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Author: Kevin Feasel

Thoughts on a Migration: Azure Analysis Services to Power BI Premium

Published 2022-12-06 by Kevin Feasel

Dan English shares some thoughts:

Over the past month couple of months I got the opportunity to test out the new migration experience that was just made available for Public Preview this past month during the PASS Data Community Summit and announced on the Power BI blog here Accelerate your migration experience from Azure Analysis Services to Power BI Premium with the automated migration tool. The blog post also shows a very quick animated gif walkthrough of the process and there is a thirteen minute video from the MS Build conference earlier this year where this was first demoed that you can check out here as well The Future of Enterprise Semantic Models.

Click through for a detailed analysis.

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The Lowdown on the Power BI Gateway

Published 2022-12-06 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad gives us a primer:

Power BI is a data analysis tool that connects to many data sources. Suppose the data source for Power BI is located in an on-premises location. In that case, the connection from the cloud-based Power BI Service to the on-premises located data source should be created with an application called Gateway. In this post, you will learn what the Gateway is, the types of the gateway, their differences, installing the gateway, and scheduling a data set with that gateway.

Click through for a video, as well as a lengthy article covering the topic.

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A New Sample Database

Published 2022-12-06 by Kevin Feasel

Daniel Hutmacher isn’t satisfied with AdventureWorks:

The database collation is Latin1_General_100_CI_AS_SC.

I’ve divided information into schemas based on their respective sources. The “ReferenceData” schema will have mixed sources, all of them publicly available.

Because the data is so geographically bound, many of the tables with have geo data as well, though I technically put it in a geometry type and not a geography type – just because it was easier. This can make for some cool map visuals in SSMS if you want.

Most columns and tables are annotated using the extended property MS_description, so if you view the extended properties in SSMS, or if you use my sp_ctrl3 utility, a brief description will show up for each object.

Read on for an overview of the database’s schema, as well as the link to download the DB. I’ll have to check it out.

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Multivariate Anomaly Detection with ADX

Published 2022-12-05 by Kevin Feasel

Adi Eldar shows off multivariate anomaly detection in Azure Data Explorer:

Azure Data Explorer (ADX) is commonly used for monitoring cloud resources and IoT devices performance and health. This is done by continuous collection of multiple metrics emitted by these sources, and on-going analysis of the collected data to detect anomalies. The analysis is applied over time series of the relevant metrics in order to locate significant deviations of the metrics values relative to their typical normal baseline pattern.

Click through for a nice overview of the topic, including two different scenarios: one which emphasizes time series data and the other, which does not.

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Creating an AML Workspace and Trying the Studio

Published 2022-12-05 by Kevin Feasel

Tomaz Kastrun continues an advent of Azure ML. First up, Tomaz creates a workspace:

You will select “New workspace”. For now, we will work on a workspace. But just to mention, the “New registry” will enable you to share assets among different workspaces, support multi-region replication and help you provision all resources to facilitate region replications.

From there, the focus shifts to using Azure Machine Learning Studio:

In this overview page, you can click the button “Launch studio” in the middle of the workspace or you can copy and paste the Studio web URL provided under the “Essentials” to start the Studio.

But before we launch the Studio, let’s explore some additional settings, worth mentioning.

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Bit Twiddling in T-SQL

Published 2022-12-05 by Kevin Feasel

Louis Davidson explains how bit operations work in T-SQL:

I expect that 99% of the people reading this looks at this probably would expect there to be a status table that contained the values of status. Seeing that this is a base 2 number, you may be in that 1% that thinks this might be a bitmask. but unless you have and eidetic memory, you probably don’t know what all of the bits mean.

A bitmask is a type of denormalization of values where instead of having a set of columns that have on or off values (no Null values), you encode it like:

Bitmasks make me break out the angry nun ruler. You can almost guarantee you’re doing something wrong if you design a bitmask as a column in a table.

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Enterprise-Level Backups in MySQL

Published 2022-12-05 by Kevin Feasel

Lukas Vileikis continues a series on backups with MySQL:

MySQL Enterprise Backup is a known tool for everyone inside of the world of MySQL, no matter if people dealing with the tool are enterprise (business) minded or not. The tool can be considered the flagship of MySQL’s enterprise-level offerings: it comes as a part of its Enterprise tier and costs thousands to attain: is it worth your money, and perhaps more importantly, your time? We will figure that out in this blog.

Read on for Lukas’s thoughts.

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Azure SQL Managed Instance Performance

Published 2022-12-05 by Kevin Feasel

Reitse Eskens wraps up a series on Azure SQL performance comparisons:

So far, the blogs were about the really SaaS databases; the database is deployed and you don’t have think about it anymore. This ease of use comes at a ‘price’. You’ve got no control whatsoever on files, you’ve lost the SQL Agent and a number of other features. The managed instance is a bit different. When I was testing you could see the TempDB files but not change them, since then a few changes have been made to this tier where you’re able to change settings and, Niko Neugebauer told the data community on twitter, there are more changes coming. With the managed instance, you get the agent back and you can run cross database query’s again. So you can safely say the managed instance is a hybrid between your trusty on-premises server and the fully managed Azure SQL database.

Click through for Reitse’s thoughts.

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Defining an Analytics Engineer

Published 2022-12-02 by Kevin Feasel

Ust Oldfield defines a term:

Analytics Engineering, along with Data Engineering and Report Engineering, is a specialised subset of skills that would previously be the preserve of a Business Intelligence (BI) Developer. The BI Developer was once a generalist data developer, whose overall responsibilities have been split out and shared among specialist developers as the prevalence of data across organisation has increased and the tools and technologies used to ingest, transform, and serve data have become more specialised and loosely integrated.

In the same way that Data Engineering borrowed and took inspiration from Software Engineering for applying repeatable and scalable patterns and techniques to the pipelines that ingest and cleanse data, as well as the rigorous testing of those pipelines, Analytics Engineering has borrowed and taken inspiration from Software Engineering too.

Click through for the specifics of what an Analytics Engineer does.

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