Suggested Reading for October 20, 2017

I came across some nice articles and blog posts in the past weeks I wanted to share:

• Loading Data using R and PowerBI by Nick Burns at SQLServerCentral
  Nick explains why he isn't a fan of Power BI's R visuals. But the alternative is loading data via an R script and display it in a native Power BI visual. I specially liked his neat technique of unpivoting data with R to end up with a key-value pair. This gives him the possibility to easily slice the final scatterplot by the keys of the key-value pair, which were the attributes (columns) in the original data set before the unpivot action.
• Configuring “all” access with dynamic row-level security by Daniil Maslyuk (@DMaslyuk | xxlbi.com)
  Daniil has a nice solution for solving a problem with dynamic RLS for a security table with 2 attributes, e.g. Department and Region where several users have "ALL" configured for 1 or 2 attributes. For example, the CEO can see all departments and regions, but the CFO can see all regions but only the Finance department. He introduces an unrelated UserSecurity table and filters the facts and dimensions by this table.
• Epic Life Quest Task: Setting the Summit Pre-Con Attendance Record by Brent Ozar (@BrentO | Ozar.me)
  Brent and Erik put themselves to the test and passed gloriously: they sold out all the 360 seats in their pre-con. Brent gives a look behind the scenes how they pulled it off and what they did to get it sold out: write a blog post, online presentation, email announcements and give more value to the attendees with stretch goals.
• A Freecon Halloween at the PASS Summit at SQLServerCentral
  If you aren't attending any of the pre-cons for Pass Summit you can go to this FreeCon. It's held on Tuesday, October 31st, with 6 sessions from different speakers: Jason Brimhall (@sqlrnnr), Louis Davidson (@drsql), Andy Leonard (@AndyLeonard), Jimmy May (@aspiringgeek), Gail Shaw (@SQLintheWild) and Wayne Sheffield (@DBAWayne), an impressive lineup I'd say. Among the topics: SSIS Framework, SQL Injection and Parameter Sniffing. You can register here.
• Power BI Pro & Power BI Premium by Adam Wilson (@AdamDWilson) at PowerBI.com
  Adam, Group Program Manager Power BI, has put together a list of the most common questions they heard from customers to provide guidance that can help as a starting point when assessing licensing options.
• Book Release: Voices from the Data Platform by Melody Zacharias (@sqlmelody | sqlmelody.com)
  7 very talented people from the SQLFamily got together and wrote this book as a start of a series of books: Melody Zacharias (@sqlmelody), Cathrine Wilhelmsen (@cathrinew), Jennifer McCown (@JenniferMcCown), Mindy Curnutt (@sqlgirl), Rie Irish (@IrishSQL), Kathi Kellenberger (@auntkathi) and Meagan Longoria (@mmarie), with a foreword by Kevin Kline (@kekline). You can get the book on Amazon.

• The purpose of this series is to help others succeed.  The authors have all ridden the elevator of success to the top and received their MVP awards to reflect that fact.  Now it is our responsibility to send that elevator back down so others may benefit from our experience.  As an indication of our intent, all profits from the sale of this book are to be donated to charities.

I hope you can get something useful out of here, feel free to let me know if you find other useful links that I should include next time!

@NickyvV

Saying Goodbye to Pulse and Hello to Van Lanschot

I'm starting next monday, October 2nd, at Van Lanschot (@VanLanschot | web) in Den Bosch. Unfortunately I didn't have any holidays left so yesterday I had my last day at Pulse, and today I'm attending SQLSaturday Holland (which will have a separate post) where I can meetup with some SQLFamily! Then one day to switch contexts and get started on Monday: I'm very excited!

Pulse
I have to say I enjoyed my time at Pulse. It therefore wasn't an easy decision to leave. I really liked my colleagues and the opportunities they gave me. But recently I discovered that the time I spend commuting just isn't worth it anymore. I like what I do at work, but I love my family more.

Van Lanschot
That's when this opportunity came along. It's a job internally at Van Lanschot, so no consultancy for different clients anymore. I'm stationed in Den Bosch, around 25 minutes from home!
I will be a Business Intelligence Consultant at the Data Management team, and will (still) mainly be working with Microsoft technologies like SQL Server and Power BI.

Book Review: The War of Art by Steven Pressfield

My Reading Journey

A while ago I created a new page on my blog: My Reading Journey. On this page I’m keeping track of the books I read throughout the year. There are around a dozen books on it that I read in previous years. Starting this year, and maybe I’ll cover a few other books I already read, I’m going to do a short review of the books. Or at least the ones that are related to my professional career.

I recently completed reading The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield.

My 3-word summary: Beating resistance & procrastination

Theme

The War of Art tries to help readers overcome Resistance. It comes in many flavors as you can see in the mind map I created. The author gives various ways of beating through this resistance and ultimately getting things done.

Opinion

I really liked the book, especially the first two parts of the book where resistance is explained and what I can do to beat resistance and turn into a pro. I think I already am a pro… in procrastination. I have to be honest and admit that many of the properties of resistance where quite familiar to me.
Since I started planning my daily activities a bit more I see I can be much more productive. Also focus on finishing one task at a time. Just set out what you want to achieve for the day and work towards that with priorities. You can use the Pomodoro technique if that works for you, I use Pomodairo for that. But the point is: just use anything that makes you more productive, whether it’s a tool, a framework or just common sense.

In the third part the author gives his opinion as to what he believes is the reason that I can overcome my fears.At some points he lost me a little bit, just because I don’t think there’s anything “in a higher realm”.

Author

Steven Pressfield also wrote Do the Work and Turning Pro, similar books to this, all centered around the topics of resistance, prioritization, creativity and empowerment, although this was his first nonfiction book. He wrote quite a few novels before this one (e.g. The Legend of Bagger Vance was adapted for screen, starring Matt Damon, Will Smith and Charlize Theron a.o.).
The title is not to be confused with The Art of War, written by Sun Tzu in the 6th century BC which is said by many to be the decisive work on military strategies and tactics of its time.

TFS: Undo Check-out From Other User

Out-of-the-box, there is no functionality to undo check-outs from other users in Team Foundation Services. But there is an option with TFS Power Tools for VS, available from VS 2012.

1. Go to Tools and Extensions and Updates.
2. In the Online Visual Studio Gallery search for Power Tools
3. Download the extension, close VS and install the extension.

Power BI Report Server

I just want to share this short post with anyone that is not familiar with the SQL Server Slack channel at: https://sqlcommunity.slack.com.
If you want to join the Slack channel, visit Brent’s (@BrentO) post: How to Join the SQL Server Community Chat in Slack.

With the introduction of Power BI Report Server on May 3rd, a lot of questions arose.

The particular question that started the thread I want to share was whether it is possible to upgrade an existing SSRS instance to Power BI Report Server. You can read Adam Saxton’s (@GuyInACube) answer to this and other interesting questions in the screenshot below.

SSDT Error Message: Unable To Cast COM Object of Type…

Just a short blog post today explaining a problem (and solution) I ran into when working at a client recently. Hopefully it is helpful for anyone out there.

Problem

I recently got this error message at a client when trying to open an SSIS solution in SSDT.

Unable to cast COM object of type 'System.__ComObject' to interface type 'Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Pipeline.Wrapper.IDTSObject100'

The reason could be a badly applied Service Pack or CU for example, but I’m not entirely sure about that (source).

Solution

Before starting, make sure you close any open Visual Studio instance.
In a Command Prompt go to the following path (be sure to start the Command Prompt as Administrator):

C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\120\DTS\Binn\

where 120 is you SQL Server version number.
Reregister the dts.dll by executing the command:

regsvr32 dts.dll

If all goes well you should see the following message pop up:

I found info here.

Happy coding :)

T-SQL Tuesday #89: The Times They Are a-changing

This months T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Koen Verbeeck (@Ko_Ver) on the topic how the cloud will change and maybe has already changed our jobs as data professionals.
This idea was inspired by Kendra Little’s (@Kendra_Little) blog post Will the Cloud Eat My DBA Job? I listened to the podcast version of her post and here are my 2 cents to the party.