Press "Enter" to skip to content

Author: Kevin Feasel

Develop BDC PySpark Jobs in Visual Studio Code

Published 2019-09-09 by Kevin Feasel

Jenny Jiang announces a new capability in Visual Studio Code:

With the Visual Studio Code extension, you can enjoy native Python programming experiences such as linting, debugging support, language service, and so on. You can run current line, run selected lines of code, or run all for your PY file. You can import and export a .ipynb notebook and perform a notebook like query including Run Cell, Run Above, or Run Below. You can also enjoy a notebook like interactive experience that includes your source code and markdown comments along with the running results and output. You can remove the unneeded sections, enter comments, or type additional code in the interactive results window. Moreover, you can visualize your results in a graphic format through a matplotlib like Jupyter Notebook. The integration with SQL Server 2019 Big Data Clusters empowers you to quickly submit a PySpark batch job to the big data cluster and monitor job progress.

This is rather useful for developers, though I greatly prefer the Azure Data Studio notebook interface.

Comments closed

Determining Instant File Initialization Status

Published 2019-09-09 by Kevin Feasel

Dave Mason gives us a couple of methods for determining whether we turned Instant File Initialization on:

Here’s a little tidbit I wanted to share regarding the Perform Volume Maintenance Tasks security setting. In the SQL Server world, this is often referred to as IFI. On more recent versions of SQL (SQL 2012 SP4 or later, I believe), you can verify if IFI is enabled or not for the database engine logon account by checking the error log.

That’s one, but click through for the technique you can easily script out.

Comments closed

Goodbye, Powershell 5.1 Ad

Published 2019-09-09 by Kevin Feasel

Chrissy LeMaire has a Powershell ad blocker:

I really abhor the new ad in the PowerShell 5.1 console and it seems there’s no hope of Microsoft making it go away.

After a long, involved Twitter conversation with the community and the PowerShell team that confirmed it’s impossible for the advertisement (?!) to be easily removed, it looks like the only solution is to bypass it. Przemysław Kłys has a great suggestion to emulate the old prompt that totally works!

Click through for that solution.

Comments closed

Reporting Services and SPNs

Published 2019-09-09 by Kevin Feasel

Greg Dodd shares a couple tips on creating SPNs for SQL Server Reporting Services:

Reporting Services often requires an SPN assigned to the account running the Reporting Services Service. You’ll know that you need to set this up when you try connecting to your Reporting Services instance from within the same domain and you are prompted for credentials. If SPN’s are setup correctly then your browser will work out the authentication for you and your users won’t need to login again.

Read on for an example, but also a pitfall and how to avoid it.

Comments closed

Intellisense and the DAC

Published 2019-09-09 by Kevin Feasel

Slava Murygin doesn’t like severity 20 errors just popping up for no good reason:

Yesterday I’ve needed to use Dedicated Administrator Connection (DAC) once in a while, and because I have all kinds of notifications in my system, I immediately got an “Severity 20” alert.

As you probably know, Severity 20 Errors “Indicate system problems and are fatal errors” (See books online: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/errors-events/database-engine-error-severities?view=sql-server-2017)

Even though “Severity 20” does not indicate any problems with data and belong only to a user process it is still worth to investigate the problem.

Read on to see the cause of Slava’s problem and how there’s no way to fix it in SSMS.

Comments closed

Progressive Disclosure

Published 2019-09-06 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld continues a series on storytelling with Power BI:

Progressive disclosure
It is all about giving that little bit more insights which can be done in many ways. For example, you want to show the sales by product category, which you’ve put in a bar chart. Looking at these bars, you might be interested in the number of manufactures involved in these sales amounts for product category. You can create a stacked barchart representing the different manufacturers in a legend. Or you can use another chart in your report to represent the top 5 products, which will interact with the sales over time chart. But both options will use additional space on your report canvas and look a bit messy, which can distract the users of where it is all about.

Marc is wrapping up the series and it’s worth the read.

Comments closed

Tuning YARN

Published 2019-09-06 by Kevin Feasel

Dmitry Tolpeko helps us tune YARN settings:

Sometimes it may take a few iterations to find the proper container size, but usually it helps and the query succeeds.

But what if you set the container size 4096 MB or 8192 MB but the query could complete successfully even with 2048 MB?

Read on to learn more.

Comments closed

On-Prem Data, Azure Apps

Published 2019-09-06 by Kevin Feasel

Jamie Wick helps us figure out how to keep our data local while using Azure services:

One of the challenges many organizations face when beginning to work with Azure applications (PowerBI, PowerApps, Flow, etc.) is that their data is on-premise and the applications are hosted in the cloud. Moving the data to the cloud is often cost-prohibitive and there can be operational requirements that prevent the data, or the systems hosting it, from being relocated to the cloud.

So, how can on-prem data be used with Azure apps?

Read on for more.

Comments closed

Processing JSON in Biml

Published 2019-09-06 by Kevin Feasel

Bill Fellows takes us through a library which (seemingly by law) must be in every .NET project:

#sqlhelp #biml I would have the metadata in a Json structure. How would you parse the json in the C# BIML Script? I was thinking use Newtonsoft.Json but I don’t know how to add the reference to it

Adding external assemblies is a snap but here I’ll show how to use the NewtonSoft Json library to parse a Json based metadata structure and then use that in our Biml.

Click through to learn how.

Comments closed