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Curated SQL Posts

Microsoft Fabric Licensing and Capacity

Published 2023-08-03 by Kevin Feasel

Aimee Johnson explains how Microsoft Fabric licensing works:

Microsoft Fabric is a Software-as-a-Service platform (SaaS) which enables you to build an end-to-end analytics solution without the need to spin up complex infrastructure. If you want to know more about Microsoft Fabric then check out our introduction blog post which you can find here.

Since Microsoft Fabric has been announced there have been many questions and queries about licensing and in this blog post I will go through everything you need to know!

One thing I keep forgetting is that Power BI Premium P1 is equivalent to Fabric F64; I keep wanting it to be F32 or F16, but that’s because I’m frugal that way.

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Batch File Importation in SQL Server

Published 2023-08-03 by Kevin Feasel

Paul White loads things quickly:

All this can be achieved with client-side tools and programming. It can also be done server-side by importing the raw data into a staging table before processing using T-SQL procedures.

Other times, the need arises to ingest data without using client-side tools and without making a complete copy of the raw data on the server. This article describes one possible approach in that situation.

Read on for the process.

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Updates to Microsoft Purview

Published 2023-08-03 by Kevin Feasel

Wolfgang Strasser keeps us informed:

It’s been a while that there were some (major) announcements around Microsoft Purview Data Governance. But it seems that August (2023) is a good month with some quite huge announcements:

Click through for those announcements. I particularly appreciate the free version. Even though it’s fairly limited, the price is right for people who are just playing around with the system and don’t want a massive bill.

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Finding Service Retirements in Azure Advisor

Published 2023-08-03 by Kevin Feasel

Anth Kernan has a tool for us:

Microsoft maintains 77 services across 13 service categories, everything from Artificial Intelligence to Compute to Databases to Storage to Azure Orbital – this is a lot of code and infrastructure to maintain and evolve, often at pace. Inevitably some of these services will be retired, either as new services replace them or through investments in the Microsoft Partner ecosystem.

This article will provide an overview of the tooling that exists within Azure to obtain a single centralized view of Service Retirements and reduce the reliance on manually checking the Azure Updates feed and/or Email notifications.

Click through to see where the tool is in Azure Advisor. Taking a quick look at it, this is pretty smart.

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Using the Microsoft Fabric Data Gateway

Published 2023-08-03 by Kevin Feasel

Reitse Eskens uploads some data:

In a blog from a few weeks ago, I wrote about getting data from your on-prem SQL Server into Fabric. At the time, the only option for a copy dataflow was using a direct connection over the internet. It still is, but now you can also use the PowerBI Data Gateway to get data from your SQL Server into Fabric.

In this blog, I’ll take you through the steps needed and an issue I ran into.

Read on for Reitse’s instructions and how to avoid the issue he ran into.

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ML Model Interactions and hstats

Published 2023-08-02 by Kevin Feasel

Michael Mayer has a new R package for us:

This post is mainly about the third approach. Its beauty is that we get information about all interactions. The downside: it is as good/bad as partial dependence functions. And: the statistics are computationally very expensive to compute (of order n^2).

Different R packages offer some of these H-statistics, including {iml}, {gbm}, {flashlight}, and {vivid}. They all have their limitations. This is why I wrote the new R package {hstats}:

Click through for an overview of the package and an example of how it works.

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Migrating Cosmos DB Tables API

Published 2023-08-02 by Kevin Feasel

Eitan Blumin handles a migration:

A few months ago, I was involved in an interesting project where a large customer (not to be named due to NDA) needed to migrate their entire Azure cloud subscription to another subscription. This was a difficult and arduous process that involved several PaaS technologies, besides SQL Server, that I didn’t have experience with before.

But it presented very interesting challenges and opportunities to learn new things.

One of these was the need to migrate an entire Azure Cosmos DB with Table Storage API account from one subscription to another.

Read on for the challenge, the intermediate solution using the Cosmos DB Data Migration Tool, and Eitan’s Powershell script to automate the process. I know and work with most of the people working on the DMT and they’re good folks.

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The Hunt for Red Logtober

Published 2023-08-02 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Darling has a new stored procedure and a fancy Scottish accent:

SQL Server has incredibly verbose error logs, and sifting through them for the highlight reel can be a pain. They’re often full of messages that you aren’t actionable.

  • Failed logins
  • Successful logins
  • Successful backups

Making matters worse is that when you open large log files, the response time for loading all those messages can be painful, and even time out.

But Erik has a nice stored procedure to filter out the chaff. Read on to learn more about it.

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Creating a Power BI VNet Data Gateway

Published 2023-08-02 by Kevin Feasel

Meagan Longoria rolls up her sleeves:

If you are using Power BI to connect to a PaaS resource on a virtual network in Azure (including private endpoints), you need a data gateway. While you can use an on-premises data gateway (the type of Power BI gateway we have had for years), there is an offering called a virtual network data gateway that is currently in preview.

The VNet data gateway securely communicates with the data source, executes queries, and transmits results back to the service, just like the on-premises data gateway. But it doesn’t require us to provision a virtual machine in the same network (or a peered network) of our Azure data source.

Read on to see some important caveats, as well as a step-by-step guide.

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