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Author: Kevin Feasel

Simplifying a Shrinkage Report

Published 2022-09-21 by Kevin Feasel

Mike Cisneros cleans up a complex visual made up of less complex visuals:

There are opportunities to improve this visual, but I appreciate that the graph is appropriately titled, that the legend is clear and easy to find, and that the most recent data point is the only one that is labeled. On its own, it’s an acceptable view of the data, albeit one that could be strengthened.

When this visual is considered in its greater context, however, the need to improve the legibility of this graph becomes obvious.

These charts are generated at multiple levels of geographic and thematic detail. Each one is then shared as part of one large report, with almost no visual variation from region to region, level to level, or week to week:

There’s a lot going for that redesign.

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Tracking Implicit Transactions with sp_whoisactive

Published 2022-09-21 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Darling is on the hunt:

But anyway, you should avoid implicit transactions as much as possible. They most often show up in the Microsoft JDBC driver queries that only people who hate you use.

When I first started to realize how bad they are, I wrote a bunch of checks into the Blitz scripts (I’ll cover those next week) that check for them.

I also opened an issue to add the check to sp_WhoIsActive, because it’s rather popular, I hear.

Click through to see how you can track them now. Also, Erik has been showcasing community procedures like sp_WhoIsActive, sp_PressureDetector, sp_QuickieStore, and sp_HumanEvents all month and he’s doing great work there.

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E-Mailing Power BI Query Outputs as CSV Files

Published 2022-09-21 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers finds a way:

I recently had a requirement from a customer where they wanted a list of all Customers and the Primary Contact to be emailed to them every day.

The reason for this to be emailed daily is to ensure that when calling the customer, they know whom to speak to.

This got me thinking and I could use Power Automate to achieve this task which I detail in this blog post below.

I appreciate the ingenuity involved in getting this to work, though this also presents a good case for having this data in a warehouse, where data export to CSV would be easier.

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Format_TimeSpan in KQL

Published 2022-09-20 by Kevin Feasel

Robert Cain continues a series on KQL:

If you refer back to my post Fun With KQL – DateTime Arithmetic, you may recall that when you perform any math with datetime data types, such as subtracting one date from another to get the amount of elapsed time, the resulting data type is a timespan.

In this post, we’ll see how to format timespan data types using the format_timespan function.

As always, Robert teaches by example here so go ahead and check that out.

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Keyboard Focus on Controls in Shiny

Published 2022-09-20 by Kevin Feasel

Thomas Williams wants to take control:

It is possible – though not the default – set set keyboard focus on load to a control in an R Markdown web page rendered with Shiny.

Setting keyboard focus when an R Markdown page is loaded is beneficial to users, who can start interacting with the page without having to first click the control.

Click through to learn how. This is one of the biggest losses we have in the GUI era: that you have a mouse necessitates using the mouse for everything. But that’s a “get off my lawn” rant for another day.

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Auto-Scaling SQL Managed Instances

Published 2022-09-20 by Kevin Feasel

Amanda Ibrahim answers a customer request:

If the customer needs to configure auto scaling for SQL Managed Instance, where the vCores can be increase and decrease automatically on specific time.

Read on to learn how. This can be useful for dev environments or places where your use case has “office hours”—that is, 90% of your activity takes place during a block of 4-12 hours—and you can afford the time in which the service is unavailable due to scaling.

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Tips for using Synapse Database Templates

Published 2022-09-20 by Kevin Feasel

James Serra provides some guidance:

I had previously blogged about Azure Synapse Analytics database templates, and wanted to follow-up with some notes and tips on that feature as I have been involved on a project that is using it:

– Purview does not yet pull in the metadata for database templates (table/field descriptions and table relationships). Right now it pulls in the metadata as if it was a SQL table or as if it was a file in ADLS. Both just have the basic information supported by those types. The SQL one is probably preferred

– Power BI does not import the table and field descriptions when connecting to a lake database (where the database templates are stored), but it does import the table relationships. You can see the table descriptions by hovering over the table names in the navigator when importing tables using the “Azure Synapse Analytics workspace (Beta)” connector. Note you are not able to see the table descriptions when hovering over the table names using the “Azure Synapse Analytics SQL” connector. Also note the “Select Related Tables” button does not work in the navigator

Click through for more notes from the field.

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Getting Started with SQL Server

Published 2022-09-20 by Kevin Feasel

Lee Markum helps out people new to SQL Server:

I see a lot of questions on data related Reddit forums and data science groups on LinkedIn about how to get started with SQL. Certainly these people mean that they want to learn the SQL language. I don’t think you can do that long term without setting up a home lab. You need your own place to experiment beyond what you can do in an online tutorial where you’re typing into a web browser, for example.

By the time you finish this post, you will be able to install SQL Server for use as a home lab for learning T-SQL and administration of the server environment.

Click through for a step-by-step guide. There’s a lot to learn after walking through this guide but you’ve got to start somewhere.

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