So how does this work? 

Read on to learn more, including something which is in Power BI paginated reporting but not SSRS.

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Changing Visual Titles on Filter with DAX

Published 2023-06-16 by Kevin Feasel

Allison Kennedy has a new title:

Today’s post is a short one with a video to demonstrate what I have learned. I’m a big believer in providing your end user with as much information as possible. Someone new should be able to pick up the report and understand it without needing to get a degree in Power BI or go digging through your company’s intranet to learn what’s what. 

One of the neat features that Power BI provides, is the ability for any visual to act as a filter or ‘cross-filter’ to other visuals. This provides us with comparative values and highlighted bars, but Power BI tooltip just says ‘highlighted’, which isn’t very helpful.

Click through for a bit of DAX code which can help with that, as well as a video demonstrating how it all comes together.

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Schema Optimization and Disk Usage in Cassandra

Published 2023-06-15 by Kevin Feasel

John Del Castillo has an after-action report for us:

Instaclustr’s automated systems are constantly monitoring the growth of Instametrics, and periodically it reaches a threshold where TechOps determines it requires more storage. 

When this happens, they contact the Engineering team to get permission to add more nodes. 

On one of these occasions, our team of experts in TechOps looked more closely at our usage of Cassandra and how it has changed over the years, to see if there were ways to further optimize it. 

And we found a way to reduce our disk usage by over 20%, with just a change to our data schema. 

Read on to see what they did and how they were able to save a good amount of disk space.

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Joins in KQL

Published 2023-06-15 by Kevin Feasel

Robert Cain picks back up on a series:

I’m still working on my ArcaneBooks project, mostly documentation, so I thought I’d take a quick break and go back to a few posts on KQL (Kusto Query Language). In this post we’ll cover the join operator.

A join in KQL operates much as it does in SQL. It will join two datasets together into a single result.

Even so, there’s a little more to joins in KQL than in T-SQL, with innerunique being unique to KQL. The closest T-SQL analog would probably be a CROSS APPLY (SELECT TOP(1) ...) operation. KQL also uses join to combine the concepts of EXISTS and NOT EXISTS in SQL.

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Hard-Coding Values in T-SQL Queries

Published 2023-06-15 by Kevin Feasel

Matthew McGiffen defends a practice:

If someone else comes along to look at this code they don’t know what the value of zero means. My code’s not clear. Worse I might refer to the same value multiple times in my procedure, so if I need to change it later I have to change it in multiple places.

Good practice from other coding languages would say that I replace it with a meaningfully named constant. As mentioned, in T-SQL we don’t have constants so I’ll compromise and use a variable:

And that good idea is where everything goes off the rails. There are a few places where T-SQL offers you “close enough” to other programming languages but where performance suffers as a result: ‘constant variables” like in this example, nested views and user-defined functions for encapsulation, etc.

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