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Author: Kevin Feasel

Using Power BI Powershell Cmdlets

Published 2023-01-17 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad explains the value of the Power BI Powershell cmdlet set:

Power BI has a set of PowerShell Cmdlets that help automate part of the operations with Power BI. However, PowerShell is not a commonly familiar technology. In the world of Power BI, we are used to working with graphical options and settings provided in the tools and the service. However, using commands provided for Power BI in a command/scripting tool such as PowerShell can be an excellent asset for a Power BI administrator, architect, and developer. In this article and video, you will learn about the PowerShell Cmdlets for Power BI, what they are, how they can be helpful, and examples of using them.

There are more modules than I expected there to be and Reza does a good job of walking through them.

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Spark Structured Streaming with Synapse

Published 2023-01-16 by Kevin Feasel

Ryan Adams builds a demo:

In this post we are going to look at an example of streaming IoT temperature data in Synapse Spark.  I have an IoT device that will stream temperature data from two sensors to IoT hub. We’ll use Synapse Spark to process the data, and finally write the output to persistent storage. Here is what our architecture will look like: 

Click through for the architectural diagram and step-by-step on how to put the demo together.

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The Cost of Ignoring GDPR

Published 2023-01-16 by Kevin Feasel

Matthew McGiffen looks at the fines:

The biggest fines (both individually and in total) have been levied for improper use of data, with Amazon, WhatsApp, Google and Facebook topping the list. After that though we have fines for insufficient protection of data. In most cases this is where companies have had some form of data breach and the safeguards in place weren’t deemed sufficient. The largest fine in this case was against British Airways who were hacked in 2018 and they received a fine of over 22 million euros for the lack of safeguards. That was calculated as 1.5% of the company’s turnover in 2017.

Read on for a summary of fines by violation type, more detail, and a link to the core data.

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The Problem with Tornado Graphs

Published 2023-01-16 by Kevin Feasel

Rita Fainshtein takes a beloved chart and gives it the beating it rightfully deserves:

In the picture above, you can see the execution of the budget on the right (blue), and the budget amount on the left (orange).

This interesting and special graph can be perfectly integrated into any business dashboard.

But does it let you know where the company stands in relation to its budget?

No, it is not. An optimistic view would be challenging, if not misleading.

Click through for more info and alternative ways of displaying this. In fairness, the area where I like seeing tornado charts is a categorical comparison, not a time series comparison, of two things. For example, during a head-to-head matchup in a sporting event, a tornado chart showing relevant stats about each side (or a star player on each side) tends to work reasonably well. Yeah, there are still clearer ways of showing the results in that case, but these have a soft spot in my heart for that specific use case.

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Setting CPU Affinity (Correctly)

Published 2023-01-16 by Kevin Feasel

Taiob Ali does something out of the ordinary:

Setting CPU affinity in SQL Server is not a task you do every day. Rarely are there use cases when you need to do that. I had a recent requirement to do it. We plan to replace a physical server with half of its current CPU. Primarily due to faster CPU and workload moved off of SQL Server to other cloud services. To test, we needed to set the CPU affinity mask in one of our non-production servers. In the research, I learned about the side effect of setting CPU affinity mask, which is nicely explained in this ( by Klaus Aschenbrenner) and this (by Adam Denby) blog post.

Click through to learn more about the process.

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Avoiding Dynamic Data Sources Error with OData.Feed

Published 2023-01-16 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb avoids an error altogether:

In my last post I showed how, in many cases, you can avoid the “dynamic data sources” error with OData data sources by taking advantage of query folding. That’s not always possible though and in this post I’ll show you how you can use the Query option of the OData.Feed function to do so instead.

As always, Chris provides some nice detail and good examples.

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Using the Native Pipe in R 4.1+

Published 2023-01-13 by Kevin Feasel

Michael Mayer shows off the native R pipe:

What does the pipe do? It puts the object on its left as the first argument into the function on its right: iris %>% head() is a funny way of writing head(iris). It helps to avoid long function chains like f(g(h(x))), or repeated assignments.

In 2021 and version 4.1, R has received its native forward pipe operator |> so that we can write nice code like this:

Tying pipe syntax all back together, the magrittr pipe %>% was (as I recall) built with the F# pipe |> in mind. In R 4.1 and later, the built-in pipe is |>, as is right and natural in this world. Regardless, do check the comment before trying out this code, as it appear to work for R 4.2 and later, though not 4.1.

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Reviewing the Power BI Admin Portal

Published 2023-01-13 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad looks at administrative options:

In the world of Power BI, there are some configurations in the Desktop tool and some on the Service. One of these critical configurations is the Tenant Settings of the Power BI administrator panel. Tenant settings have a list of highly important configurations across your Power BI tenant. If you miss configuring the settings properly, it may result in leaking the data, authorizing people who should not be authorized to see reports and many other catastrophic scenarios. In this article and video, you will learn the configurations available in Tenant settings and the recommended options for each. If you want to learn more about Power BI, read the Power BI book from Rookie to Rock Star.

Click through for a video, as well as a detailed description of what’s available in the admin portal.

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Writing Tests with shinytest2

Published 2023-01-13 by Kevin Feasel

Russ Hyde continues a series on shinytest2:

Here, we will write a simple shiny app (as an R package) and show how to generate tests for this app using {shinytest2}. As discussed in the previous post, {shinytest2} tests your app as if a user was interacting with it in their browser. The tests generated are application-focussed rather than component-focussed and so give some overall guarantees on how the app should behave.

This post is slightly more technical than the last, and assumes that the reader is comfortable with creating and unit-testing packages in R, and with shiny development in general.

Click through to see the code, as well as plenty of explanation.

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Troubleshooting High I/O Usage on Azure SQL DB

Published 2023-01-13 by Kevin Feasel

Etienne Lopes troubleshoots a strange issue:

After the downsizing (to GeneralPurpose: Standard-series (Gen5), 2 vCores) occasionally there were timeouts in the application for a very specific task (the command timeout property in the application was set to 30 seconds). Other times the very same task would execute immediately, as it should always, since the underlying query was actually quite simple: a SELECT to a single, although large table (58 GB) but with a predicate that would always result in a perfect index seek to return never more than 300 rows. Furthermore each time there were timeouts, there were also momentary I/O spikes up to 100%:

Read on to learn more about what caused this problem and how Etienne was able to resolve it.

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