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Author: Kevin Feasel

Power BI Workspace Roles

Published 2023-02-03 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad shares some recommendations with us:

Power BI workspaces are not like the old days when we had Edit access and View access only. You have more options for roles in a workspace, and in my courses, I have found that many people have chosen the incorrect role without knowing what the role does. In this article, I’ll explain all the roles in the workspace, and what is the best way to set them up to have a secure workspace.

Click through for the article, as well as an accompanying video. Or a video and an accompanying article, if that’s how you roll.

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Regionally Formatted Dates in Excel and Power BI

Published 2023-02-02 by Kevin Feasel

Allison Kennedy wrangles dates:

Dates are fundamental to pretty much every report. No matter what industry you work in, at some stage you’re going to work with dates in your reporting. This might be in the form of Semesters, Quarters, Seasons, Weeks, or just good old fashioned Dates. 

If you’re working with Power Query or Power BI, you should have a Date Table. In this post, I’m going to demonstrate how to work with Dates that can be tricky to format. 

Click through for examples of three common challenges when working with dates in Excel and Power BI.

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The Power of Managed Identities in Azure

Published 2023-02-02 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeeck waxes about managed identities:

This however presented me with the opportunity to review what users were actually necessary in the ETL. Turns out, not that many. In many cases, one Azure resource (for example, an Logic App) can use a managed identity to access another Azure resource (such as an Azure SQL DB). For those of you not familiar with the concept, a managed identity is basically a service principal in Azure AD with the same name as your resource. If your Azure Data Factory instance is called myADF, you’ll have an entry in AAD with the name myADF (it’s very much alike the SQL Server service account used on-premises). You can then assign role permissions to this managed identity.

Read on to see how you can use these managed identities to grant permissions without having to set (or reset or store) passwords.

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Registering AKS Endpoints on Azure DNS

Published 2023-02-02 by Kevin Feasel

Denny Cherry notes that the DNS server is in another castle:


If you have an Azure environment when you have your DNS servers in a separate vNet from your new AKS environment you’ll notice that you get an error when deploying the AKS environment which looks something like this.

Agents are unable to resolve Kubernetes API server name. It’s likely custom DNS server is not correctly configured, please see https://aka.ms/aks/private-cluster#hub-and-spoke-with-custom-dns for more information.

The fix for this is actually pretty straightforward, but I’m going to give you a little background on why this happens.

Click through for the answer.

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Power BI App Audiences and Workspaces

Published 2023-02-02 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld looks at an update to Power BI:

Back in August 2022, Microsoft released a feature to have multiple audiences for Power BI Apps, or if you will deploying multiple versions of the same app where you can actively show and hide content for different audiences. A very welcome feature that has a big impact on the number of workspaces people require to have to reach the same goals. In this blog, I will elaborate on the impact of multiple audiences for Power BI Apps, as well as the impact on workspace governance.

Read on for Marc’s thoughts on the topic.

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Automating Power BI Premium Dataset Backup

Published 2023-02-02 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers shares the first part of a two-part series:

The first part in this 2-part series I am going to explain how configure the Azure Runbook so that you can then re-use it for multiple different Power BI datasets.

I am confident that most people have more than one dataset that needs to be backed up.

Before starting, please make sure that you have connected your Power Per User or Premium App Workspace to Azure Storage

Read on for a high-level overview of how to create a runbook in Powershell, as well as the runbook code.

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Simplified Syntax for Scala 3

Published 2023-02-01 by Kevin Feasel

Anshika Agrawal shows a few examples of how Scala 3 is a bit easier to pick up than Scala 2:

Scala 3 is a remodel/refit for the scala language. It attracts developers due to its improved features such as simpler syntax, better type inference, improved error messages, and enhanced support for functional programming. In this article, we will compare the syntactical enhancement of Scala 2 & Scala 3. How indentation will help developers to write code efficiently and effortlessly.

Click through for some examples. On the whole, these are small but welcome changes in eliminating unnecessary code cruft.

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SOUNDEX in Snowflake

Published 2023-02-01 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Wilkie makes a noise:

In Snowflake, there is another function that is SOUNDEX-like that can give slightly different results – SOUNDEX_P123.

For those cases where the first and second letters of the string have the same SOUNDEX number, the SOUNDEX_P123 function will keep the number for the second letter. This variant is used in a few other database systems, for example, Teradata.

Click through for a demonstration of the two SOUNDEX() variants and how results can differ.

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Reviewing Database Usage Trends

Published 2023-02-01 by Kevin Feasel

Brendan Tierney looks at the data:

Getting back to the topic of this post, I’ve gathered some data and obtained some league tables from some sites. These will help to have a closer look at what is really happening in the Database market throughout 2022. Two popular sites who constantly monitor the wider internet and judge how popular Databases area globally. These sites are DB-Engines and TOPDB Top Database index. These are well know and are frequently cited. Both of these sites give some details of how they calculate their scores, with one focused mainly on how common the Database appears in searches across different search engines, while the other one, in addition to search engine results/searches, also looks across different websites, discussion forms, social media, job vacancies, etc.

I don’t necessarily believe that these are totally accurate, though on the whole, I do expect the results to be directionally accurate. I’ve used DB-Engines data several times in the past and like to point out that, for any given year, 7 or 8 of the top 10 database engines are relational.

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