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Curated SQL Posts

Custom Formatting of Visuals using Calculation Groups

Published 2020-08-04 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers shares some exciting news:

The Power BI team has been doing a lot of incredible work. The most recent update which I got wind of is Custom Formatting of measures is now supported for Visuals.

This has already been deployed to the Power BI Service and if you download the
latest version of Power BI Desktop (Version 2.83.5894.961 as at 03 Aug 2020) it has the new features. This means you can use this TODAY!

Previously this was only supported for tables and matrixes.

Click through to see how it looks in Power BI. It’s easy, and that’s a good thing.

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Connecting to Cosmos DB via Linked Server

Published 2020-08-04 by Kevin Feasel

Frank Solomon takes us through communicating with Cosmos DB from SQL Server:

Every source table column becomes an expression in the SELECT clause. If needed, JSONLint, for example, can validate the output JSON format. In this query, the FOR XML PATH clause places each row into a formatted JSON row, with key/value pairs that match the column/value pairs of the original rows. To get the data ready, the empty (”) value in the FOR XML PATH() clause at line 10 separates each XML row with a default comma. At line 11, the STUFF function arguments format the result set as a string and remove the leading “.” in the original data. Save the finished result XML-format result set as a JSON file. This file will become the data we’ll import.

A Cosmos DB database has zero or more collections, which correspond to SQL Server tables. A collection has zero or more documents, which correspond to SQL Server table rows. In the Cosmos DB

With SQL Server 2019, PolyBase also allows connections to Cosmos DB if (and only if) you are using the MongoDB API for Cosmos. But if that’s how your collection is set up, querying it becomes pretty easy.

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Understanding DAX’s LOOKUPVALUE Function

Published 2020-08-04 by Kevin Feasel

Alberto Ferrari explains how the LOOKUPVALUE works:

LOOKUPVALUE requires a column to retrieve a set of column/value pairs to provide the search conditions, and an optional default value in case there are either no matching rows, or too many matching rows. The following formula retrieves the exchange rate from the Daily Exchange Rate table, where Currency[Currency Code] matches EUR and ‘Daily Exchange Rate'[Date] matches Sales[Order Date]. In case there are no matches, it returns zero:

Alberto also provides a primer on the function in case you are unfamiliar with it, as this post starts with the assumption that you know what it does.

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Choroplethr 3.6.4 on CRAN

Published 2020-08-03 by Kevin Feasel

Ari Lamstein announces that Choroplethr version 3.6.4 is now on CRAN:

Choroplethr v3.6.4 is now on CRAN. This is the first update to the package in two years, and was necessary because of a recent change to the tigris package, which choroplethr uses to make Census Tract maps. I also took this opportunity to add new example demographic data for Census Tracts.

Read on for a listing of the updates, examples, and a request from Ari to help keep the project up to date by finding a suitable sponsor. H/T R-Bloggers

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Credential and Secrets Management in R

Published 2020-08-03 by Kevin Feasel

Bernardo Lares walks us through some good practices around managing credentials and secrets in R:

I have several functions that live in my public lares library that use get_creds() to fetch my secrets. Some of them are used as credentials to query databases, send emails with API services such as Mailgun, ping notifications using Slack‘s webhook, interacting with Google Sheets programatically, fetching Facebook and Twitter’s API stuff, Typeform, Github, Hubspot… I even have a portfolio performance report for my personal investments. If you check the code underneath, you won’t find credentials written anywhere but the code will actually work (for me and for anyone that uses the library). So, how can we accomplish this?

Read on to learn how.

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Creating Executables from Powershell Scripts

Published 2020-08-03 by Kevin Feasel

Patrick Gruenauer introduces us to an interesting tool:

Have you ever dreamed of creating exe files out of your PowerShell scripts? If yes, read on. In this post I will show you how you can create exe files with a small and simple program called ps2exe.

Read on to see how it works. Then give it a try and wallow in the fact that some Powershell-wielding production DBA who absolutely is not a developer and doesn’t write code like developers slowly realizes that the developer call was coming from inside the house.

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Retrieving Secrets from Azure DevOps Pipelines

Published 2020-08-03 by Kevin Feasel

Gavin Campbell shows how you can pull secrets out of an Azure DevOps Pipeline:

For secrets created in the Azure DevOps UI, whether pipeline-scoped or in a variable group, it is not so simple to retrieve the variables after creation. This might be required for a number of reasons, most often troubleshooting. The need to do this is often an indicator that the project should have been using an Azure Key Vault in the first place.

Previously it was necessary to jump through some hoops to access secret variables, but it turns out this is no longer required. It also appears the recommended approach of mapping secrets to environment variables is currently not working for secret variables from variable groups.

I second the notion of using Key Vault for secrets management.

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Wanted: Limiting Calculation Group Members in Power BI

Published 2020-08-03 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo shares an annoyance in how calculation groups are currently set up:

The consumption experience following the introduction of calculation groups needs to be improved in Power BI. For example, the immediate advantage of having a time intelligence calculation group is that it is no longer necessary to create multiple variations of the same measure to implement all the possible time intelligence calculations. However, what happens when you have a matrix with Sales Amount, Total Cost, Margin, but you want to show the current value for all the measures and the year-over-year difference only for the Margin measure? Today, if you add a year-over-year calculation item to the matrix, you get the year-over-year of all the measures.

Marco has a Power BI Idea to resolve this which sounds a lot like GROUPING SETS in T-SQL.

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Issues when Using the Power BI REST API

Published 2020-08-03 by Kevin Feasel

Nicky van Vroenhoven walks us through a few issues discovered when trying to use the Power BI REST API:

Last month when I was trying to follow the excellent video on Building a Power BI Admin View by Parker Stevens ( b | @PowerBIElite | YouTube).

However, I ran into a few things that I’d like to dedicate this quick post on.

Read on to see where Nicky ran into issues and how you might be able to avoid them.

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