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Curated SQL Posts

PostgreSQL Sans Superuser in v16

Published 2023-01-25 by Kevin Feasel

Robert Haas doesn’t wear a cape:

As I’ve written about before, a PostgreSQL superuser always has the ability to take over the operating system account in which PostgreSQL is running, but sometimes you’d like to have a role that can administer the database but not break out of it. In existing releases, there’s no good way to accomplish that. You can either make a new role so weak that it can’t perform ordinary administration tasks, or you can make it so strong that it can easily break into the operating system account and thus take over the superuser role as well. Unless you hack the source code, which some people have done, there’s no real way to set up an account that has enough power to usefully administer the database in meaningful ways but yet not enough power to take over everything. I’ve committed a number of patches to v16 to try to improve the situation, and I think that we can look forward to big improvements in this area once it is released.

Read on for some of the implications of this change.

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Dashboard Sharing in Power BI

Published 2023-01-25 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad takes us through one form of data sharing in Power BI:

Power BI provides multiple ways of sharing content with users. Each sharing method has pros and cons and can be used for specific scenarios. Some sharing methods can be used together to build a framework for sharing. This article and video discuss the most basic way to share Power BI content. This method is called Dashboard (or Report) Sharing. Dashboard sharing is the easiest way of sharing; however, it may not always be the best way. In this article and video, you’ll learn how this method works, you will learn about the pros and cons of this method, and the scenarios of using it.

Click through for a video and article.

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CI/CD for the Synapse Serverless SQL Pool

Published 2023-01-25 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Chant has some links for us:

Last week the January 2023 video of the Azure Synapse Analytics and Microsoft MVP series was released. Where I covered how to do CI/CD for dedicated SQL Pools in Azure Synapse Analytics.

Since the release of that video the most popular question raised has been how to perform CI/CD for serverless SQL Pools within Azure Synapse Analytics?

Read on for links galore.

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Unpivoting a Multi-Field Matrix in Power BI

Published 2023-01-25 by Kevin Feasel

Meagan Longoria gets out of a tricky situation:

I had to do this for a client the other day, and I realized I hadn’t blogged about it. Let’s say you need to include data in a Power BI model, but the only source of the data is a matrix that is output from another system. And that matrix has multiple fields populating the columns. An example of this is below. The matrix has fiscal year and product category on columns, vertical on rows, and the profit metric populating the values.

Read on for a step-by-step guide on how to do this.

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A Free Training Offer for the Recently Laid Off

Published 2023-01-25 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Leonard has an offer for free training:

My LinkedIn and social media feeds are filled with contacts and friends sharing their availability for a new career opportunity. While some are more gracious than concerned and others more concerned than gracious, it’s normal to be both concerned and gracious. Well, it was normal for me when it happened to me. If you haven’t been laid off before, I hope you never learn what that feels like.

If you have been laid off already, or if you’ve been notified you are about to be laid off, I encourage you to see this as the beginning on your Next Opportunity.

Click through for the details on this generous offer.

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Amazon Redshift 2022 in Review

Published 2023-01-24 by Kevin Feasel

Manan Goel lists what’s been going on with Amazon Redshift:

In 2021, we launched Amazon Redshift Query Editor V2, which is a free web-based tool for data analysts, data scientists, and developers to explore, analyze, and collaborate on data in Amazon Redshift data warehouses and data lakes. In 2022, Query Editor V2 got additional enhancements such as notebook support for improved collaboration to author, organize, and annotate queries; user access through identity provider (IdP) credentials for single sign-on; and the ability to run multiple queries concurrently to improve developer productivity.

Read on for the rest of the highlights.

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Top-nested in KQL

Published 2023-01-24 by Kevin Feasel

Robert Cain continues a series on KQL:

Back in June of 2022 I covered the top operator in my Fun With KQL – Top post. We showed how to create your own top 10 lists, for example what were the top 5 computers ranked by free disk space.

What if you needed your top results in a nested hierarchy? For example, you wanted to know which three objects in the Perf table had the most entries? But, for each one of those, what were the three counters with the most entires?

That’s where the top-nested operator comes in. It allows you to create top lists in nested, also called hierarchical levels.

Click through for the normal slew of examples on how to use this operator.

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Consistency Levels in Cassandra

Published 2023-01-24 by Kevin Feasel

Dmytro Kostenko enumerates some options:

In Cassandra, a consistency level is the number of replicas responding before returning a reply to a user. Consistency in Cassandra is tunable, meaning that each client can consider what level of consistency and availability to choose. Moreover, it is assigned at the query level and can be configured for different service components. Users can choose different consistency levels for each operation, both for reads and writes. While choosing the consistency level for your operation, you should understand each level’s tradeoff between consistency and availability. Cassandra’s consistency can be strong or weak, depending on your chosen level.

Read on to learn more about strong vs weak consistency in the context of Cassandra, as well as the consistency level options available to us.

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SQLCMD Variables in Database Projects

Published 2023-01-24 by Kevin Feasel

Olivier Van Steenlandt can’t live in this static world:

When I started to explore and use Database Projects, I ran into a specific situation quite fast where I was required to use SQLCMD variables. In this blog post, I will describe what they are, how you can use SQLCMD variables in Database Projects and where this might become very useful for you.

Click through for a scenario, a primer on using SQLCMD variables, and some basic details on how to use them in database projects.

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Use Cases for Multiple Data Lakes

Published 2023-01-24 by Kevin Feasel

James Serra explains why you might want multiple data lakes in an organization:

A question I get asked frequently from customers when discussing Data lake architecture is “Should I use one data lake for all my data, or multiple lakes?”. Ideally, you would use just one data lake, but I have seen many valid use cases where customers are using multiple data lakes. Here are some of those reasons:

I’d quibble with a couple of these (and given James’s intro, I’m not sure he’s fully on board with all of the reasons) but this is a good list of reasons why you might see several data lakes in an organization.

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