A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Jack Vamvas shows how you can check on the SQL Server Agent status using T-SQL:
I want to check if SQL Server Agent is running using t-sql. I know I can check through the services.msc or other methods such as Powershell scripts to report on the SQL Server Agent status , but the requirement is to extract this information via t-sql. Do you have a script using t-sql to get the SQL Server Agent Status?
There is a method and Jack shows us the way.
Comments closedMohammad Darab shows off a tool to monitor the Kubernetes cluster driving a Big Data Cluster:
I don’t recall how I came across this Kubernetes IDE called Lens, but all I know is it’s cool as hec! It connects to a Kubernetes cluster (using the kube config file) and gives you an in depth view of all the different Kubernetes objects, their associated yaml files, health/metrics, etc. In this blog post I will show you how we can look into a Big Data Cluster’s Kubernetes infrastructure using Lens.
Click through for instructions on installation, as well as how to use the product.
Comments closedMartin Schoombee gets off the beaten path:
We’ve only used the PowerShell cmdlets for Power BI so far in this series, but things are about to get interesting because there aren’t cmdlets available for everything you might want to do. One such thing is updating parameters, and we’re going to use the Power BI REST API (which the cmdlets use underneath the covers anyways) to achieve that.
REST APIs are usually a little tricky to deal with, especially the process of authentication. Fortunately there is an Invoke-PowerBIRestMethod cmdlet that makes it possible to use the API in PowerShell without the need to deal with some of the underlying complexities.
Read on to see how the whole process works.
Comments closedSo what’s the hard thing I want to help make easier in this post? Metadata driven pipelines in Azure Data Factory! I had the opportunity awhile back to work with a customer who was pulling data out of large SQL Servers to eventually land data into Azure Synapse SQL pools back when they were still Azure SQL DW. We created a couple load pattern pipelines that used metadata in Azure SQL DB to load Synapse sql pool tables from parquet files in Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) Gen 2.
Not gonna lie, the pipelines weren’t easy for me to learn to setup initially. Big thanks to Catherine for your blog which was a life preserver in the hardest parts! So I wanted to see if I could automate it in my old friend PowerShell.
It would also be worth looking at some of the work Paul Andrew has done around ADF.procfwk for another approach to the problem.
Comments closedIf you’ve used Power Query long enough, you’ve needed to group data and provide some sort of summary. For example, grouping by customer and summarizing sales. The normal way the Table.Group function works is to group the entire table by the field(s) you are grouping by, then providing whatever aggregations you need.
However, you can alter that behavior and group data by a column, and have it provide a separate group at each change in the data.
Click through for the rest of the story. There’s some complexity to the problem which is hard to summarize.
Comments closedGarry Bargsley gives us two methods for copying an Azure SQL Database:
Copying an Azure SQL Database is a vital skill when managing cloud databases. Recently, a request was received from the “business”. They wanted to create a copy of an Azure SQL Database that was in a development environment. The database has been certified and early testing was accepted. They now want an exact copy in QA to start integration testing. The process of making an Azure SQL Database copy is straightforward. There are several different ways to perform this action.
Two methods chosen will use the Azure Portal and PowerShell to demonstrate the completion of this request.
Click through for the demos.
Comments closedBryan Shalloway shows off some new functionality in the rsample package:
For some problems you may want to take a traditional regression or classification based approach while still accounting for the date/time-sensitive components of your data. In this post I will use the
tidymodelssuite of packages to:– build lag based and non-lag based features
– set-up appropriate time series cross-validation windows
– evaluate performance of linear regression and random forest models on a regression problemFor my example I will use data from Wake County food inspections. I will try to predict the
SCOREfor upcoming restaurant food inspections.
Click through to see it in action.
Comments closedOne thing I love about performing analysis in .Rmd (R Markdown) files is how easy it is to share your results publicly on GitHub. Create your analysis in the .Rmd file, set your output variant as below, knit to .md format and then add your files to GitHub!
There is only one problem with the .md output: PRETTY TABLES! Most of the pretty tables packages that I like to use, or don’t display all of the formatting, or don’t display at all in .md format.
Click through to see how to solve this, including demonstration videos.
Comments closedMarco Russo and Alberto Ferrari walk us through three important set functions in DAX:
In this article we refer to “set functions” as functions that operate on sets. The three set functions available in DAX are: UNION, INTERSECT, and EXCEPT. Their behavior is very intuitive:
– UNION performs the union of two or more tables.
– INTERSECT performs the set intersection between two tables.
– EXCEPT removes the rows of the second argument from the first one.These functions take two or more tables as parameters and return a table. They prove useful not only to write DAX queries; a developer can also use these functions to prepare complex filters when implementing measures.
Read on to see how these work in DAX.
Comments closedAmeena Lalani shares some good info on the tempdb database:
Tempdb is a SQL Server temporary system database. Everytime SQL Server restarts, new Tempdb database is created. Whatever data was stored in the tempdb is lost. When TempDB gets recreated its data and log files reset to their last configured size. SQL Server records only enough information in the tempdb transaction log to roll back a transaction, but not to redo transactions during database recovery. This feature increases the performance of INSERT statements in tempdb. Tempdb database is always in Simple recovery mode. If you try to change it to Full Recovery mode, you will receive the following error message.
Click through for more info on how the database is special, types of issues you can run into as concurrency grows, and ways to resolve those issues.
Comments closed