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Author: Kevin Feasel

Dynamic Date Column Headers in Power BI

Published 2020-08-27 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers shows how we can display the last several days as column headers:

I find I do love a good challenge and I find that I get them frequently. I also enjoy sharing what I have learnt with others.

In this blog post I am going to show you how I found a way to create Dynamic Date Column Headers for Tables or Matrixes in Power BI.

Below is what it looks like once completed. What I did was to create a matrix with the last 5 Days (Showing each date for the last 5 days) and then along with this an MTD calculation which shows not only the header of MTD but it includes the current months values.

This is an interesting one for sure. Read on to see how Gilbert solved the problem.

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Recursion in T-SQL

Published 2020-08-27 by Kevin Feasel

Bert Wagner takes us through writing recursive statements in T-SQL:

Recursive queries are fun to plan and write. They can be frustrating too depending on the complexity of the problem you are trying to solve.

This post shows one solution for finding all records that are related, either directly or via intermediate records, using recursive queries in SQL Server.

When you know the data size will be fairly small and performance isn’t critical, recursion can be an elegant solution to a data access problem.

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Working with Read-Only Endpoints in Azure SQL Database

Published 2020-08-27 by Kevin Feasel

Arun Sirpal takes us through one method for improving performance in Azure SQL Database:

One of the main benefits of configuring active geo-replication for Azure SQL Database is leveraging the read-only endpoint, a good technique to split away read only activity from OLTP based workloads. This means that there is no reason why you cannot point users to these databases via tools such as Power BI as highlighted below.

But there are some things to keep in mind, as Arun points out.

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MLOPS in R with GitHub Actions

Published 2020-08-26 by Kevin Feasel

David Smith explains MLOPS and GitHub actions in a talk:

In the talk, I demonstrate the process in action (the demo starts at the 14:30 mark in the video below). I used Visual Studio Code to edit the app.R file in repository, and then pushed the changes to GitHub. That immediately triggered the action to deploy the updated file via SSH to the Shiny Server, running in a remote VM. Similarly, changes to the data file or to the R script files implementing the logistic regression model would trigger the model to be retrained in the cluster, and re-deploy the endpoint to deliver new predictions from the updated model.

Click through for a quick summary, link to the repo, and embedded video of the talk.

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The %tensorboard Magic Command in Databricks Notebooks

Published 2020-08-26 by Kevin Feasel

Jerry Liang and Hossein Falaki introduce a new magic command in Databricks Runtime 7.2:

In 2017, we released the  dbutils.tensorboard.start() API to manage and use TensorBoard inside Databricks python notebooks. This API only permits one active TensorBoard process on a cluster at any given time – which hinders multi-tenant use-cases. Early last year, TensorBoard released its own API for notebooks via the %tensorboard python magic command. This API not only starts TensorBoard processes but also exposes the TensorBoard’s command line arguments in the notebook environment. In addition, it embeds the TensorBoard UI inside notebooks, whereas the dbutils.tensorboard.start API prints a link to open TensorBoard in a new tab.

Read on to see how you can use it.

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Power BI Fonts and Dyslexia

Published 2020-08-26 by Kevin Feasel

David Eldersveld has some tips to make it easier to read your dashboards:

Power BI font selection is currently limited to about two dozen choices. These include a mix of serif versus sans serif, monospaced versus not monospaced, bold versus light, and more. While I do not have a definitive list of specific fonts–and I would love additional input from readers who live with dyslexia–there are some preferred font choices as well as choices to avoid when designing Power BI reports.

Click through for good recommendations regardless of whether any of your dashboard viewers are dyslexic.

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Creating a Fail-Safe Agent in SQL Server

Published 2020-08-26 by Kevin Feasel

Garry Bargsley wants the buck to stop somewhere:

Did you know it is possible for SQL Server Agent to  alert you of problems if something goes haywire with your Agent? Have you ever had an issue with Alerts not being sent after critical events? Then you might need to configure the SQL Server Agent Fail-Safe Operator to save the day. A Fail-Safe WHAT you might say?? This is a special SQL Agent Operator configured in the SQL Agent Alert System in the chance any of the following situations occur.

Click through for the situations as well as configuration steps using Powershell + dbatools.

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