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Author: Kevin Feasel

Splatting in Powershell

Published 2020-08-14 by Kevin Feasel

Mark Wilkinson describes splatting in Powershell and shows how you can use it to handle optional parameters:

I have to start of by saying I hate the name “splatting”. I didn’t come up with it, and I don’t like using it, but it’s the only word we have. Splatting is a way to pass parameter values to a function using a single array or hashtable. In this post we’ll be talking about hashtables because I think it is the more useful of the two.

Splatting is easy to explain in an example. 

And then that’s exactly what Mark gives us. Click through for the example as well as how you can set those optional parameters.

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Blocking Classic Workspaces in Power BI

Published 2020-08-14 by Kevin Feasel

Adam Saxton points out something new in Power BI:

The ability to BLOCK classic workspaces from being created in Power BI is finally here! Adam shows you how to implement and what to consider. Create Microsoft Teams without the worry!

Click through for a video as well as the Power BI blog post describing this. You can also tell that Adam has the heart of a DBA based on the level of excitement around blocking something. DBAs and goalies, I tell you.

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Overriding SSRS Authentication

Published 2020-08-14 by Kevin Feasel

Eitan Blumin doesn’t like the SSRS authentication prompt:

In this post, I hope to summarize the various methods that we have, in order to get rid of that annoying authentication prompt. Each method has its own advantages and disadvantages in terms of complexity of implementation, versatility, and the level of security that it provides. More specifically: the more secure and versatile a method is – the more complicated it is to implement.

Read on for four such techniques, as well as a bonus technique.

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Web-Optimized ggplot2 Themes

Published 2020-08-13 by Kevin Feasel

Petr Baranovskiy shares a few new themes:

This will be a very short post compared to the detailed stuff I usually write. Just what it says on the tin – I made some tweaks to my three favorite {ggplot2} themes – theme_bw(), theme_classic(), and theme_void() – to make the graphics more readable and generally look better when posted online, particularly in blog posts. Please feel free to borrow and use.

Also, I will be frequently using these themes in subsequent posts, and I’d like to be able to point readers here with a hyperlink instead of repeatedly posting the whole theme_web_…() code every time I am writing a post.

Click through for the definition of each theme. H/T R-Bloggers

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Methods and Functions in Python

Published 2020-08-13 by Kevin Feasel

Sairam Uppugundla distinguishes methods from functions in Python:

Function and method both look similar as they perform in an almost similar way, but the key difference is the concept of ‘Class and its Object’. Functions can be called only by its name, as it is defined independently. But methods cannot be called by its name only we need to invoke the class by reference of that class in which it is defined, that is, the method is defined within a class and hence they are dependent on that class.

Read on to see how to create each, as well as more details on types of functions.

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Sending an E-Mail with SQL Agent Job Outputs

Published 2020-08-13 by Kevin Feasel

Thomas Rushton shows how to send an e-mail with the outputs of a SQL Agent job:

I came across a need for SQL Server Agent job output to be emailed out to the developer who created the code that the job was running. For various reasons, they don’t necessarily have access to the SQL Server itself – hurrah – but need to see what’s being generated by their scripts in case something goes wrong.

So, I ended up writing this extremely rough and ready SP

Rough and ready, but it works.

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Azure Data Studio August 2020 Release

Published 2020-08-13 by Kevin Feasel

Alan Yu announces the most recent set of changes around Azure Data Studio:

The notebooks viewlet in Azure Data Studio now includes a dynamic search experience. When you are dealing with hundreds of notebooks, it can be tricky navigating and finding the notebook you need. With this experience, we make it faster to search through notebook content.

Once notebooks are listed in the Notebooks viewlet, users can easily search for content across all notebooks and see how many instances the search term appears in a certain notebook. You can then interact with the notebook.

It’s a notebook-heavy month.

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Securing Application Secrets with Azure Key Vault

Published 2020-08-13 by Kevin Feasel

Rishit Mishra walks us through Azure Key Vault:

As the name suggests, Azure Key Vault is used to store and manage keys securely. Key Vault can be used to store the cryptographic secrets and keys such as authentication keys, storage account keys, data encryption keys, passwords and certificates.

Azure Key Vault enables developers to create the keys for development and testing in minutes, and they can further migrate this setup seamlessly onto the production environment.

The centralized key store/vault can be securely managed by the Key Vault owner who manages permissions to this key store and would be responsible for keeping the secrets secure.

Key Vault becomes quite useful in managing secrets in tools like Azure Databricks and Azure Data Factory without saving a bunch of keys in configuration files. And it’s a lot safer than that option, too.

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Hardcoding Calculation Groups in a Measure

Published 2020-08-13 by Kevin Feasel

Kasper de Jonge works around a limitation with the Power BI UI and calculation groups:

AS we have seen calculation groups are great :). It offers amazing flexibility and is extremely easy to maintain. But sometimes it doesn’t do what you want due the limitations of the visuals. Let’s say I want to have a visual that shows me the sales of current year and sales Previous year on different axis (let’s say as line).

You would create something like the visual below where you want to use the same measure but apply different calc groups for each measure. But unfortunately, below visual is not as we want it to be.

But Kasper has us covered with a bit of DAX, so check that out.

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A Trillion-Row Operator

Published 2020-08-13 by Kevin Feasel

Joe Obbish sets up a challenge:

48 billion rows for a single operator is certainly a large number for most workloads. I ended up completely missing the point and started wondering how quickly a query could process a trillion rows through a single operator. Eventually that led to a SQL performance challenge: what is the fastest that you can get an actual plan with at least one operator processing a trillion rows? The following rules are in play:

1. Start with no user databases
2. Any query can run up to MAXDOP 8
3. Temp tables may be created and populated but all such work needs to finish in 30 seconds or less
4. A RECOMPILE query hint must be present in the final query
5. Undocumented features and behavior are fair game

Read on to see what Joe learned.

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