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Category: Tools

Databricks Power Tools in VS Code

Published 2023-03-21 by Kevin Feasel

Gerhard Brueckl has some tools for us:

As you probably know, we at paiqo have developed our Databricks extension for VSCode over the last years and are constantly adding new features and improving user experience. The most notable features are probably the execution of local notebooks against a Databricks cluster, a nice UI to manage clusters, jobs, secrets, repos, etc. and last but not least also a browser for your workspace and DBFS to sync files locally.

In February 2023 Databricks also published its own official VSCode extension which was definitely long awaited by a lot of customers (blog, extension). It allows you to run a local file on a Databricks cluster and display the results in VSCode again. Alternatively you can also run the code as a workflow. I am sure we can expect much more features in the near future and Databricks investing in local IDE support is already a great step forward!

As you can imagine, I am working very closely with the people at Databricks and we are happy to also announce the next major release of our Databricks VSCode extension 2.0 which now also integrates with the official Databricks extension! To avoid confusion between the two extensions we also renamed ours to Databricks Power Tools so from now on you will see two Databricks icons on the very left bar in VSCode.

Click through to read more in the announcement and some of the things which have changed as a result of version 2.0.

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The Importance of Monitoring Tools

Published 2023-03-08 by Kevin Feasel

Louis Davidson talks turkey about tooling:

When I was a DBA involved with the management of a large number of database servers, I didn’t have many third-party tools to help me do my job. For the most part, I relied on scripts that I found or wrote. I enjoyed writing scripts to manage the servers, as it taught me a lot about the internals of SQL Server. Many of these scripts were eventually automated using SQL Server’s agent to run and save data on the different servers so we could review the results, looking for issues.

Some of these tools written over 20 years ago still run to this day. We captured tons of data about everything we wanted to know about the server in case there were issues. Loads and loads of data. We had some processes that would scan that data and send emails when obvious errors occurred, but it was hard to keep synchronized over many different servers.

Click through for Louis’s thoughts. I believe good tools can make a DBA’s life a lot easier, though mediocre tools might make it worse: you become the proverbial drunk looking for his keys under a streetlamp because that’s where the light is.

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Handling Optional T-SQL Code via SQLCMD

Published 2023-03-07 by Kevin Feasel

Louis Davidson shows off a bit of SQL Server Management Studio’s SQLCMD mode:

In the creating a database script, there are quite a few parameters you will want as part of your script. The database name, the settings, whether or not to drop the database or not. Built into SQL Server Management Studio is a cool tool called SQLCMD mode. Scripts using this mode get a few scripting tools that are really useful. These tools allow you to do things like insert other script files, set environment variables, and one I particularly like, make sure you don’t accidentally execute a script if no code is highlighted using EXIT to start your script ().

Where it is really lacking is in the area of control of flow language. In this blog I am going to share a few techniques I have used to get around this when building scripts that need to optionally execute different bits of code.

Click through to see how you can use it. Going one step further, you can directly script against sqlcmd.exe, which can be useful for automating deployments.

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Capabilities (and Limitations) of Power BI Migration Tools

Published 2023-02-20 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb talks tools:

I have so many customers wanting to migrate from legacy BI tools to Power BI. They are concerned that their current BI tool has an uncertain future. Licence renewals are looming and in the current economic climate organisations are looking to save money. Power BI is not only a lot cheaper than other BI tools, it’s a better tool overall and since Microsoft continues to make big investments in it then migration is clearly a no-brainer.

As a Power BI consultancy owner I have a problem though: I don’t have enough skilled people working for me to keep up with all this demand. What’s the answer? I know! Let’s build a tool that can help migrate all these legacy reports to Power BI!

The result is that, so far this year, I’ve seen or heard of five or six different Power BI migration tools built by various consultancies. That’s great and here at Microsoft we’re naturally supportive of our partners and want as many people to use Power BI as possible. I have reservations about some of these tools though, and these reservations fall into two categories.

Read on for Chris’s take on the topic.

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Diagnosing VSCode + R Integration Problems

Published 2023-02-07 by Kevin Feasel

John MacKintosh troubleshoots an issue:

I recently updated my R installation, and then realised that I’d broken my VSCode/ R set up in the process – I could not launch an R terminal either directly or via radian.

I have a repo where I’ve collated various blog posts relating to setting up VSCode for R, but that didn’t solve all my problems.

I did get it resolved eventually, and here’s how.

Read on for that resolution. H/T R-Bloggers.

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Plan Explorer Integration in SSMS 19

Published 2023-02-07 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Yun does us a solid:

If you’re like me, Plan Explorer has always been a must-have tool in your performance tuning arsenal. And one of the things that made it so useful was a simple little SSMS Integration that would allow you to right click on an Execution Plan and see “View with […] Plan Explorer.” 

Unfortunately, I started hearing reports of that no longer being available in SSMS v19. But I know a thing or two, so was willing to bet 30 minutes of time that I could get it back.

Andy won that bet, so shower him with accolades.

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Tools for the DBA Jumpbox

Published 2023-01-25 by Kevin Feasel

Tracy Boggiano has a script:

I wrote a blog post a few months ago about the tools I use on my jumpbox you can read here.  Since then, I have automated most of the install with Chocately and so I’ll have the script later I’m going to blog it here.  First, we need to install Chocately on the jumpbox by opening PowerShell as the adminstrator.

Read on to see how to do that, the installation of a slew of tools via Chocolatey, and then several Powershell modules.

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Time Intelligence Templates in Bravo for Power BI

Published 2022-12-21 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari try out some templates:

Thanks to Bravo for Power BI, creating a Date table and applying time intelligence calculations to existing model measures has never been easier. With a few clicks, the Power BI model gets the required updates, and you can further modify the code generated.

Bravo provides several ready-to-use templates based on the Time Intelligence patterns published on the DAX Patterns website. However, the pattern may not provide all the features required. There could be columns and measures you want to remove, or you might need additional columns or time intelligence calculations that are not part of the template.

Read on to see two ways you could resolve this.

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An Overview of Quarto for R Users

Published 2022-12-09 by Kevin Feasel

Nicola Rennie and Colin Gillespie provide an overview of Quarto:

Earlier this year, Posit (formerly RStudio) released Quarto. Quarto is an open-source scientific and technical publishing system that allows you to weave together narrative text and code to produce high-quality outputs including reports, presentations, websites, and more.

One of the main features of Quarto is that it isn’t just built for R. It’s language-agnostic. It can render documents that contain code written in R, Python, Julia, or Observable. That makes it incredibly useful if you work in multilingual teams, or collaborate with people who write in a different programming language from you. But what if you don’t use any other programming languages? What benefits does Quarto bring to people who only use R?

Read on to learn why you might want to use it over R Markdown.

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The Basics of dbt in Spark

Published 2022-12-06 by Kevin Feasel

Ust Oldfield provides an introduction to dbt:

dbt is an abbreviation for data build tools. It is primarily a SQL based transformation workflow, supported by yaml, to allow teams to collaborate on analytics code whilst implementing software engineering best practices like modularity, portability, CI/CD, testing, and documentation.

dbt is available using a CLI in the form of dbt core, or as a paid-for SaaS product in the form of dbt cloud.

Click through to see how the product works, including an example.

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