The Bit Bucket

We had a new house built a while back, and in a few rooms there was a double switch: one for the light and one for a fan.

But which is which?

Now the old way to do that would have been to put a label on each one. Seems like a reasonable idea but unless that’s a braille label, and you can read braille, that’s not going to help you in the dark. You want to just reach in and turn on the correct switch. That’s easy enough to do, but it really only works if the electrician who installed them followed a pattern i.e. the switch furthest inside might be the light, and the one closest to the door might be the fan.

2020-10-20

I was reading posts in an email distribution list yesterday and someone asked if SQL Server Replication was deprecated. First up, let’s just confirm that it’s not. As Mark Twain said: “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated”. There’s still a really strong need for it, and somewhat ironically, that need has been getting stronger lately.

Back when replication was introduced, it had a bit of a reputation for being hard to set up, and hard to look after. It was in the same category as features like clustering. If I was teaching a SQL Server 6.5 class, you could tell which students could follow instructions if they managed to get clustering working. Fortunately, it’s nothing like that today but you’ll still hear from people with “old pain”.

2020-10-15

I’ve been in so many companies lately where new CTOs and CIOs claim to have a cloud focus, but all they want to do is migrate all their existing systems from on-premises VMs to cloud-based VMs. They talk about making a cloud transformation but they’re not transforming anything.

I was pleased to get a chance to create a short educational series for the people at PASS to cover some of my thoughts on how to make a real transformation, not just a migration.

2020-10-09

Recently, I did an interview with Amit Bansal and the team from Data Platform Geeks about some of the aspects involved in implementing Power BI in the Enterprise.

We touched at some length on security and a number of issues around data models.

You can find the interview here: http://www.dataplatformgeeks.com/geek-talk-sep-03-2020-dr-greg-low-enterprise-power-bi/

2020-09-11

I saw the above message when working with one of my clients today. The error says Only users with Power BI Pro licenses can publish to this workspace. And that would make sense if they hadn’t already purchases Power BI Pro licenses for the user.

I checked online, and there were a number of comments about people seeing this error. There were the usual suggestions of logging out and back into Power BI. There was even one who’d quoted a Microsoft support person who said that Pro licenses don’t work for up to 24 hours after you purchase them. (That sounds dubious to me).

2020-09-07

Many years ago, I spent a lot of time in universities. I ended up finishing my studies at QUT in Brisbane

and I have a great and continuing fondness for that institution. Earlier on though, amongst other universities, I did quite a lot of study through Charles Sturt University

Over the years, I’ve maintained a continuous link with my friends at Charles Sturt University (CSU). Back when we used to run Code Camps for both developers and DBAs, CSU were only too pleased to jump in to help us. From the minute we arrived that first day in Wagga Wagga, I knew it was going to be good. Associate Profession Irfan Altas was an amazing help and remains a friend to this day. I’m always pleased to get to chat to him.

2020-08-16

Power BI is amazing. And it’s starting to appear all over the place. Many enterprises don’t know what to make of it though. Some are scared that it’ll be the “next Access” where stores of uncontrolled data end up all over the organization. Power BI’s mantra of “5 minutes to Wow” is spot on. It’s easy to be impressed. But enterprises are often struggling with “what comes next after that 5 minutes?”

2020-08-07

I was editing using the Power Query editor in an Analysis Services project, hosted in Visual Studio 2019. When I tried to use “Add column by example”, I received the error shown above:

Unexpected Error

Could not load file or assembly ‘Microsoft.DataIntegration.TransformDataByExample, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad34e35’ or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.

The problem is that the assembly had not been deployed with the Analysis Services Designer.

2020-07-16

In some upcoming posts, I’ll discuss how you can change between data types, but I wanted to show you first, how you can use the FORMAT() function to convert dates and times to strings.

This query asks for the current date and time value formatted as day then month, then (four digit) year. It also includes the desired culture (en-US) which would be used if the format required any culture-specific items, such as the names of months.

2020-07-13

I mentioned in the last T-SQL post how you could create a datetimeoffset value by combining a datetime2 with an offset. But sometimes you need to switch to a different offset. And that’s what the SWITCHOFFSET() function does:

In this query, I was taking a local time (that had a timezone offset of 11 hours), and switching it to the current time in Seattle (with a -7 hours offset):