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Category: Tools

An Overview of the Power BI Ecosystem

Published 2025-05-06 by Kevin Feasel

Kurt Buhler looks at tools:

In general, the process to build and manage both models and reports in Power BI can be simplified to a few sequential steps that describe the “lifecycle” of this content. You can see this depicted below, as well as some examples of the various tools that you might use to support each of these steps. Shameless plug, Bravo, Vertipaq Analyzer, and Analyze in Excel were created by SQLBI, and SQLBI is involved in the development of DAX Studio, DAX Optimizer, and Tabular Editor.

Click through for an interesting table showing what fits where. If all you’re using is Power BI Desktop, there’s a whole world of additional functionality you’re missing out on.

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Debugging R Code in Visual Studio Code

Published 2025-05-05 by Kevin Feasel

Yohann Mansiaux steps through the code:

We are going to see how to use these functions in VSCode, as well as introducing “breakpoints”. Breakpoints are markers that you can set in your code to pause execution at a specific line. This allows you to inspect the state of your code at that point and step through it line by line. They are very close to the browser() function. They can also be used in RStudio IDE, but I have to admit that I never used them.

Read on to see how VSCode fills the need when it comes to debugging code. H/T R-Bloggers.

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Darling Data Blocking Monitor App

Published 2025-05-05 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Darling announces a tool.

If you’ve given Erik money in the past (which I can confirm is an easy enough task). If you’ve used sp_WhoIsActive to write to a table, you’ve got an idea of how it will work. But this looks quite a bit easier than setting it all up yourself.

And the next time you run into Josh Darnell, say thank you.

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The Power of Invoke-DbaQuery in dbatools

Published 2025-04-25 by Kevin Feasel

David Seis looks at a powerful cmdlet in dbatools:

In this blog post, we will audit the dbatools command Invoke-DbaQuery. I will test, review, and evaluate the script based on a series of identical steps. Our goal is to provide insights, warnings, and recommendations to help you use this script effectively and safely. Invoke-DbaQuery is the Swiss army knife of all dbatools commands as you can execute almost any T-SQL script you can think of via PowerShell.

Click through for an overview of what the cmdlet does, some tips on proper usage, and an important note around possible misuse.

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Comparing Apache Iceberg to Delta Lake

Published 2025-04-18 by Kevin Feasel

Maria Zakourdaev compares technologies:

Public cloud blob storage has been a standard for data lakes for the last 10 years. Blob storage, at first, came to solve data warehouse storage limitations. It is very cheap and has unlimited capacity. You can store any data format (structured, semi-structured, or unstructured) in the data lake located on a blob storage, and keep any amount of raw data for an unlimited time. When considering Apache Iceberg vs Delta Lake, both can manage data efficiently. Depending on the access frequency, data can be stored on cold or warm types of cloud storage, saving even more costs.

Read on to see how the two techniques compare along several dimensions, as well as some general guidance at the end on which to choose.

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Using the Microsoft Fabric SKU Estimator

Published 2025-04-18 by Kevin Feasel

Andreas Bergstedt shows off a new tool:

In today’s ever-changing analytics landscape it can be difficult to plan out your next project or your enterprise analytics roadmap.

Designed to optimize data infrastructure planning, the Microsoft Fabric SKU Estimator helps customers and partners to accurately estimate capacity requirements and select the most suitable SKU for their workloads, protecting users from under-provisioning and overcommitment.

Click through for a few scenarios of translating your existing warehousing and analytical systems into expected Microsoft Fabric needs.

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Binding a Power BI Report to a Separate Semantic Model via Power BI Studio

Published 2025-04-17 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers makes use of a Gerhard Brueckl extension:

The default option to rebind a Power BI report is to use the Power BI REST API.

This works well, but for a lot of people this can be quite intimidating.

Fortunately, Gerhard Brueckl, has created the amazing Power BI Studio, which is a Visual Studio Code Extension.

Click through to see how to install it and how to use this extension to rebind an existing Power BI report to a different semantic model, whether in the same workspace or even a different one.

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Microsoft Fabric Extensions for VS Code

Published 2025-04-11 by Kevin Feasel

Sunitha Muthukrishna announces a new trio of VS Code extensions:

Microsoft Fabric is changing how we handle data engineering and data science. To make things easier, Microsoft added some cool extensions for Visual Studio Code (VS Code) that help you manage Fabric artifacts and build analytical applications.

By adding these Microsoft Fabric extensions to VS Code, developers can quickly create Fabric solutions and manage their data setups right from their coding environments. Here, we’ll look at these extensions and show why they’re useful.

Click through for notes on the three extensions that are available. Note that two of them are still in preview.

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Time Range Generation in Data Diluvium

Published 2025-04-04 by Kevin Feasel

Adron Hall extends Data Diluvium:

Following up on my previous posts about adding humidity and temperature data generation to Data Diluvium, I’m now adding a Time Range generator. I decided this would be a nice addition to give any graphing of the data a good look. This will complete the trio of generators I needed for my TimeScale DB setup. While humidity and temperature provide the environmental data, the Time Range generator ensures we have properly spaced time points for our time-series analysis.

Click through to see how it works.

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A New Dashboard for Distributed Availability Groups

Published 2025-04-02 by Kevin Feasel

David Fowler has been busy:

This comes off of the back of my last post looking at using a distributed availability group (DAG) to help facilitate a SQL server migration. SQL Server Migration Using a Distributed Availability Group

One thing that I mentioned in that post was that, although SSMS gives us a nice dashboard to check the health of our regular AGs. There’s nothing there to look at the state that the DAGs are in. The only choice that we’ve got is to tap up and compare results from a couple of DMVs on each side.

David has met that demand. Read on to see what the solution includes and how you can get your hands on it.

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