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Author: Kevin Feasel

Using Powershell in Azure Cloud Shell

Published 2021-09-28 by Kevin Feasel

Hope Foley shows how you can set up Powershell to be your Azure Cloud Shell language of choice:

Part of my job is doing POCs with customers to help with Azure Data Services.  Anything that helps me move quicker is helpful so I’m a tad bit obsessed with automating things.  I have used PowerShell for more years than I’m willing to admit to help me automate what I can.  There are a lot of ways to automate things like ARM templates and DevOps, but PoSH has been my preferred hammer.  As much as I love it, I’ve ran into issue sometimes with installing modules locally on folks machines and not to mention if they have a Mac.  I wondered recently if Azure Cloud Shell would help make things easier, and it very much did and I’m super pumped to share!  This post will help run through how to get setup to run PowerShell scripts in Azure.

For people who prefer Powershell to bash, check it out.

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Excel PivotTable Drillthrough

Published 2021-09-28 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari show how you can control drillthrough when using PivotTables in Excel:

When you double-click on a cell in an Excel PivotTable, you invoke the drillthrough feature of the PivotTable which shows the underlying data for that particular cell. This feature was initially designed for Multidimensional databases in Analysis Services. In a Multidimensional model, it is also possible to add different drillthrough actions that can be activated through the context menu in Excel. While the customization of actions is not feasible for a Tabular model, the drillthrough feature is active by default. It returns all the rows visible through the filter context in the table that includes the measure definition. In many scenarios, this default behavior does not provide a result consistent with the data computed in the result that you see visible. Through the Detail Rows Expression property of a measure in the Tabular model, you can customize the drillthrough behavior in Excel, thus controlling the rows and columns returned to the user.

This article explains how to use the Detail Rows Expression property to customize the Excel drillthrough behavior for a PivotTable connected to a Power BI dataset or an Analysis Services database – they can be identified as Tabular models in the remaining part of this article.

Read on for a demonstration, plenty of explanation, and even some elucidation.

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Databricks Notebook Discovery via Notebooks

Published 2021-09-27 by Kevin Feasel

Darin McBeth creates a meta-noterbook to keep track of notebooks:

Elsevier has been a customer of Databricks for about six years. There are now hundreds of users and tens of thousands of notebooks across their workspace. To some extent, Elsevier’s Databricks users have been a victim of their own success, as there are now too many notebooks to search through to find some earlier work.

The Databricks workspace does provide a keyword search, but we often find the need to define advanced search criteria, such as creator, last updated, programming language, notebook commands and results.

Interestingly, we managed to achieve this functionality using a 100% notebook-based solution with Databricks functionalities. As you will see, this makes it easy to set up in a customer’s Databricks environment.

Read on to see how.

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Partitioning vs Bucketing in Hive

Published 2021-09-27 by Kevin Feasel

The Hadoop in Real World team explains the difference between partitioning and bucketing in Apache Hive tables:

Now let’s say you also filter the sales record by sku (stock-keeping unit aka. barcode)  in addition to sale_date and country. Creating a partition on sku will result in many partitions which is not ideal as it might result in uneven and smaller partitions.

Hadoop is not efficient in processing small volumes of data. There is a better way.

Read on to understand when each technique makes sense.

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Using Query Labels in Azure Synapse Analytics

Published 2021-09-27 by Kevin Feasel

Gauri Mahajan shows one of the pieces of functionality in Azure Synapse Analytics dedicated SQL pools that I’d like to see on-premises:

Azure Synapse supports a concept known as “query labels” that allows tagging any DDL or DML queries that are executed on the dedicated SQL pool. These labels can be queried using the dynamic management views (DMVs). One can use these labels to describe the purpose of the query or add any metadata to the query being executed and the same can be used later for instrumenting the queries, specifically to identify the queries that meet the desired search criteria. Let’s walk through a step-by-step exercise to understand this concept practically.

Click through for the process.

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SQL Server Environment Variable Files in Containers

Published 2021-09-27 by Kevin Feasel

Andrew Pruski shows how you can pre-set environment variables when building a SQL Server on Linux container:

Do we really want to be typing all that out every time we run a container? Ok, we could drop this into a script and execute that but another option is to use environment variable files.

Nice and simple, we take all the environment variables in the statement above and drop them into a file on our Docker host: –

Read on and gauge for yourself how nice and simple it is.

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Setting File Permissions inside a SQL Server Container

Published 2021-09-27 by Kevin Feasel

Anthony Nocentino wants to set some permissions:

This post will walk you through setting file permissions on database files copied into a container. The SQL Server process sqlservr running in containers runs as the non-privileged user mssql. The appropriate permissions on files are needed, so the SQL Server process has the proper access to any database files, log files, and backup files.

Click through for the process.

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Toggling Word Wrap in SSMS

Published 2021-09-27 by Kevin Feasel

Ronen Ariely shows how to enable word wrap in SQL Server Management Studio:

Line breaking, also known as word wrapping, is breaking the displayed of a section of text into lines so that the text will fit into the available width of the editor. When writing queries this feature is not so useful as breaking the script line may make the query less readable, but when writing long comments this feature become one of the most useful feature. 

This post simply shows you how to use word-wrap by default or add a command button to Toggle Word Wrap – it’s a built-in feature which is less known and if you did not used it yet, then it is time to use the power of word wrap

Because T-SQL is not line or whitespace sensitive, my preference is to break lines well before they hit the point where word wrap makes sense. But if you’re working with some lengthy lines of code or on a low-resolution laptop, this can help a lot.

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