A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Eitan Blumin has updated an open source project:
Back in April 2020, I created an open-source project called “SQL Server Page Allocation Reports“. It consisted of a set of SQL queries and some Power BI reports that can be used for visualizing the size and locations of your data and transaction log pages.
Well, recently I also added SSMS Custom Reports into the mix. So, it’s time to revisit this project and see what’s new!
Click through to see what’s new.
Comments closedMike Cisneros trims the fat, and there’s a lot of it:
My colleague Alex was the first person I heard refer to the underlying structure of a graph as its “skeleton.” This includes all the features that give form and shape to your graph, but that ideally—like bones—we never even really notice or see. The skeleton frames and structures our graph, but doesn’t include the data itself.
If we don’t take the time to organize the skeleton of a chart thoughtfully and intentionally, our data won’t be appropriately supported. To an audience, something will always seem a little bit amiss.
Click through for a Halloween-themed visual update.
Comments closedTomaz Kastrun unleashes the power of R’s native plotting function:
Plot() function is R’s most generic function for plotting different types of graphs. And making a animation of sample graphs with is as useless as it can be useful for educational purposes.
Click through for the code to build an animated image of various plots you can draw in R without importing any other libraries.
Comments closedThe Jumping Rivers team show how to create a D3 visual in R:
D3.js, or just D3 as it’s more often referred to, is a JavaScript library used for creating interactive data visualisations optimised for the web. D3 stands for Data-Driven Documents. It is commonly used by those who enjoy making creative or otherwise unusual visualisations as it offers you a great deal of freedom as well as options for interactivity such as animated transitions and plot zooming.
Click through for the blog post and also check out the associated GitHub repo. D3 is an incredibly powerful framework, but is almost as complex as it is powerful.
Comments closedChris Webb shows off a feature in Microsoft Edge:
I’m not an expert on Power BI report accessibility like Meagan Longoria but I do know how important an issue accessibility is. I also know how difficult it can be to remember to check for accessibility issues when building reports which is why, when I was watching this video on new features in Edge DevTools, I was pleased to see that Edge now makes it easy to see how your report looks like when viewed by someone with vision deficiencies.
Click through to see this extension in action.
Comments closedJean-Georges Perrin shows off a Spark library:
I was looking for an effortless data visualization that would interface easily with Apache Spark. I found a few interesting tools, but nothing that would not require some complex interfacing, setup, or infrastructure. In a good geek way, I then decided to write the tool. This lack of simple tools is how Drsti (pronounced drishti) was born.
Aren’t you tired of looking at dataframes that looked like they came straight from a 1980 VT100? Sure, if you use notebooks, either standalone or hosted (IBM Watson Studio, Databricks…), you are not (or less) confronted with the issue. However, if you are building pipelines outside of the Data Science toys, oops, tools, you may need to visualize data in a graph.
Read on to see how it works and some of what you can do with Drsti.
Comments closedElizabeth Ricks explains how you can change the width of a bar in Excel:
Before we get into the step-by-step, I should mention that there aren’t any strict rules for optimal spacing between bars. Rather, it’s personal preference similar to wearing white after Labor Day (in the U.S., that’s the first weekend in September). As a resident of the muggy Southeast, I’ll be rocking white until fall temperatures arrive in mid-October. However, if you live in cooler climes and consider Labor Day the symbolic end of summer, your preference might be to say sayonara to white until Memorial Day.
The same gray area goes for optimal spacing between bars. The actual width is not set in stone. Our goal is to enable our audiences to compare the lengths of the bars (instead of the area between them), so general guidance is to thicken the bars to minimize the surrounding white space.
Click through for the process.
Comments closedLast week, as a new employee, I went through Microsoft’s internal employee learning portal and found the Accessibility 101 online course. To my surprise, the course did have a good amount of practical information and connected the concept of accessibility nicely to inclusion and diversity. In this post, I want to share a couple of the practical steps to help you step up your accessibility game. If you are where I was, I’m sure you will love these.
Click through for some easy ways to improve presentations and webpages. Most of this is a few minutes’ worth of effort but can pay dividends. On a side note, congrats to Daron for the Microsoft gig. I enjoyed working with him in the past and know he’ll do great there.
Comments closedSandeep Pawar explains how to allow users to control transparency in Power BI visuals:
As someone who uses Python/R heavily for exploratory data analysis and Power BI for publishing the final data analytics reports, I have always missed the ability to adjust the color transperancy in Power BI. In Power BI you can change the color dynamically and conditionally but there is no native functionality to change the transperancy.
I was working on a project where I wanted to highlight certain clusters in the data to the business user. Sure, I could change the color but it’s very challenging when the data points are concentrated in a small area and they overlap each other. In Python and R you can easily adjust the
alphavalue in most plots to see the dense area clearly.
Click through for one Power BI solution.
Comments closedGilbert Quevauvilliers feels complete:
I was really excited to use the Power BI Log Analytics for Analysis Services Engine report when it was released along with this blog post from the Power BI Team: Announcing long-term usage and performance insights (Public Preview) | Microsoft Power BI Blog | Microsoft Power BI
This is really a great report when using Log Analytics.
I found the one thing that I wanted to view was my report names. The standard report did not have this.
Protip: displaying GUIDs is not the same as displaying useful information. I recommend reading through this just to see how much pain and effort it takes to make the Log Analytics report actually become useful.
Comments closed