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Curated SQL Posts

Calculating the Size of Dataflow Gen2 Staging Lakehouses

Published 2024-07-23 by Kevin Feasel

Sandeep Pawar busts out the calculator:

My friend Alex Powers (PM, Fabric CAT) wrote a blog post about cleaning the staging lakehouses generated by Dataflow Gen2. Before reading this blog, go ahead and read his blog first on the mechanics of it and the whys. Note that these are system generated lakehouses so at some time in the future, they will be automatically purged but until then the users will be paying the storage cost of these lakehouses. If you want to read more about how dataflow gen2 works and whether you should stage or not , read this and this blog.

Read on for a Python script using the SemPy library.

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Creating Elastic Jobs in TerraForm

Published 2024-07-23 by Kevin Feasel

Josephine Bush builds a script:

If you aren’t familiar with Terraform and its requisite bits and pieces, I have a post that walks you through them. Let’s hit the ground running. To create Elastic Jobs with Terraform, you need to use the azapi_resource, but before we go down that path, you will use the azurerm resource to create some supporting objects.

Read on for a guide covering requirements and setup.

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Calculation Options in Power BI

Published 2024-07-23 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld builds a list:

There are tons of options in Power BI to add your custom logic. Varying from SQL expressions at data ingest all the way up to Visual Calculations to add logic on a visual level. But how do they compare to each other, where should you do what?

As I’ve been a fan of making DAX easier since day one, I thought it may be a good moment to highlight the differences between calculation options using DAX in Power BI, like measures and calculated columns and how that is significantly different with Power BI Visual Calculations and how those can make your DAX easier.

Read on for a half-dozen options and some further thoughts about calculation options.

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Radar Love

Published 2024-07-22 by Kevin Feasel

Jerry Tuttle talks radar charts:

I was looking for an opportunity to practice with radar charts and I came across an article on five-tool baseball players, so this seemed like a perfect application for this kind of chart.

      A radar chart is an alternative to a column chart to display three or more quantitative variables. The chart graphs the values in a circular manner around a center point.

I have an unhealthy love for radar charts in the right circumstances, and this love came from the way you did scouting in earlier versions of Madden NFL games, using the radar chart to estimate traits. The only problem was, the charts turned out to be a lie: they didn’t really correlate to player talents, but that was something I learned years and years later and probably explains why I’m so bitter all the time. H/T R-Bloggers.

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Basic Troubleshooting in SQL Server on Linux

Published 2024-07-22 by Kevin Feasel

Infant Arockiaraj gives people an idea of where to look:

Based on our extensive experience with customers using SQL on Linux, we have compiled a guide outlining fundamental troubleshooting steps and available tools to assist in resolving SQL on Linux issues. This guide aims to make it easier for SQL DBAs who have primarily worked on Windows operating systems over the years.

In this article, we will normalize three checks in Linux that we typically perform in Windows to start troubleshooting issues with SQL Server: 

  • System logs
  • SQL Server logs
  • Task Manager

Note: The screenshots in the below examples are taken from RHEL and Ubuntu machines, and while the Linux flavors are different, the commands are similar in both environments. 

Click through to learn more about these steps and where you can find the files..

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Comparing Pie and Waffle Charts

Published 2024-07-22 by Kevin Feasel

Rita Fainshtein makes waffles:

Why is it more challenging to get an accurate answer from pie/donut charts and why do we feel less confident trying to read them?

The main reason is the difficulty in calculating the areas of the pie slices/lengths of the donut arcs.

This is much more challenging and less confident than comparing the areas of rectangular shapes.

Rita takes a look at the waffle chart custom visual available for Power BI and then builds something custom fit for the task.

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Testing GitHub Support in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2024-07-22 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Chant gives it a try:

By the end of this post, you will see the results of my initial tests. Along the way I share plenty of links and some advice.

If you need help with any jargon used in this post, you can read my other post. Which is a Microsoft Fabric Git integration jargon guide for Fabricators.

One key point I want to highlight is that the GitHub support for Microsoft Fabric Git integration is currently in preview and the contents of this post are subject to change.

It’s been a long time coming, that’s for sure.

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Using Powershell to Browse Azure Capabilities

Published 2024-07-22 by Kevin Feasel

Kay Sauter does some digging:

In a nutshell, Azure follows a structure called the Azure Resource Manager (ARM). Unfortunately, ARM is not human-readable, so you need to a tool to be efficient in using it. There are quite some tools available, and from Microsoft, there is Azure Bicep, Azure CLI and Azure PowerShell. Since I have done some DBA stuff in the past, and I am a fan of dbatools (created by the team here), I find PowerShell the most convenient tool to use and suspect that many will see it the same way if they are using dbatools.

Click through for the post. As of right now, the images are broken, but if you open them in new tabs and remove the extraneous “browsing-azure-with-powershell/” in the URL, you’ll be able to see those images.

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Color and Power BI Themes

Published 2024-07-22 by Kevin Feasel

Allison Kennedy talks color in Power BI:

Being a good data storyteller means using all the tools at your disposal. This includes color. It is important to note that I’m not advocating the use of color only in your reports – you need to ensure that there is another method to discern what’s going on with the data for those in your audience who might be colorblind. But that doesn’t mean we can’t play around with color and use it to add meaning to our reports. 

Most people I know would agree that GREEN means ‘Good’ and RED means ‘Bad’. But colors can be very personal. For example, my favorite color is BLUE and it was also the color I chose for my math notebooks throughout school. (Yes, math was my favorite subject – I guess it’s no surprise I ended up in a career that works so much with data.) 

In addition to personal meaning of colors, there can also be cultural meanings around individual colors, and that can shape how individuals view a given color. Grace Fussell has one of my favorite articles on the topic.

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Filestream and Availability Groups

Published 2024-07-22 by Kevin Feasel

Chad Callihan kicks a hornets’ nest:

Migrating databases to new servers and configuring them for availability groups can be a complex process. It can be more complex depending on what type of sneaky features are in use by the databases being migrated. I encountered an interesting issue migrating a database that had been setup to use FILESTREAM and wanted to show the steps I took to identify and resolve it.

Read on for the issue and what happened. It was a small thing overall, but the kind of small thing that can eat up the better part of a day if you’re not aware of it.

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