Sean Gallardy answers a question:
I’ve been asked this question a few times, so I feel it’s worth writing about, which is, “Are Distributed Network Names (DNN) supported for SQL Server?”.
Read on for the answer.
Comments closedAuthor: Kevin Feasel
Alberto Ferrari takes us through key performance indicator creation in Power BI Desktop:
Starting from the July 2020 version, Power BI Desktop offers the possibility of using external tools to modify its internal Tabular model. With a tool like Tabular Editor, you can create a KPI directly in Power BI Desktop so that it can be used in any Power BI report and also by using the Analyze in Excel feature. The KPI feature was previously available only in Tabular models created in Analysis Services or Power BI Premium. This introductive article shows you how to create and consume KPIs in Power BI Desktop. A more detailed description of the available KPI graphics and the corresponding state values is the topic for an upcoming article.
Let us see the feature with a practical – though fictitious – example. Say Contoso needs to analyze the Margin % of its products. The yardstick is the overall margin, which is the Margin % over time and products with a tolerance of 2%. The overall margin of Contoso is 53%. Therefore, a category with a Margin % less than 51% is considered bad (red), over 55% is considered good (green), in between 51% and 55% is considered average (yellow). Moreover, Contoso wants to analyze the trend of Margin % compared with the previous year. For example, the margin might be red but Contoso can evaluate which action to take depending on whether it is improving or not over time.
Read on for the demonstration.
Comments closedHaroon Ashraf wraps up a series:
Being the final part of the article, it is going to take you to the next level of analyzing word documents stored in Windows folders, managed by File Table, and consumed by Semantic Search.
Additionally, the readers are going to gain more understanding of Semantic Search and how to make it work with MS Word documents for analysis.
This article provides a name-based analysis of the documents with equal attention to both theory and practice.
Click through for the culmination of all of this filestream work.
Comments closedUnmesha Sreeveni shows how you can create a widget in a Databricks notebook:
In order to get some inputs from user we will require widgets in our Azure Databricks notebook.
This blog helps you to create a text based widget in your python notebook.
The syntax is rather similar for Scala as well.
Comments closedMark Kromer clears up some issues around debugging in Azure Data Factory:
One of the important features built into ADF is the ability to quickly preview your data while designing your data flows and to execute the finished product against a sampling of data prior to finalizing and operationalizing your pipelines.
However, there are a few fundamentals relative to working with Joins that you should keep in mind and a few details below are important to understand at design time and while debugging / testing.
The answer makes sense but it would not have been the first thing to come to mind for me.
Comments closedMark Lelijveld walks us through something new in Power BI Desktop’s August 2020 update:
If you work or used to work with Analysis Services, you might know the perspectives functionality. It is a feature inside tabular modelling that allows you to define viewable subsets of a data model.
Each tabular model can include multiple perspectives, where each perspective can include a subset of tables, columns a measures. Especially with large enterprise models, perspectives can be very useful.
With perspectives, you can define specific perspectives to be defines for a specific target audience. For example, the author can create logical subsets of the model for each audience of the dataset. (e.g. Sales, Finance, Marketing, etc.) One thing must clear, perspectives are not object level security or any other kind of security! It is just a better way to view it.
Read on to see how you can create and work with these in Power BI Desktop.
Comments closedAaron Bertrand walks us through a painful scenario:
We recently performed a DDL operation against a SQL Server table – simply increasing the size of a varchar column – which should have been instantaneous. Instead, we killed the SQL Server process after observing 20 minutes of HARD_SYNC_COMMIT waits and a blocked replication log reader. Could this issue have been avoided? What went wrong?
I spotted the issue pretty quickly, but it’s easy to miss in a code review. Read the whole thing.
Comments closedEitan Blumin uses Extended Events to track activity:
Extended events provides a solution similar to client side trace. It basically can capture all events that a trace can capture (and more), and it also supports a wider choice of target types. And that, is where its true power lies.
It just so happens that Extended Events has a target type called “ring buffer“, and it gives us exactly what we need.
The ring buffer is easy to set up and if you don’t need permanence, works great.
Comments closedElizabeth Ricks asks and answers a question:
As the workplace shifts to more remote communication, a question we’ve been receiving frequently in our virtual workshops is “How many words should I put on my slides?”
The answer? It depends on how your audience is consuming the information.
Read on to get past the standard consultant’s answer of “It depends” and see upon what it depends.
Comments closedNagdev Amruthnath covers a topic which brings me joy:
Benford’s Law is one of the most underrated and widely used techniques that are commonly used in various applications. United States IRS neither confirms nor denies their use of Benford’s law to detect any number of manipulations in income tax filing. Across the Atlantic, the EU is very open and proudly claims its use of Benford’s law. Today, this is widely used in accounting to detect any fraud. Nigrini, a professor at the University of Cape Town, also used this law to identify financial discrepancies in Enron’s financial statement. In another case, Jennifer Golbeck, a professor at the University of Maryland, was able to identify bot accounts on twitter using Benford’s law. Xiaoyu Wang from the University of Winnipeg even published a report on how to use Benford’s law on images. In the rest of this article, we will take about Benford’s law and how it can be applied using R.
The applications to images and music were new to me. Very cool. H/T R-Bloggers
Comments closed