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Curated SQL Posts

The Value of Multiple Graphs

Published 2024-04-10 by Kevin Feasel

Alex Velez shares some advice:

A tip I regularly share when providing data visualization feedback is to use multiple graphs instead of packing several series into a single chart. Although it is important to be concise, people are often surprised to hear that when it comes to the number of graphs we share, fewer isn’t always better.

Read on for the advice. It makes a lot of sense for several reasons, as Alex shares. One additional reason is that it goes toward Edward Tufte’s argument about information density: multiple smaller visuals allow you to put more relevant information into the same amount of physical space. This makes your visuals more impactful as a result.

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Removing Rows with Missing Data in R

Published 2024-04-10 by Kevin Feasel

Steven Sanderson shows us three ways:

Handling missing values is a crucial aspect of data preprocessing in R. Often, datasets contain missing values, which can adversely affect the analysis or modeling process. One common task is to remove rows containing missing values entirely. In this tutorial, we’ll explore different methods to accomplish this task in R, catering to scenarios where we want to remove rows with either some or all missing values.

Click through for three ways to do this.

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CI/CD in GitHub

Published 2024-04-10 by Kevin Feasel

I have a new video:

In this video, I explain what continuous integration (CI) is, disambiguate continuous delivery from continuous deployment (CD), and see how you can perform CI/CD operations using GitHub Actions.

Read on to see what these terms mean and an example of how it all works with .NET projects.

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Searching for Files in a Blob Storage Container

Published 2024-04-10 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword hits one of my bugbears:

Shifting from handling data on premises to Azure has been a real change of mindset. Whilst what I want to build may be similar, the how part is completely different. There’s a learning curve not just to the tooling but how you use it too.

This is one of those instances.

I had a storage container with files which had a date in their name. I wanted to perform a wildcard search to select some of them. That sounds straight forward, right?

This is unnecessarily painful, especially if you’re trying to find the right full backup in a container filled with full and transaction log backup files. Andy’s solution does work but also requires a full scan of keys. And I don’t think there’s a better way to do it.

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Database Delegation with Power Apps

Published 2024-04-10 by Kevin Feasel

Deborah Melkin shares a note about Power Apps:

When I write a SQL Query, I never have to worry if the way I’m writing a query will automatically create a limit on the number of records being returned if I’m not specifying TOP or OFFSET…FETCH. If my query wants to return 1 million records, it will return 1 million records.

PowerApps doesn’t work that way.

Click through to see how it does work, including some of the limitations around it.

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The Importance of Orchestration in E(L)TL Processes

Published 2024-04-10 by Kevin Feasel

Martin Schoombee begins a new series:

In the context of what we’re talking about throughout this series – facilitating the execution of an ETL process in a platform like Azure Data Factory – orchestration means that we’re using the ETL tool primarily for the “E” (Extract) part of the process. In addition to that, most people I know would also use the ETL tool to facilitate the workflow, in other words the order of execution and any constraints that go along with that.

In what I’d like to call the “traditional” approach for lack of a better term, all parts of the ETL process are performed natively by the tool (image below), using whatever built-in tasks are available and of course accounting for any nuances. With this approach, transformations are typically performed in transit and in memory.

Read on to see how the Orchestration approach differs from the traditional ETL approach.

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Creating DAX Measures Directly in the Power BI Service

Published 2024-04-10 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers skips the desktop step:

There have been some updates to Power BI with Visual Calculations, and as of the March 2024 release you can now create and edit visual calculations in the Power BI Service.

Here are details from the blog post: Power BI March 2024 Feature Summary | Visual Calculations Update

I then saw an email which made me think, could I then use the visual calculations to create a DAX measure directly in the Power BI Service on an existing Power BI report.

The answer, it turns out, is yes. Read on to see how.

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Trying out Microsoft Fabric Mirroring of Cosmos DB

Published 2024-04-10 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Chant gives it the ol’ college try:

In this post I cover some initial testing of Mirroring Azure Cosmos DB Databases in Microsoft Fabric that I performed.

I wanted to do this post for various reasons. Including the fact that it was announced during the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference that Mirroring is now in Public Preview.

Which means that you can now mirror data from Azure SQL Database, Azure Cosmos DB and Snowflake into your own Microsoft Fabric tenant. Even trial tenants.

Kevin takes us through the process and gives it a try, sharing with us the results of some testing, including a test insertion of 100 million rows.

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EXPAND() and COLLAPSE() in Power BI Visual Calculations

Published 2024-04-09 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari play the accordion:

In previous articles, we introduced the concepts of visual context, the visual lattice, and the two visual context navigation operations: EXPAND and COLLAPSE. In this article, we build on that knowledge to first compute a simple percentage over the parent: a simple calculation to consolidate the understanding of EXPAND and COLLAPSE. Next, we move on to a much more complex scenario, computing the inflation-adjusted sales using visual calculations.

Read on to see what the two functions do, using a pair of examples.

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