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Author: Kevin Feasel

Building a Power BI Audit Log

Published 2023-01-19 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad analyzes Power BI logs in Power BI:

Power BI dashboard and reports come with a usage metric, which you can see how users used this content. There is another report for usage metrics across the entire tenant, which you can see if you have access to the Power BI Administrator account under Admin Panel in the Power BI Service. However, what if you want to create your own detailed usage metrics report across the entire tenant? How if you want to see across all workspaces in the tenant, how was the consumption of reports and dashboards? Who created reports, who are users of them, in which workspace these are located and etc. This information is not easily accessible in the Power BI Service. In this article and video, I will show you how to extract the Audit log from Office 365, export it into text files, and create a Power BI report from it, or in other words, How to create your custom usage metrics report across the tenant. If you like to learn more about Power BI, read the Power BI book from Rookie to Rock Star.

Click through for a video as well as the full blog post.

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Securing Temporal Tables

Published 2023-01-19 by Kevin Feasel

Daniel Hutmacher does a little locking down:

You may have already discovered a relatively new feature in SQL Server called system-versioned temporal tables. You can have SQL Server set up a history table that keeps track of all the changes made to a table, a bit similar to what business intelligence people would call a “slowly changing dimension”.

What happens behind the scenes is that SQL Server creates a separate table that keeps track of previous versions of row changes, along with “from” and “to” timestamps. That way, you can view the contents of the table as it was at any given point in time.

But how to you version the contents of a table, while hiding things like deleted records from prying eyes?

There’s not a whole lot we can do, but Daniel shows what we are able to do.

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Flink Table Store 0.3

Published 2023-01-18 by Kevin Feasel

Jingsong Lee announces a new version of Flink Table Store:

Sometimes users only care about aggregated results. The aggregation merge engine aggregates each value field with the latest data one by one under the same primary key according to the aggregate function.

Each field that is not part of the primary keys must be given an aggregate function, specified by the fields.<field-name>.aggregate-function table property.

Read on for the full changeset.

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Networking Options with Azure SQL DB

Published 2023-01-18 by Kevin Feasel

Deepthi Goguri looks at four options:

Securing data in Azure is an important part and there are different security layers available in Azure. Below diagram shows you the different layers of Security we have in Azure to reach the customer data.

In this post, let’s focus on the Network security.

Click through for a table covering the four options in the columns list and a quick comparison of the highlights in the rows. Private link is definitely the best corporate option, though it also requires a fair amount of preparatory work.

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Time Series Features in SQL Server 2022

Published 2023-01-18 by Kevin Feasel

Kendal Van Dyke walks us through a few new bits of T-SQL in SQL Server 2022:

Time series data is often used for historical comparisons, anomaly detection and alerting, predictive analysis, and reporting, where time is a meaningful axis for viewing or analyzing data.

Time series capabilities in SQL Server were introduced in Azure SQL Edge, Microsoft’s version of SQL Server for the Internet of Things (IoT) which combines capabilities such as data streaming and time series with built-in machine learning and graph features.

I am happy to see that these operators and functions made the leap from Azure SQL Edge and am hopeful that we’ll see a bit more of what makes databases like influxdb so useful for time series make their way in as well.

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Plotly Visualizations in Azure Data Explorer

Published 2023-01-18 by Kevin Feasel

Adi Eldar improves ADX visualization:

Azure Data Explorer (ADX) supports various types of data visualizations including time, bar and scatter charts, maps, funnels and many more. The chosen visualization can be specified as part of the KQL query using ‘render’ operator, or interactively selected when building ADX dashboards. Today we extend the set of visualizations, supporting advanced interactive visualizations by Plotly graphics library. Plotly supports ~80 chart types including basic charts, scientific, statistical, financial, maps, 3D, animations and more. There are two methods for creating Plotly visuals:

Read on to learn more about those two methods.

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Comparing Encryption Options in SQL Server

Published 2023-01-18 by Kevin Feasel

David Fowler has a table for us:

The question of encryption seems to be coming up a lot recently. I’ve had a number of people asking me about how to go about encrypting SQL Server.

SQL can encrypt our data at a number of different levels and gives us a quite a few options when doing so. I want to use this post to put together a matrix so you can easily see which method of encryption suits your purpose. I’ll look in to each method in more detail in a future series of posts.

Click through for a rather comprehensive table and remember that “several of these all at once” is usually the correct answer for which to choose.

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