A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Marco Russo announces a new set of tools:
Power BI Push Tools is a set of open-source tools to work with Power BI push datasets.
Read Implementing real-time updates in Power BI using push datasets instead of DirectQuery to learn the architecture of solutions based on push datasets and how to create and populate a push dataset starting from a regular Tabular model.
In addition to reading that linked post, click through to see the three tools which are currently available.
Comments closedSolomon Rutzky has an apropos post for Friday the 13th:
In a previous post, Prevent Full Script Execution (Understanding and Using PARSEONLY and NOEXEC), I explained how to easily disable a script using the
PARSEONLYsession setting. That same method can be used to disable one or more sections within a script instead of the entire script. But in either case, “disabling” doesn’t mean that the script, or section of code, will be skipped entirely as if it wasn’t there. It will still be parsed by SQL Server as that is not something that can be turned off. This means that you could still see parsing errors related to undeclared variables, syntax errors, etc.Then one day I tried something silly that I figured wouldn’t work but wanted to try anyway (because quite often you don’t know until you know), and it actually did work (for the most part). I found a way to fully disable an entire T-SQL batch, and there really isn’t any indication that it happened. However, this “technique” is more limited than
PARSEONLYas it only works on individual batches, and it only works in some environments.
Read on to see how you can use the GO operator to prevent many SQL Server client tools from even noticing a block of text.
Dave Klein has a few tools to make working with Apache Kafka a little easier:
We like to save the best for last, but this tool is too good to wait. So, we’ll start off by covering kafkacat.
kafkacat is a fast and flexible command line Kafka producer, consumer, and more. Magnus Edenhill, the author of the librdkafka C/C++ library for Kafka, developed it. kafkacat is great for quickly producing and consuming data to and from a topic. In fact, the same command will do both, depending on the context. Check this out:
Read on for more information on this tool, as well as several others.
Comments closedAdrian Buckman has an announcement:
As always the code can be found here in our github repo
We updated our sample report hereWe forgot to mention V2.5! We added the ability to add Thresholds per drive for the drivespace module.#270
In addition to this, click through for a dozen additional bugfixes and changes.
Comments closedChris Shaw lays out some of the problems with monitoring systems today:
A next-generation monitoring tool should not just provide the same standard old dashboard dressed up with new fancy graphs; it should empower me to be actionable. It needs to help me improve the environment and show me the impacts of those actions on the system, and thus, the business.
What the industry needs (for risk of rendering the title of this article bunk) is not another monitoring tool. I have tools that help me monitor and they do a fine job of specifically doing that. I need a tool that will take me into the future, I need a tool that makes me better and faster at what I do. This industry needs a smarter tool.
Click through to see what Chris has in mind, though the reason you haven’t seen some of this stuff is that it’s a couple orders of magnitude more difficult than what we do see in monitoring solutions. H/T Amanda White.
Comments closedKiana Bergsma announces a new tool:
Save yourself Time and Money with Steve Stedman’s new database comparison tool. Following in its cousin’s (Database Health Monitor) footsteps, SchemaDrift is FREE! It is currently in Beta phase but it is free to download for personal or business use.
We only ask that you give us feedback. Let us know what you like and dislike. How can we make this product even better and we’ll send you emails on update releases. Comment down below or message us through our website.
Click through for a download link, as well as a FAQ in video form.
Comments closedHaroon Ashraf takes a look at an extension in Azure Data Studio:
This article talks about the steps required to add and use the DB Snapshot Creator extension in Azure Data Studio.
Additionally, the readers are going to get a conceptual understanding of database snapshots and their use in professional life scenarios. This article highlights the importance of preserving database structure for future reference.
Let us get familiar with the extension prior to its use.
Click through to learn more. The one thing I’d like to see clarified (if it’s not already and I just missed it) is that you really don’t want more than one database snapshot on a given database at any time. Having two or more database snapshots active on a database can cause fairly significant performance issues on non-trivial databases and I’d prefer to see the tool include that knowledge rather than remembering an eight-year-old article from Jonathan Kehayias. But hey, I guess that’s what I’m here for…
Comments closedMatt Allington reviews a paid product:
Tabular Editor is a Power BI Tabular Modelling productivity tool developed by Daniel Otykier. I blogged about Version 2 of the Tabular Editor in this article here. The 3rd edition of Tabular Editor has just been released, and it is a major upgrade from version 2. TE 3 is not free, but in my view, the productivity benefits make it a must have piece of software for anyone that is regularly writing DAX in Power BI Desktop.
Read on for the review.
Comments closedKenneth Fisher shows how to use the bcp command to create a file from a table:
This is a pretty handy little tool in your arsenal. I’ve talked about using bcp to transfer data from one instance to another before and this is another really great use for bcp. If you haven’t used it before bcp stands for Bulk Copy Protocol and is a command line tool for transferring data in and out of SQL Server. In this case you can use this command to generate a csv file from DBName.SchemaName.TableName:
Click through to see the command, as well as some helpful hints.
Comments closedAjit Chelat compares two popular log agents:
Log collectors, or aggregators, are critical aspects of the log management infrastructure. They help collect logs from various systems and parse and groom them for ingestion into a monitoring or observability tool for further visualization and analysis. DevOps and SRE teams are quickly adding log collectors to their toolchain. With millions of users across domains, two log collectors have risen to the forefront of log collection—Fluentd and Logstash.
This article compares the two and sees which one is the best for your log management and analysis initiatives—Fluentd vs. Logstash.
Click through for the round-by-round comparison and see which one comes out on top in your scenario.
Comments closed