In recent months, I’ve been brushing up my R skills. I’ve had a few areas of interest in this:
As a client tool, I’ve been using RStudio. It’s been good and very simple but it’s a completely separate environment. So I was excited when I saw there was to be a preview of new R tooling for Visual Studio.
2016-03-10
Hi Folks,
We’ve taken a fairly long break but now back into the swing for SQL Server 2016 and Power BI.
The first of the new series of shows is a show on the current state of Power BI with Jen Underwood.
You’ll find it here: SQL Down Under Podcast
Enjoy!
Regards,
Greg
2015-12-27
We recently started working with the new Personal Data Management Gateway for Power BI. Overall, we really like it but the error messages in most of Power BI have left much to be desired.
One error that we were encountering made us feel like the service was flaky as it seemed to happen randomly. When we tried to refresh a dataset, we got this error:
The Power BI team came to the rescue and worked out what was happening. Turns out that you cannot currently refresh more than once every 5 minutes. That also includes within 5 minutes of your initial upload. Unfortunately, this is the error returned when you attempt it.
2015-07-14
At a client site today and they asked me about a warning that they got every time they manually failed over their SQL Server availability group.
It said: “The current WSFC cluster quorum vote configuration is not recommended for the availability group.” They were puzzled by this as they had a valid quorum configuration. In their case, they had a two node cluster using MNS (majority node set) and a fileshare witness.
2014-12-22
I spend a lot of time working with software houses, helping them to make their applications work well with SQL Server. One thing that I’ve heard loud and clear over the years is that most software houses won’t write a single line of code that will only run on the enterprise edition of SQL Server, because they are not prepared to limit their potential pool of customers to those running enterprise edition.
2014-12-12
As most websites do, we collect analytics on the people visiting our site https://sqldownunder.com
I thought it might be interesting to share the breakdown of visitors to our site. Keep in mind that we have a primarily Microsoft-oriented audience. Enjoy!
No surprise on the native languages:
Country breakdown reflects the amount of local traffic we have for instructor-led courses. Most others are podcast listeners:
We first noticed Chrome slightly outstripping IE a while back but recently, it’s changed a lot. I suspect that IE11 will have been as issue here:
2014-10-30
I had the pleasure of recording another SQL Down Under show today.
Show 64 features Microsoft Azure DocumentDB product group member discussing Azure DocumentDB and what SQL Server DBAs and developers need to know about it.
JSON-based storage has been one of the highest rated requests for enhancements to SQL Server. While we haven’t got those enhancements yet, DocumentDB nicely fills a gap between NoSQL databases and relational databases.
You’ll find the show here: SQL Down Under Podcast
2014-10-30
It’s great to see that the Connect site leading to fixes in the product.
I was really pleased when SQL Server Data Tools for BI appeared for Visual Studio 2013. What I wasn’t pleased about where a number of UI issues that came with that version.
In particular, there was a problem with previewing Reporting Services reports. If I create a new report project, add a blank report, and drag on a text box:
2014-10-29
I’m finally catching up on some book reviews.
One that I’ve been meaning to write for quite a while is this review.
It’s hard to describe how awesome I think this book is. I was at a session in the USA some time back, where they were giving out the previous version of this book. I grabbed a copy but didn’t get around to reading it for a while. What a mistake.
2014-09-27
There were a number of great announcements from Scott Guthrie today: https://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/azure-sql-databases-api-management-media-services-websites-role-based-access-control-and-more
One that particularly caught my eye was a subtle change to the billing for Azure SQL Database. Databases used to be billed at a daily charge.
While this might not have seemed a big deal, the only way to create a transactionally-consistent backup of the database was to first copy it using CREATE DATABASE AS COPY OF original database, then to use the database export functions on the copy. The export needed to be done on the copy (not on the original) as it just copied the data in each table, one table at a time.
2014-09-14
