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Author: Kevin Feasel

The Power BI Icon Map Custom Visual

Published 2022-01-19 by Kevin Feasel

Alice Drummond shows off a custom visual in Power BI:

Working across the environmental industry – it’s fair to say that pretty much ALL of DiscoverEI’s Power BI reports have a map! And if you thought that MapBox was good, well you’re going to LOVE the Icon Map custom visual in Power BI – which allows you to display interactive polygons, points, lines and of course – icons, all in the one visual…plus so much more!

We’ve been using the Icon Map custom visual in Power BI for the last couple of years and it’s safe to say that it is hands down our favourite mapping visual for Power BI! This visual is created for free for the community by James Dales. James is always making updates and enhancements to the visual so the best place to get the latest version and some helpful instructions and tips on how to use it is from his dedicated website: https://icon-map.com/index.html. And while you’re there remember to shout James a coffee or 10 to say thanks for creating such a fantastic mapping visual

Click through for a few examples of the visual and be sure to check it out in the link above.

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CORRESPONDING and ANSI SQL

Published 2022-01-19 by Kevin Feasel

Lukas Eder looks at a rarely-implemented keyword in SQL:

I recently stumbled upon a standard SQL feature that was implemented, to my surprise, in HSQLDB. The keyword is CORRESPONDING, and it can be used with all set operations, including UNION, INTERSECT, and EXCEPT.

Click through to see what it does. Be sure to check out the comments, where Joe Celko pops in to provide some additional historical context to explain why you won’t find this keyword in many implementations of the standard..

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Configuring a Debezium Connector for Event Hub Streaming

Published 2022-01-18 by Kevin Feasel

Niels Berglund continues a series:

This series came about as I in the post How to Use Kafka Client with Azure Event Hubs, somewhat foolishly said:

An interesting point here is that it is not only your Kafka applications that can publish to Event Hubs but any application that uses Kafka Client 1.0+, like Kafka Connect connectors!

I wrote the above without testing it myself, so when I was called out on it, I started researching (read “Googling”) to see if it was possible. The result of the “Googling” didn’t give a 100% answer, so I decided to try it out, and this series is the result.

In the first post, – as mentioned – we configured Kafka Connect to connect into Event Hubs. In this post, we look at configuring the Debezium connector.

Click through and enjoy the fruits of Berglund’s Folly—which, as far as it goes, I’d still rate Seward’s Folly higher but this one’s pretty good too.

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Automating Azure SQL DB Maintenance with Data Factory

Published 2022-01-18 by Kevin Feasel

Hiten Bhavsar works around the lack of SQL Agent:

As we know, it’s crucial that you run Database maintenance regularly in order to keep your database performance up with the latest statistics and healthy indexes, here we provide another way to schedule this job using Azure Data Factory; this can be done on a scheduled time interval weekly/bi-weekly/monthly.

Click through for the process and try not to think too hard about this secretly being maintenance plans all over again.

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Auto-Failover Groups for Azure SQL Hyperscale

Published 2022-01-18 by Kevin Feasel

Melody Zacharias fills us in on a recent announcement:

On January 5th they announced, auto-failover groups for Azure SQL Hyperscale are now available in preview. Auto-failover groups is a feature that allows you to manage the failover and replication of a group of databases on a server or managed instance from one region to another region in Azure. This can be done manually or in conjunction with a user-defined policy. 

Click through for more information on how it all works.

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Extending Page Compression Checks

Published 2022-01-18 by Kevin Feasel

Eitan Blumin builds on a prior Paul Randal post:

So, here is my own expansion to Paul’s script, which adds the following:

* Outputs a remediation command to REBUILD each relevant index with ROW compression.

* The script has parameters for:

– Minimum number of compression attempts

– Maximum success rate percentage

– Index rebuild options

* The script outputs additional details such as:

– Whether the index/table in question is partitioned or not.

– Range-scan percentage

– Leaf-level updates percentage

* It runs the check for ALL accessible and writeable databases.

Click through for the script.

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Appending Date to File Name in SSIS

Published 2022-01-18 by Kevin Feasel

Jason Jenkins needs a dynamic filename:

In a recent project we needed to create an SSIS package to export data from a SQL Server table to a CSV file.  One of the requirements was to dynamically append the date to the file name each time a file was generated. This post will cover how to create a dynamic file name with the date included (YYYYMMDD format) in the file name.

Click through to see how. Hint: it’s expressions. It’s always expressions with SSIS.

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Simple Mapping Data Flows in Synapse

Published 2022-01-18 by Kevin Feasel

Joshuha Owen announces a new feature:

This week, we are excited to announce the public preview for Map Data, a new feature for Azure Synapse Analytics and Database Templates! The Map Data tool is a guided process to help users create ETL mappings and mapping data flows from their source data to Synapse lake database tables without writing code. This experience will help you get started with transformations into your Synapse Lake database quickly but still give you the power of Mapping Data Flows.

This process starts with the user choosing the destination tables in Synapse lake databases and then mapping their source data into these tables. We will be following up with a demo video shortly.

Click through for more details on how it works.

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Setting up a Power BI Workspace

Published 2022-01-18 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld has a new two-parter:

Time for a more governance related blog this time. It will be a series of two blogs, where in this first part, I will elaborate on the overall setup of your Power BI workspace and naming. The second part will continue about workspace permissions, sharing and ownership. I feel this is a wide topic and therefore deserves a separate blog.

In this part, focus on the overall setup of workspaces. In my work at various clients, I regularly encounter situations where there is a lot of confusion around workspaces, the scope of a workspace, audience and naming. A blog not only for Power BI tenant administrators, but also for passionate Power BI content creators to better understand each other’s standpoints.

Click through for part one and stay tuned for part two.

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