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Curated SQL Posts

Making Temporal Tables Yours

Published 2021-09-08 by Kevin Feasel

Lee Markum continues a series on temporal tables:

In the initial post, we talked about some very basic items to get you up and running with temporal tables. In part 2, I’ll cover a few more things to think about and implement when working with temporal tables.

In the first post, we looked at altering an existing table to be a temporal table. Now we will look at what is involved in making a table be a temporal table from the very beginning.

Click through for Lee’s thoughts on naming, indexing, and data retention.

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Dynamic Transparency Changes in Power BI

Published 2021-09-08 by Kevin Feasel

Sandeep Pawar explains how to allow users to control transparency in Power BI visuals:

As someone who uses Python/R heavily for exploratory data analysis and Power BI for publishing the final data analytics reports, I have always missed the ability to adjust the color transperancy in Power BI. In Power BI you can change the color dynamically and conditionally but there is no native functionality to change the transperancy.

I was working on a project where I wanted to highlight certain clusters in the data to the business user. Sure, I could change the color but it’s very challenging when the data points are concentrated in a small area and they overlap each other. In Python and R you can easily adjust the alpha value in most plots to see the dense area clearly.

Click through for one Power BI solution.

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Tying DAX Queries to Visuals in a Power BI Report

Published 2021-09-08 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb shows off some diagnostic skills in published Power BI visuals:

The integration between Azure Log Analytics and Power BI opens up a lot of new possibilities for Power BI administrators. It’s still in preview (there’s a lot more cool stuff still to come) but the Analysis Services events that are available at the time of writing are still very useful: they give you pretty much everything you had in Profiler plus some new stuff too. In this post I’ll show you how you can use this data to work out which visual in a published report generated a particular DAX query.

Read on for a demonstration.

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Image Classification with ML.NET

Published 2021-09-07 by Kevin Feasel

Ivan Matec shows how to use ML.NET’s image classification with an example of vital importance:

One of the best scenes from Silicon Valley is Jian Yang demoing his “Hotdog, not hotdog” application. In this article, we will build our own “Hotdog, not hotdog” solution using ML.NET. After all, who would not want to determine if that dish is, or is not a hot dog? Just take a picture, upload it to the web or desktop application, and get results with almost 90% certainty in a second.

Although some may say this is not a very useful application, it is a fun way to explore another machine learning concept through ML.NET. I covered installing and getting started with ML.NET in Visual Studio in my previous article, so refer to it if you missed it.

Click through for the implementation, which is quite straightforward.

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An Introduction to Aggregations in Power BI

Published 2021-09-07 by Kevin Feasel

Phil Seamark begins a new series:

One of the most powerful features of Power BI data modelling today is creating aggregation tables in your dataset and having simple calculations automatically make use of the tables without writing complex DAX. This feature is available in both Pro and Premium.

What does “automatically make use of” mean in this context?

Read on for that answer and a whole lot more.

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Relative-Time Slicers in Power BI

Published 2021-09-07 by Kevin Feasel

Gerhard Brueckl wants your Power BI reports to know what day it is:

A very common requirement for a Power BI report that I stumble across at almost all of my customers is to automatically show data for the current day/month/year when a report is opened. At first sight this seems like a very trivial problem but once you dig into the problem, you will realize that all of the common solutions out there have some disadvantages and only solve the problem partially.

Click through for a clear description of the problem and a clear description of the answer.

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An Overview of Function-as-a-Service

Published 2021-09-07 by Kevin Feasel

Grace Ol’Halloran lays out the basics of serverless computing in cloud platforms:

The term serverless computing can be misleading; how can you compute things without a server? Well, the answer is that you don’t. The term “serverless” comes from the idea that the server is abstracted from the developer, and is totally maintained by the cloud provider. In other words, the developer doesn’t really care what environment their code is run in; they just need it hosted somewhere where it can be executed. This removes the responsibility of infrastructure configuration and maintenance from the developer, but naturally gives them less flexibility and control over the environment.

It took me watching several presentations before I really understood the value behind serverless compute.

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Advanced Functions in Powershell

Published 2021-09-07 by Kevin Feasel

Robert Cain moves from basic to advanced:

In my previous post, I covered the use of PowerShell Basic Functions. In this post we’ll cover Advanced Functions.

Advanced Functions provide several abilities over basic ones. First, you can create a detailed parameter list, including the ability to include optional parameters.

Second, you can pipeline enable your functions. Just like a cmdlet, you’ll be able to take input from the pipeline, work with it, then send it out your function back into the pipeline. This will be the subject of our next post.

Finally, you can use features such as Verbose and Debug, which will be the subject of an upcoming blog post.

Click through for examples of what you can do with advanced functions.

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Using Triggers for Change Tracking

Published 2021-09-07 by Kevin Feasel

Chad Callihan shows how you can roll your own change tracking with triggers:

Have you ever come across triggers being used to audit table changes? In this post, we’ll look at a few examples of DML triggers in action.

Click through for examples around tracking updates and last edit times, as well as creating audit tables for operations.

If you do go this route, Chad has an important warning. In addition, I appreciate that the statements in this example support multi-row updates. That’s something people often forget when writing triggers.

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