FYI- this was the one post I had to restore manually after my blog was hacked a week back. Its intact, but the post may appear a bit different than before, as I copied and pasted from the emailed version that occurs as part of my RSS feed. Enjoy! Azure CLI made me feel right at home after working at Oracle in the Enterprise Manager CLI, (EMCLI) The syntax is simple, powerful and allows an interface to manage Azure infrastructure from the command line, scripting out complex processing that would involve a lot of time in the user interface. I’d…
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Time Flies when you’re having fun or when you’re crazy busy- I’m unsure which is more true. I just completed my first review as an employee at Microsoft and good news! They’re going to keep me. 🙂 I still get a number of questions surrounding my job at Microsoft. Since I worked for Oracle for 2 1/2 years, much of it speaking between customer engagements, many didn’t realize that I started out, and have always been, multi-platform. My first database was a monstrous SQL Server, version 7 and small Oracle and Sybase databases. I have always loved technology. I found…
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Its quite common that the first time you work with a feature in a cloud interface, it can appear so foreign until you’ve done it a few times. If it’s a task that you may not do often or only once, it can be downright painful. It doesn’t matter who the cloud provider is or the application, we all have felt the pain of this type of situation and why some of us even started blogging…:) Until its familiar, it may not feel comfortable and you may not even like how it works. As a newer employee at Microsoft, I’m…
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Tim and I just arrived back in Colorado yesterday and just arrived- as in Grand Junction, Colorado on the western border of Utah. Hauling a 42Ft. 5th wheel means that you make some considerations on how far you can go and how far you want to go. It’s going to be a busy couple of weeks and this is what’s in the plans: Microsoft Education Data Summit I’ll be flying to Las Vegas tomorrow morning to attend and train in Las Vegas with the rest of my technical peers in the education sector of Microsoft. I look forward to these…
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I’ve started to write a series of articles on Simple Talk from Redgate on Linux for the SQL Server DBA. Thanks to Kathi Kellenberger, who came to my pre-con in Indianapolis SQL Saturday and then asked if it was something that I’d be up to doing. The biggest challenge when doing one hour sessions on Linux at SQL Saturdays is that you find out, one hour is just no where, near enough. The eight hour pre-con we get to dig in deeper, actually work through a number of labs and I feel like students leave with a better grasp on…
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There’s a reason that log analytics programs, like Splunk, Data Dog and Sumo Logic are so popular. Even Microsoft has a Log Analytics product, but the important message here is log data is massive and parsing through it to find important information can be a bit of a pain. The second word in Log Analytics IS “analytics”. Due to this, the first thought when faced with the number of logs from many complex Power BI environments that people are building, (multiple data sources, multiple data centers, SSRS, Power BI, etc) was to load the logs into Power BI. I’ve been…
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I get a lot of questions about what it’s like to work remote while living in our 5th wheel. I’ll link this post to danceswithwinnebagos.com, too, so for those asking the same question from that site, it’s a two for one… 🙂 I don’t just break any ol’ rule, I break rules that don’t makes sense and working from an office was one of them. The amount of time lost in a daily commute was something I wasn’t able to accept. I hated open work spaces, which more offices are going to, (my ADHD does NOT thank you for the…
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I just finished teaching an 8 hour pre-con at SQL Saturday Indianapolis on Essential Linux for the DBA. The focus of the class was on what the Microsoft DBA would need to know as more SQL Server environments begin to run on Linux. The obstacles and demands of them will be a bit different than the Oracle crowd, as they may not have the Linux Admin or Unix expertise onsite for support and have to fend for themselves more than I did starting out on Linux. Some folks asked me why I chose to use Docker with the SQL Server…
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So I haven’t opened Visual Studio in….oh….let’s just say it’s been a few years…:) I had a project that I needed to run and was surprised when the Solution Explorer was missing from SSMS 2017. Its only fair to say, there was also fair warning from Microsoft. Due to this, I opened up Visual Studio to use its Solution Explorer and integration for SSIS and other features required for a large project. I was both happy with the sheer amount of features and have some constructive feedback to make it more user friendly. I love that I can navigate servers,…
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Power BI, like many Microsoft products, is multi-threaded. This can be seen from the logs and even the Task Manager. I know, I know…you’ve probably heard this part all before… The importance of this information, is that the logs will display Process IDs, (PID) that are separate from the main Power BI Desktop executable, including the secondary processes.. Moving from the Power BI logs that reside in the Performance folder, (see Part I here) we can view and connect the PIDs and TID, (Transaction IDs) to information from the Task Manager and the data displayed: Note that I’ve highlighted the…
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So we went over locations and the basics of logging and tracing in Power BI. I now want to know how to make more sense from the data. In Oracle, we use a utility called TKProf, (along with others and a number of third party tools) to make sense of what comes from the logs. SQL Server has Log Analytics and the profiler, but what can I do with Power BI? First, let’s discuss what happens when we have actual activity. In my first post, the system was pretty static. This time I chose to open up a file with…
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Knowing where log files are and how to turn on debugging is an essential part of any technical job and this goes for Power BI, too. Remember, as I learn, so does everyone else….Come on, pretty please? Power BI Desktop Log files and traces can be accessed one of two ways- Via the Power BI Application Via File Explorer In the Power BI application, go to File –> Options and Settings –> Options –> Diagnostics. Crash and dump files are automatically stored with an option to disable them from this screen, but unsure why you’d ever want to do this. …
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Today’s Post is brought to you by Patrick LeBlanc of Guy in a Cube. I learn best by doing, so I was working with different features while watching along on Quick Measures: As a newbie, yes, I had problems with my quick measures just as Patrick said I would, but with a twist- It wasn’t that I didn’t want to learn DAX, quite the opposite, I could get the expression to work just fine with DAX, but couldn’t seem to get the hang of the quick measure. Leave it to me to have challenges with the *simpler* method… 🙂 Its…
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Presenting data in the format to ease visualization is required for any BI product. Power BI provides much of this with Data Analysis Expressions, (DAX). As a DBA, I admit to cringing every time a reference was made how similar it is to functions in Excel or other non-database platforms. I’m a DBA and I naturally am going to see data at a much larger, more complex level. I love the simplicity of DAX, which granted me the ability to acquire basic skills using it in just a day, but considering Power BI’s ability to pull from multiple data…
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Click bait worthy title, eh? 🙂 That’s what I thought after I read the article from the Harvard Biz Review with the lead in comment, “Women who have already made it to the top say that the only person who will get you there is yourself.” I found this utterly misleading and the article missing many of the important areas, proving this incorrect. We are highly critical of women and we’re uncomfortable with women’s ambition, (which the article did lightly touch on.) The author didn’t capture how much women require sponsors and mentors or, as the article also touched on,…
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They say the devil is in the details and as I come from the DevOps side of the house, it would only be natural that I’d be attracted to how Microsoft Flow works with Power BI. For those that aren’t familiar with Microsoft Flow, think of it like If This Then That, (IFTTT) from Microsoft. I used IFTTT to automate a number of tasks at my previous company- everything from posting to social media automation, notifications on Slack, creating weekly status reports and other tedious tasks that I hated having to do manually. Microsoft Flow, is a powerful SaaS tool…
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I can be an extremely impatient person about anything I think should be faster. I’m diving in deep with Power BI and for most of the early on lessons, the data sources used are Excel and…ahem…Microsoft Access. I don’t know a DBA alive that enjoys working with Access. Its great for the common user to have a database application, but we can barely use the words “Access” and “Database” in the same sentence. In my heart, I will always be a performance person and working with Power BI desktop with Microsoft Access is enough to make you want to throw…
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I’m back!! I know you missed my posts…be honest…. 🙂 So its time to start drinking from the fire hose and its important for me to go back to the very beginning, start from scratch and learn from A to Z. I learned Power BI on my own and there is undoubtedly pieces missing from my knowledge base that need to be filled in. No way I’d be able to spell if my A to Z alphabet was missing some vital letters, right pps, err, I mean peeps? What is Power BI? Power BI is Microsoft’s answer to how people…