• Azure D-Series VM Prices Go Down

    September 21, 2015 / No Comments »

    I'm optimizing a SQL Server OLTP mirrored database hosted on an Azure VM. After load testing, it was clear that CPU is the primary resource constraint so I suggested an upgrade to a higher A-series machine alongside other reconfiguration and storage changes. Meanwhile, I've noticed that starting in October, the D-Series pricing goes down. Moreover, D-series include a SSD temporary drive to host the temp database and buffer extensions. And, according to Microsoft, D-series have "60% faster processors than the A-series". In this case, to save the customer money, I recommended a D-Series VM with less cores than the A-series VM upgrade I had in mind.

  • Load Testing Azure Applications

    September 2, 2015 / No Comments »

    Scenario: You're conducting a capacity planning effort and load testing an Azure website (Azure App Service) that saves data to SQL Server running on Azure VM. You've created a load test, e.g. using Visual Studio, and you've realized that the throughput caps for no obvious reason. SQL Server and Azure performance counters indicate that both layers are not under pressure. Solution: Although no specifics are provided by Microsoft, it appears that Azure throttles user loads to prevent denial-of-service attacks. Based on my observations, Azure detects that the requests come from the same IP and caps the requests. As a workaround, consider conducting the load test using Visual Studio Online. Visual Studio Online allows you to distribute the test across multiple agents that can use different IP addresses (configurable as a test property). In our case, this allowed us to conduct successfully a stepped load test until we reached a performance...

  • Atlanta MS BI Group 5th Anniversary

    August 27, 2015 / No Comments »

    Our next Atlanta MS BI Group meeting will be on August 31st. This happens to be our 5th anniversary! Thanks for everybody who contributed to the group success! We've come a long way since our first meeting with a dozen people to the attendance we enjoy today of 60-70+. Come and join the festivities and learn about sentiment analysis with Big Data & Machine Learning.  Presentation:Tone/Sentiment analysis with Big Data & Machine Learning  Level: IntermediateDate:Monday, August 31th, 2015Time6:30 – 8:30 PM ETPlace:South Terraces Building (Auditorium Room) 115 Perimeter Center Place Atlanta, GA 30346Overview:People's sentiments and opinions are written in social networks. There are tweets, Facebook posts, book reviews, forum discussions, and more. These attitudes and feelings are communicated using text, with format depending on the social network. Twitter messages are limited to 140 characters and use hash-tags and Facebook messages can be longer.  This session reviews the different Natural Language Processing,...

  • Offsetting Week Start Day

    August 18, 2015 / No Comments »

    Scenario: You have a date dimension table and typical date-related columns, such as DayOfWeek, WeekEndDate, etc. In US, weeks start on Sunday and end on Saturday (ISO weeks on the other hand start on Monday and end on Sunday). You have a requirement to overwrite the week start and end days for a Power Pivot, Tabular, or MD model. For example, while the Date table defines the week start day on Sunday, you might need to overwrite it to start on Monday. Solution: I typically derive as many of the date calculations in a SQL view on top of the Date table instead of saving the results in the table itself. For example, the WeekOfYear calculation might look like this: DATEPART(WEEK, [Date]) [WeekOfYear] If you have date calculations like this, instead of changing all week-related calculations to reflect the desired week start day, the easiest way to offset the week...

  • Applied Power BI Service Class Available

    August 12, 2015 / No Comments »

    I'm happy to announce the availability of my latest training course – Applied Power BI Service. I believe that the new version of Power BI, known as Power BI Service or Power BI 2.0, is going to be very successful and it should warrant your serious interest. This one to two-day class is designed to help you become proficient with the Power BI Service and acquire the necessary skills to work with online and on-prem data, implement data models on a par with professional models created by BI pros, unlock the power of data by creating interactive reports and dashboards, and share insights with other users. No prior data modeling or reporting knowledge is assumed. Students are welcome to bring their own data to the second day of the class.

  • Where Is My DQS KB Gone?

    July 27, 2015 / No Comments »

    Scenario: You use the DQS Cleansing Transformation in an SSIS package to integrate data cleansing with DQS. Once you are done developing, you export the DQS KB and then create a new DQS KB by importing and publishing the KB to another server. Or, you might have deleted and recreated the KB with the same name. When you open the DQS Cleansing Transformation Editor, although the KB name is the same, you find that the reference to your DQS KB is gone and you get a warning message "The data quality Knowledge Base property is empty. Specify a valid Knowledge Base". Naturally, you don't want to remap the KB and recreate all mappings as this a tedious process involving many steps with many columns. Solution: I'm not sure what design pattern was followed here, by SSIS identifies the KB by its identifier instead of by name. To fix the issue...

  • Power BI Desktop Supports Direct Connectivity to Tabular

    July 25, 2015 / No Comments »

    As you've probably heard the news, Power BI went live yesterday. Among the many new features, Power BI Desktop (previously known as Power BI Designer) now supports live connections to Tabular. This is conceptually similar to connecting Excel to Tabular or Power View to Tabular to create ad hoc reports. However, Power BI Desktop is a standalone and freely available tool that is independent of Office or SharePoint. When connected directly to Tabular, Power BI Desktop generates DAX queries as a result of report changes, sends them to Tabular and displays the results. Of course, we know we have new visualizations that don't exist in Excel and on-prem Power View, such as tree maps, region maps, etc. Upon discovering connectivity to Tabular, Power BI Desktop asks you how you want to connect: Once you create the report, you can publish the dataset and report to Power BI. As a prerequisite,...

  • Atlanta BI Group Meeting on July 27th 2015

    July 25, 2015 / No Comments »

    Come and join us for our next information-packed meeting on Monday, July 27th. Stacey Jones from UPS will present "Big Data as part of your Data Strategy" and Patrick LeBlanc from Microsoft will do a quick demo of Power BI Desktop now that Power BI has gone officially live. Our sponsor will be Prestige Staffing. Presentation:Big Data as part of your Data Strategy  Level: IntermediateDate:Monday, July 27th, 2015Time6:30 – 8:30 PM ETPlace:South Terraces Building (Auditorium Room) 115 Perimeter Center Place Atlanta, GA 30346Overview:New data technologies are evolving at an unprecedented pace. The traditional RDBMS is no longer the only choice for storing your data. Big data technologies such as Hadoop and other data technologies such as Data Virtualization, NoSQL, In-memory databases, Columnar Databases, and Graph databases offer new capabilities, but hold the potential to simply distract or disrupt business. Do relational databases still play a role? Using the wrong technology for...

  • Using DQS for Externalizing Data Validation Rules

    July 20, 2015 / No Comments »

    Developers spend plenty of time coding for exceptions. The customer SSN must be 9 characters. The organization code must be four characters and it must be constrained to specific values. The happy path is easy, coding for exceptions is tedious. Some exceptions are easy to catch, others might require more complicated logic than implementing the happy path. And, it gets more difficult if the rules change often or your BI system needs to support adding new rules. This is where Data Quality Services (DQS) can help. To me, the biggest strength of DQS is externalizing rules. Instead of hardcoding rules in SQL or ETL, you can externalize them and even offload rule management to business users. Using the Data Quality Client tool, a business user can define simple rules and corrections, such as that the e-mail address must match a specific regular expression. Then, the ETL developer can integrate the...

  • Solving Datazen MDX Query Limitations

    July 12, 2015 / No Comments »

    As I mentioned in a previous blog, Microsoft added Datazen to its arsenal of data visualization tools. Datazen, of course, comes with its own pros and cons. In this blog, you'll see how you can get around a Datazen limitation when connected to an SSAS data model. Scenario: You create a Datazen dashboard that sources data from an SSAS MD or Tabular model. As usual, you need a query that slices some measures by dimension attributes, such as the query below: select {[Measures].[Sales Amount],[Measures].[Order Quantity]} on 0, [Product].[Category].[Category].Members on 1 from [Adventure Works]  While this query works fine in SSRS, when Datazen runs the query it silently drops the dimension attributes from the result. You might attempt to rewrite the query as follows: select [Product].[Category].[Category].Members * {[Measures].[Sales Amount],[Measures].[Order Quantity]} on 0 from [Adventure Works] But then you get: The query cannot be prepared. The query must have at least one...

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