A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Chris Webb looks into activity IDs:
I was looking at the output of Power Query’s Query Diagnostics feature recently (again) and trying to understand it better. One of the more confusing aspects of it is the way that the Power Query engine may evaluate a query more than once during a single refresh. This is documented in the note halfway down this page, which says:
Jorge’s comment on the post adds even more context around what the ID Chris comes up with actually means.
Comments closedKevin Schofield makes an announcement:
We’re pleased to announce today that Synapse Database Templates are now Generally Available and that we are also making available three additional Synapse Database Templates for Healthcare Insurance, Healthcare Providers, and R&D and Clinical Trials.
The Healthcare Insurance template is a comprehensive data model that addresses the typical data requirements of organizations providing insurance to cover healthcare needs (sometimes known as Payors).
The Healthcare Providers template is a comprehensive data model that addresses the typical data requirements of organizations providing healthcare services.
The R&D and Clinical Trials template is a comprehensive data model that addresses the typical data requirements of organizations involved in research and development and clinical trials of pharmaceutical products and devices.
Read on to learn more about how these templates work and what you can do with them.
Comments closedDennes Torres has written a tool:
On the article Automating table refresh in Power BI I explained many methods to automate refresh of individual objects, which could be tables or partitions.
This creates the need of good ways to visualize the last refresh date and time for each partition and table. The portal shows the refresh date/time for the entire dataset, we can’t identify on the Power BI portal the exactly date for each table last refresh.
Read on for a link to the refresh code and an example of it in action.
Comments closedCosima Meyer has updates to the overviewR package:
The package is meant to serve as a Swiss army knife for exploratory data analysis. The basic functions allow you to investigate sample coverage across different time points, missing values across your variables, and also the overlap among two data sets.
Read on for a fairly substantial set of changes. H/T R-Bloggers.
Comments closedRoel Hogervorst diagnoses trouble:
When you are in panic mode you focus on what is right in front of you and make suboptimal decisions. Here is some I have made.
Read on for a couple stories as well as a practical implementation of debugging as an OODA loop. Something that Sean McCown mentioned before has always stuck with me: it’s amazing just how few people know how to troubleshoot issues. Our inclination seems to be one of two things: adduce a conclusion from the first piece of evidence (usually just a flimsy error message) or immediately give up.
Comments closedJose Manuel Jurado Diaz explains a performance difference:
A customer asked today, why using ODBC Driver 17 for SQL Server in Python with PYODBC we have a slightly difference in terms of time taken if we compare with C# System.Data.Odbc. Following, I would like to share my lesson learned about it.
Read on for Jose’s explanation. My short version is, it seems particularly important when using the Python ODBC driver to write the exact query you want rather than a SELECT * or query which returns rows/columns you don’t need.
Comments closedDrew Skwiers-Koballa announces a new way of handling database projects:
Declarative development creates an environment where developers can focus on creating database objects while relying on the support of tooling locally and and in deployment pipelines to manage applying the differential changes calculated on the current state of the target database. Developers create objects such as tables or stored procedures by writing their definition with CREATE statements in scripts that live in source control just as if it is source code for any component of an application. Existing functionality for SQL projects in Visual Studio, Azure Data Studio, and VS Code provides developers with declarative development capabilities, however the existing SQL project file format has a few limitations. With Microsoft.Build.Sql and SDK-style SQL projects, we look forward to unlocking new scenarios for your development practices.
It does sound interesting.
Comments closedMarco Russo explains the importance of data types for rounding in Power BI:
In one of the last classrooms I delivered, students were wondering why the results of their formulas were close but not identical to the proposed solution. We quickly identified the problem being an issue of data type conversion already covered in Understanding numeric data type conversions in DAX. However, the issue is interesting as a simpler example to show that different DAX calculations can produce different results because of a different way of rounding numbers!
Read on for Marco’s example.
Comments closedIn this post I want to cover how you can keep your Azure Synapse secrets secret in Azure DevOps. Because you need to do this if you are working with production deployments.
With this in mind, I want to raise more awareness about it and make sure others avoid putting secrets directly in their pipelines like in the below example.
Read on to understand what options are available to you. My preference involves Key Vault references but there are alternatives available.
Comments closedDavid Klee answers a question for the ages:
Have you ever wondered why Windows Server doesn’t show disk performance metrics in Task Manager, but your Windows 10/11 OS does? It’s a really silly difference.
I have indeed wondered this and David has a good solution to the problem.
Comments closed