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Author: Kevin Feasel

A Report of 2022’s Best Power BI Features

Published 2023-01-11 by Kevin Feasel

Nicky van Vroenhoven goes the extra mile:

Last night we had a work meeting at Powerdobs, with a few presentations about business updates, new joiners in the coming months and Power BI projects. I had the pleasure of closing the evening with a presentation on Power BI.

So I decided to do a presentation on my favourite additions to Power BI over the past year. But instead of doing a regular PowerPoint presentation, I decided to do an all-Power-BI presentation. It was very well received and I was encouraged to share it here!

Click through for the embedded report. Great job by Nicky to put this together.

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Pull Requests and Database Projects

Published 2023-01-11 by Kevin Feasel

Olivier Van Steenlandt continues building out a database project:

A Pull Request is an alternative way of merging branches. Instead of executing the merge yourself, you will create a Pull Request for someone else to revise your development and approve and merge when ok. By doing this you are introducing peer reviewing into your development process. From my experience, using Pull Requests will improve your development quality since someone needs to validate your changes before they can be deployed to a certain environment.

I wouldn’t advise using Pull Requests to get changes in a development environment but I would advise using it to get changes to an Acceptance- or Production environment. By doing this, you can already find issues in an earlier stage than in production.

Read on to see how they work, using Azure DevOps as the example. GitHub pull requests are very similar in nature.

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DB Restoration and Upgrade Management for Arc-Enabled Data Services

Published 2023-01-11 by Kevin Feasel

Warwick Rudd continues a series on Azure Arc-Enabled Data Services. Part 9 covers database restoration:

Now that we have our Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance deployed, potentially one of the most common tasks you will need to undertake is being able to perform a database restore of an existing database to your newly provisioned Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance.

In our previous post, we deployed our Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance – “ae-sqlmi-demo” that we will continue to investigate and learn about how we can utilize in our data environments. In this post, we are having a look at restoring a database.

Part 10 looks at upgrade management:

Managing your Data Controller through Azure Data Studio provides an easy approach for controlling when you wish to apply upgrades supplied by Microsoft. This is something you need to stay on top of as the upgrade path is an incremental approach and only allows you to upgrade to the next version. If you leave it too long, you could be faced with multiple upgrades to be undertaken. This could lead to extended outages while you get up to date.

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Creating a DNS Alias for a Dedicated SQL Pool

Published 2023-01-10 by Kevin Feasel

Resham Popli creates an alias:

This blog will walk through the details on how to enable custom DNS (Domain Name System) entries on an Azure Synapse dedicated pool inside an Azure Synapse workspace in case of disaster recovery.

The DNS alias provides a translation layer that can redirect your client programs to different servers. This layer spares you the difficulties of having to find and edit all the clients and their connection strings (in disaster recovery implementation). This is not supported out-of-box, so we need to take extra steps to enable this feature. There are some limitations, so please read these steps carefully.

Read on to learn how and what those limitations are.

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Parallel Loading in Spark Notebooks

Published 2023-01-10 by Kevin Feasel

Dustin Vannoy answers some questions:

I received many questions on my tutorial Ingest tables in parallel with an Apache Spark notebook using multithreading. In this video and post I address some of the questions that I couldn’t just answer in the YouTube comments. Watch the video for more complete answers but here are quick responses with links to examples where appropriate.

Click through for the video and some text versions. Dustin includes examples for Synapse and Databricks.

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Timeouts Importing a Bacpac File

Published 2023-01-10 by Kevin Feasel

Jose Manuel Jurado Diaz hits one of the three most annoying parts of dealing with bacpac files:

Today, I worked on a service request that our customer got the following error message: Execution Timeout Expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding importing a bacpac file, in this situation, was at the moment that SQLPackage was enabling (rebuilding) an index, for example, Enabling index ‘IX_MyIndex’…

The other two are, of course, getting one to export without any errors and getting one to export without timing out.

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Securing the Root Keys when using TDE

Published 2023-01-10 by Kevin Feasel

Matthew McGiffen puts the keys behind lock and key:

In this quick post we’re going to look at an additional step you should take to secure your TDE databases. This is a step you won’t find in any other documentation on setting up TDE in SQL Server that I’ve seen, so it probably bears a little explaining.

Matthew has solid advice, though if someone does get the Local Admin credentials (e.g., through a spearphishing attack), that person could still eventually gain access to the underlying data. I get that at some point, things will break, so it’s mostly a matter of being aware what can cause that break and minimizing the likelihood of it occurring.

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When Shrinking Makes Sense

Published 2023-01-10 by Kevin Feasel

Eitan Blumin reminds us that database shrinking isn’t always bad:

Shrinking databases and database files in SQL Server is a widely known “worst practice”.

Usually, it’s because it’s assumed that the database files are expected to auto-grow again after the shrink.
So, in truth, it’s not the shrink itself that’s the problem… It’s the auto-growth!

But… What if you DON’T expect the database file to auto-grow back to what it was before?
For example, what if you truncated/deleted/migrated/archived huge chunks of data from your database, which you don’t expect to be returned later? Or what if you performed a massive data compression or migrated to clustered columnstore indexes, which reduced your data size significantly?

Read on for more thoughts along these lines, problems you might run into, and scripts to help you along the way.

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Against the Grain: Heaps, Clustered Indexes, and Fragmentation

Published 2023-01-10 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Farley cautions against rash decisions on three topics:

We’ve already mentioned how clustered indexes can help avoid some of the problems with heaps, but I’m rarely in favour of the standard clustered index key choice – that of an ever-increasing identity column. The arguments people make for this are typically around avoiding page-splits, and the smallness of the data type. But I see tables where the clustered index is on a unique ID column and nothing ever refers to it.

Read on for a dose of caution on three popular beliefs.

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Multi-Language Support for Power BI

Published 2023-01-10 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld supports several languages:

In case you’re working in an international company, you might have to deal with multiple languages and cultures at the same time. As not in all countries and businesses, it is common that everyone speaks and communicates in English all day, it can be relevant to support other languages for your Power BI solution. But what do you do? Should you start duplicating your entire solution and translate all elements to a different language? Or develop your entire solution in the corporate native language, like Dutch or German?

In this post I will elaborate on using translations in Power BI, to automatically translate your Power BI model meta data to different cultures. Besides the meta data, I will also elaborate on aspects like visual titles and translating the data itself. Happy translating!

Click through for one way to solve this problem.

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