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Curated SQL Posts

Surviving an Audit: Backup History

Published 2020-06-01 by Kevin Feasel

Dave Bland talks about surviving an audit:

Don’t volunteer information

Only provide the evidence they are asking for, nothing more.  You want to avoid giving them things that they do not ask for.  By doing so, you might expose something that you don’t want them to see.  The last thing you want to do, is give them a reason for documenting a finding. Another thing to remember is the audits have a defined scope.

This is some of the best advice about audits out there, particularly when combined with the other points Dave makes about being honest and doing the right thing. Dave also ties in some information about backup history as a particular auditing example.

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Replicating Permissions with dbatools

Published 2020-06-01 by Kevin Feasel

Claudio Silva shows how you can take one user’s permission set and apply it to another user with dbatools:

What are the steps involved in a process like this?

Generally speaking, the quickest way I know is:
1. Get the permissions of the source login/user (For each database because we don’t want to miss any permission)
2. Save them to a .sql file
3. Open the file and replace ‘srcUser’ by ‘newUser’
4. Execute

Claudio shows how you can accomplish this quickly.

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Finding the Power BI Local Tabular Instance

Published 2020-06-01 by Kevin Feasel

Emanuele Meazzo shows which port your local SSAS Tabular instance is running on as you navigate through Power BI:

I’m sure you know that PowerBI tabular models are 100% the same as SSAS tabular models, hence you can use SSMS to connect to a PowerBI Tabular model as if it was SSAS (because it is), to do whatever you want, for example scripting out the objects that you’ve created in the PowerBi Desktop GUI or extract the model to deploy it in SSAS.

The only issue to do so is that PowerBI Desktop each time you open a report creates the local SSAS Tabular instance on a random port, so it’s not like you can save a connection string and that’s it

But Emanuele has a quick Powershell script to find the port for you.

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Preventing Copy and Paste of Text in the Messages Tab

Published 2020-06-01 by Kevin Feasel

Solomon Rutzky discovered something kind of funny about SQL Server Management Studio:

While researching some odd behavior in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) I ran across something even stranger. I was testing the effect of character 0 (sometimes referred to as “NUL”) in the “Messages” tab. For those who have not worked with the C programming language (or similar languages), character 0 (usually indicated by the \0 escape sequence) is the “null terminator” for strings. Meaning, this character marks the end of this string and anything after it should not be displayed. 

In Solomon’s usual fashion, you get a thorough testing of the scenario.

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Sorting a Power BI Table by Multiple Columns

Published 2020-06-01 by Kevin Feasel

Jon Fletcher shows us how to sort a Power BI table by more than one column:

A common request that is raised by clients is how to sort a table in Power BI by multiple columns, in the same way you can in Excel.
For a while, there was no way (at least no easy way) to do this until the Power BI March 2020 update.

I learnt this tip from the following YouTube video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ik0K1H9j2Uc
Full credit to Dhruvin Shah, check his video out.

I would call this feature moderately discoverable—once you see how to do it, you can say “Oh, that makes sense.” But it’s not something I would necessarily have thought to do without this prompting.

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Securing a Kafka Deployment

Published 2020-05-29 by Kevin Feasel

Rick Spurgeon and Nikoleta Verbeck give us some tips on securing Apache Kafka:

Confluent Platform provides Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), which addresses the gaps listed above. RBAC and ACLs perform similar functions but approach the problem differently and can be used independently or cooperatively. RBAC is powered by Confluent’s Metadata Service (MDS), which integrates with LDAP and acts as the central authority for authorization and authentication data. RBAC leverages role bindings to determine which users and groups can access specific resources and what actions can be performed within those resources (roles). RBAC is empowered on the Kafka cluster by way of Confluent Server. Confluent Server is a fully compatible Kafka broker which integrates commercial security features like RBAC.

The list of items is pretty straightforward with no major surprises.

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Pandas UDFs and Python Type Hints in Spark 3.0

Published 2020-05-29 by Kevin Feasel

Hyukjin Kwon announces some updates forthcoming in Apache Spark 3.0:

The Pandas UDFs work with Pandas APIs inside the function and Apache Arrow for exchanging data. It allows vectorized operations that can increase performance up to 100x, compared to row-at-a-time Python UDFs.

The example below shows a Pandas UDF to simply add one to each value, in which it is defined with the function called pandas_plus_one decorated by pandas_udf with the Pandas UDF type specified as PandasUDFType.SCALAR.

Click through for explanations and demos for each.

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Switching Between Solution and Folders Views with SSRS Projects

Published 2020-05-29 by Kevin Feasel

Elizabeth Noble deals with a head-scratcher:


This past week, I made the goal of automating the deployment of our first SSRS report at work. I created the report and after adding the report to source control, my Object Explorer looked like the image below.

I added my solution to source control and synced the project up to Github. However, when my colleague tried to clone the repo and open the Report Project, they saw an image like the one below.

Click through for the images (which really tell the story) and how you can fix this problem.

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Passing Around JSON Arrays in Azure Data Factory

Published 2020-05-29 by Kevin Feasel

Rayis Imayev continues a series on JSON in Azure Data Factory:

It’s not a new thing to know that we can reference nested elements of ADF activities’ output since it’s represented in JSON format or pass the JSON file content to other tasks/components that can process this format.

But what if you need to pass a complete output of your ADF activity task further down your pipeline. Or you need to pass a JSON array elements to another ADF activity or sub-pipeline as the parameter value. Let’s explore what other options available in Azure Data Factory for this very interesting use case.

Read on for the demo.

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How SQL Server Stores the Money Data Type

Published 2020-05-29 by Kevin Feasel

Randolph West wants to talk to us about how we use our MONEY:

While MONEY and DECIMAL(19,4) are functionally the same, they are stored differently on disk, and this is where it gets interesting. Let’s use a random amount of $ 4,513.19. Since it’s small enough to fit in both MONEY and SMALLMONEY, we can do a simple experiment. When we ask SQL Server to store this value in a MONEY data type, it will store it (byte-reversed) as 0x7CA8B00200000000. The SMALLMONEY version of this amount would look almost identical, stored as 0x7CA8B002 (without the leading zeroes). A quick look at this byte-reversed value (0x02B0A87C) in a hex calculator gives us the amount of 45,131,900. After moving the decimal point four places to the left, we get our starting value of 4513.1900.

But read on to see how that compares to other data types.

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