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Category: Administration

Building a Power BI Audit Log

Published 2023-01-19 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad analyzes Power BI logs in Power BI:

Power BI dashboard and reports come with a usage metric, which you can see how users used this content. There is another report for usage metrics across the entire tenant, which you can see if you have access to the Power BI Administrator account under Admin Panel in the Power BI Service. However, what if you want to create your own detailed usage metrics report across the entire tenant? How if you want to see across all workspaces in the tenant, how was the consumption of reports and dashboards? Who created reports, who are users of them, in which workspace these are located and etc. This information is not easily accessible in the Power BI Service. In this article and video, I will show you how to extract the Audit log from Office 365, export it into text files, and create a Power BI report from it, or in other words, How to create your custom usage metrics report across the tenant. If you like to learn more about Power BI, read the Power BI book from Rookie to Rock Star.

Click through for a video as well as the full blog post.

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Using Power BI Powershell Cmdlets

Published 2023-01-17 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad explains the value of the Power BI Powershell cmdlet set:

Power BI has a set of PowerShell Cmdlets that help automate part of the operations with Power BI. However, PowerShell is not a commonly familiar technology. In the world of Power BI, we are used to working with graphical options and settings provided in the tools and the service. However, using commands provided for Power BI in a command/scripting tool such as PowerShell can be an excellent asset for a Power BI administrator, architect, and developer. In this article and video, you will learn about the PowerShell Cmdlets for Power BI, what they are, how they can be helpful, and examples of using them.

There are more modules than I expected there to be and Reza does a good job of walking through them.

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Setting CPU Affinity (Correctly)

Published 2023-01-16 by Kevin Feasel

Taiob Ali does something out of the ordinary:

Setting CPU affinity in SQL Server is not a task you do every day. Rarely are there use cases when you need to do that. I had a recent requirement to do it. We plan to replace a physical server with half of its current CPU. Primarily due to faster CPU and workload moved off of SQL Server to other cloud services. To test, we needed to set the CPU affinity mask in one of our non-production servers. In the research, I learned about the side effect of setting CPU affinity mask, which is nicely explained in this ( by Klaus Aschenbrenner) and this (by Adam Denby) blog post.

Click through to learn more about the process.

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Reviewing the Power BI Admin Portal

Published 2023-01-13 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad looks at administrative options:

In the world of Power BI, there are some configurations in the Desktop tool and some on the Service. One of these critical configurations is the Tenant Settings of the Power BI administrator panel. Tenant settings have a list of highly important configurations across your Power BI tenant. If you miss configuring the settings properly, it may result in leaking the data, authorizing people who should not be authorized to see reports and many other catastrophic scenarios. In this article and video, you will learn the configurations available in Tenant settings and the recommended options for each. If you want to learn more about Power BI, read the Power BI book from Rookie to Rock Star.

Click through for a video, as well as a detailed description of what’s available in the admin portal.

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Start and Stop for Managed Instances

Published 2023-01-12 by Kevin Feasel

Arun Sirpal pushes the big red button:

We all would like to save money when operating in the cloud, Microsoft has released a stop / start concept for SQL Managed Instances – preview mode!

At the time of writing, the Managed Instance needs to be built from the November wave where you will see the functionality in the overview section and it has to be in the General purpose tier. If you have managed links or failover groups then you cant use this feature.

There is a kicker, however, which makes this a less-than-pleasant option. Arun has more detail.

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Creating a DNS Alias for a Dedicated SQL Pool

Published 2023-01-10 by Kevin Feasel

Resham Popli creates an alias:

This blog will walk through the details on how to enable custom DNS (Domain Name System) entries on an Azure Synapse dedicated pool inside an Azure Synapse workspace in case of disaster recovery.

The DNS alias provides a translation layer that can redirect your client programs to different servers. This layer spares you the difficulties of having to find and edit all the clients and their connection strings (in disaster recovery implementation). This is not supported out-of-box, so we need to take extra steps to enable this feature. There are some limitations, so please read these steps carefully.

Read on to learn how and what those limitations are.

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Timeouts Importing a Bacpac File

Published 2023-01-10 by Kevin Feasel

Jose Manuel Jurado Diaz hits one of the three most annoying parts of dealing with bacpac files:

Today, I worked on a service request that our customer got the following error message: Execution Timeout Expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding importing a bacpac file, in this situation, was at the moment that SQLPackage was enabling (rebuilding) an index, for example, Enabling index ‘IX_MyIndex’…

The other two are, of course, getting one to export without any errors and getting one to export without timing out.

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When Shrinking Makes Sense

Published 2023-01-10 by Kevin Feasel

Eitan Blumin reminds us that database shrinking isn’t always bad:

Shrinking databases and database files in SQL Server is a widely known “worst practice”.

Usually, it’s because it’s assumed that the database files are expected to auto-grow again after the shrink.
So, in truth, it’s not the shrink itself that’s the problem… It’s the auto-growth!

But… What if you DON’T expect the database file to auto-grow back to what it was before?
For example, what if you truncated/deleted/migrated/archived huge chunks of data from your database, which you don’t expect to be returned later? Or what if you performed a massive data compression or migrated to clustered columnstore indexes, which reduced your data size significantly?

Read on for more thoughts along these lines, problems you might run into, and scripts to help you along the way.

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Creating an Instance Alias in SQL Server 2022

Published 2023-01-10 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo asks, what’s in a name?

If you create server aliases for SQL Server connections, you should be aware of the changes introduced in SQL Server 2022. At SQLBI we use aliases to identify the server’s name in the connection of our samples (Power BI files and Analysis Services model), so this short article should help those who face similar requirements.

Read on to learn what that change is and how you can work around it.

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A Review of Prometheus Changes at PromCon

Published 2023-01-03 by Kevin Feasel

B.C. Gain reports on sessions from PromCon EU 2022:

Prometheus’ installations are now in the hundreds of thousands range with millions of users, Richard (RichiH) Hartmann, director of community at Grafana Labs and a CNCF Technical Advisory Group Observability chair, said during his talk “I don’t have to convince this room that Prometheus is a de facto standard in cloud native metric based monitoring.”

But as Prometheus’ maintainers celebrate its 10-year anniversary, the community’s needs for monitoring Kubernetes are evolving quickly. Users are also becoming smarter about what they want and need. PromCon EU 2022, held in Munich in November, the Prometheus annual user’s conference, served as a forum about how and why Prometheus must evolve and what Prometheus maintainers must do.

Prometheus is a critical part of the modern service monitoring stack; read on to learn more about histogram updates and work at the core which should help Prometheus users along the way.

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