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Author: Kevin Feasel

Tips for Improving Power BI Dashboards

Published 2020-07-01 by Kevin Feasel

Tino Zishiri has a set of tips to design better-looking dashboards:

There are several reasons why you should design great looking dashboards. Here are a few;

– They make information more accessible – end users benefit from an intuitive design that makes insight easy to obtain so they can make informed decisions.
– They help convey your message – you’re in a better position to tell a coherent story. Applying design principles can also help accentuate your message. My colleague Kalina Ivanova has written an excellent series of blogs on Data Storytelling with Power BI.
– They encourage user adoption – if a report is useful to users and has a great look and feel then you’re winning.

In this blog, I’ll briefly cover the building blocks that make up a good Power BI dashboard. I then explore the stepping stones that will level up your dashboard and take it from good to great.

One area where I do have some disagreement is that the Z and F layouts are fine for text-heavy formats, but generally “text-heavy” and “dashboard” don’t go together very well. My preference is the notion of focal points (go about 3/4 of the way down, to the section entitled “Where We Look”), which works much better at describing eye behavior for image-heavy layouts. That aside, I like this post a lot.

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Keep Parameter Sniffing On

Published 2020-07-01 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar explains why you should keep parameter sniffing on:

What they THINK is going to happen is that SQL Server will do an OPTION(RECOMPILE) on every incoming query, building fresh plans each time. That ain’t how this works at all, and instead, I wish this “feature”‘s name was “Parameter Blindfolding.” Here’s what it really does.

Read on for the explanation. In reality, parameter sniffing is almost always a good thing. It’s when you have major skews in data that you even have to think about parameter sniffing being a problem.

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Cost-Cutting in Confluent Platform

Published 2020-06-30 by Kevin Feasel

Nick Bryan shares some techniques for reducing the cost of running on Confluent Platform:

To start, there are several Confluent Platform features that can greatly reduce your Kafka cluster’s infrastructure footprint. For use cases involving high data ingestion rates, lengthy data retention periods, or stringent disaster recovery requirements, Confluent Platform can help to reduce infrastructure costs by up to 50%.

One of the most important features for this cost category is Tiered Storage.

Read on for a few tips.

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Good Practices for Naming Things in Power BI

Published 2020-06-30 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb shares some thoughts on the power of names:

What’s wrong with this picture? Look at the names:

– The tables and columns have the same names that they had in the data source, in this case a SQL Server database. Note the table name prefixes of “Dim” for dimensions and “Fact” for fact tables.
– The column and measure names either don’t have spaces or use underscores instead of spaces.
– What on earth does the measure name _PxSysF even mean?

Chris mentions that some of the ideas in the post may be controversial, but to be honest, I don’t think any of them are. The important thing here is to keep your audience in mind.

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Mounting a Disk Image in Powershell

Published 2020-06-30 by Kevin Feasel

Jack Vamvas shows us how we can mount a disk image from ISO in Powershell:

I want to set up a script to Mount a Disk in an automated way utilising Powershell ? The image exists as an ISO on a network path and requires to be made available as a drive letter & path. It doesn’t have to be a dedicated drive letter – just the next letter after the highest. So for example , if I already have E:, F:,G:  than I want it to be set as I: 

For no extra charge, Jack also shows us how to dismount a disk image.

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Another Way to Calculate Elapsed Business Hours with DAX

Published 2020-06-30 by Kevin Feasel

Matt Allington follows up on a previous post:

Then, sometimes (like this time) I discover that someone has a better way to solve the same problem that I shared on my blog. This is what happened last week after I shared my first article about how to calculate the total business hours between 2 date/time stamps. I shared the way I solved this problem last week, but one of my readers, Daniil Bogomazov, shared a brilliant alternative solution to the same problem. The solution is so good that I am sharing his solution with you here today.

Read on for a clever solution and a detailed comparison to Matt’s prior answer.

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Backups on AWS RDS

Published 2020-06-30 by Kevin Feasel

Grant Fritchey shows how you can back up a database on Amazon’s RDS:

Which results in the following:

Msg 262, Level 14, State 1, Line 1
BACKUP DATABASE permission denied in database ‘HamShackRadio’.
Msg 3013, Level 16, State 1, Line 1
BACKUP DATABASE is terminating abnormally.

Completion time: 2020-06-26T08:34:23.5511314-04:00

In short, by default, you can’t backup SQL Server databases on RDS. However, that’s by default. We can make some changes.

Read on to see the proper way of backing up a database hosted in RDS.

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