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One of the problems we hit today was getting a Power BI to automatically refresh. The underlying data is updated every 5 mins, however the actual Power BI only refreshes when the user interacts with the report despite using DirectQuery. To overcome this, we’ve built a simple HTML page that used a bit of JavaScript magic to force a refresh and the new Secure Embed feature. First, we need to get a code for the report, open the report then click File > Embed (You can select ‘Publish to web’ - this means you don’t need to login to view the report, however anyone in the world could access the report)...

Power BI Secure embed codes - allows easy sharing of Power BI reports. The public embedded codes - publish to web - has been out for a while that allows you share the Power BI reports that the anyone on the Internet (unauthenticated members of the public) should be able to see. The key difference is the secure part of the name. Users will need to authenticate, this does of course mean they will require either a Power BI Pro license or the report will be using the Power BI Premium capacity....

Monzo is a digital only UK bank. It is fully authorised in the UK by the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and the PRA. Simply put, if Monzo goes belly up, your money is protected. If you are over 18 years old and have a Android or iPhone (as it’s app only), it’s worth signing up, it takes minutes. Especially whilst they are giving away £10 for new customers!...

One of the annoyingly missing features in Power BI is the ability to organize fields into folders to allow users to easily find them. Luckily the amazingly animated Will Thompson posted an update on Power BI Ideas, which has received over 400 votes, that it has been developed and is available as a preview feature in the Nov'18 Power BI Desktop release. The display folders are part of the new modeling view....

At the end of the day, a business is a business. It’s sole job is to make money. There isn’t anything wrong with this, I like getting paid each month, it enables me to be to, you know, buy food and keep a roof over my head. Once you accept you need money to live in today’s society you can kinda see how a business needs to make money and if you can reduce costs it, brillant....

I had a bit of a weird one where one of the SSDT projects failed to deploy. The package would successfully deploy locally, but failed from the deployment server. An extract from the log: vardecimal support is enabled for the database but disabled for the project. See SQL Server Books Online for more information about how to turn off vardecimal support. The short version of the story is the deployment server was trying to msdb....

Towards the end of last year I was writing .net core AWS Lambda. I was super impressed with how .net core (and even PowerShell) works on Linux. I would have to say C# is by far my favorite programming language, the only exception might be T-SQL and the idea of being about to write code and get it to run on Linux is amazing. Mainly because Linux servers are, to be blunt, cheaper....

So you’ve renamed your SQL Server, but something isn’t right. Returns the old name. The fix is simple. You just need to restart the SQL instance and @@servername will return the correct name. More info on the Microsoft Docs. On a similar note, Octopus Deploy has similar annoyance, the server name doesn’t update for the server node. Again simple fix for this simple annoyance: The other thing that can get missed is the SQL Jobs....

I got this error when opening an SSRS project in Visual Studio. The solution. Upgrade SSDT. Turns out my colleague had a higher version of SSRS component - if you go, within Visual Studio, Help > About it will give you the version number of Visual Studio then the individual component versions.

Here are a few of my predictions based on my experiences over the last few months. First. Azure Data Catalog is going to be massive in the near future (18 months). The (hopefully) future integration with the new SQL Data Discovery and Classification is going to help massively with GDPR. Secondly, Chris Webb is going to become very popular. With Azure Analysis Service, the big question is optimize or scale. The killer feature for any monitoring tool aimed at the BI market is going to have to answer that question....

In the old days, you would have to throw money at a trusted Certificate Authority (CA) who would sell you a SSL certificate. The alternative was to self-sign or use someone like cacert, the problem is out-of-the-box, no browser\OS supports this so you get a security warning, which isn’t something you want when your trying to be secure. StartCom, was a trusted CA who issued free SSL certificates. Microsoft Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox all trusted StartCom which means you could get a free SSL certificate without the warnings....

Another day, another source of bad data. This time, it was a CSV. As you can see, the format changes mid file. This makes importing tricky. The way I tend to handle importing into SQL is to create staging tables with all the columns defined as varchar, then, once its imported into SQL, then convert it. The problem occurs when you try to determine the number of columns required. Traditionally, we let the system auto determine how many columns we have, and if we have headers, define the names, unfortunately because the format changes we can’t do this otherwise it will ignore the additional columns - assuming the first row doesn’t contain all the columns....

Serverless doesn’t somehow make your code run without physical servers. You still need servers, it’s just your treating your servers like you would code. However, it goes beyond just infrastructure as code (IaaS), it’s utilizing the cloud. Let’s get something clear, the cloud is nothing more than someone else’s server and for this post, I’m defining the cloud as any service provider who allows you run compute by the millisecond. The reason the cloud is such a major thing is that it allows you to treat commodity hardware as a commodity....

Another day, another Twitter awesome moment, Parikshit Savjani was explaining how backups are now faster in SQL Server 2017. How we made backups faster with SQL Server 2017 https://t.co/NNf5cLuBJx — Parikshit Savjani (@talktosavjani) November 23, 2017 For more info on how, read his post. TD;LR - The wait time before data is actually copied is reduced because the amount of buffers to scan is massively reduced. “…requires only 250 buffers to scan as opposed to 500 Million buffers with former algorithm…”...

One of the annoying things about AWS S3 is the error messages. Below is an error, see if you can figure out what it’s saying. I’ll give you a hint. We’ve connected and authenticated. Here is another hint, we can read from that bucket. Give up? It’s permissions. Incorrect AWS keys returns a helpful message, so does invalid bucket, as does no access to read bucket

So the NHS Hack Day retweet this We're a UK non-profit dedicated to open source in Healthcare. Can anyone help us with some VPS instances? @rackspaceUK @digitalocean @linode — NHoS (@_nhos_) April 30, 2017 Which made me think why is Ubuntu creating a NHS specific distro (OS) and why are they begging for some VPS instances? Turns out, it has nothing to do with either Ubuntu or the NHS. Its a group of people building on-top of Ubuntu, aimed at the NHS....

Idempotent – something that is repeatable, that remains unchanged in value when repeatedly executed either independently or on by itself. SSRS – SQL Server Reporting Services part of Microsoft SQL Server. Used to deliver static reports that can be viewed via a web browser and exported to a number of formats including Excel, PDF and CSV. SSAS – SQL Server Analysis Services part of Microsoft SQL Server. SSIS – SQL Server Integration Services part of Microsoft SQL Server....

I’ve been thinking lately about how the web industry needs to change in order to improve. Cyber attacks appears to be on the rise and alot of the time they appear to be caused by someone doing something silly. Perhaps this is because everyone is a web developer, it certainly isn’t down to lack of available resources on the matter. Thinking positively about cyber security, the card companies banded together to form PCI-DSS – Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, with the goal to help businesses process card payments securely and reduce card fraud....

One of those annoying things about the US is they use different paper sizes to us Brits. US Letter is 215.9 by 279.4 mm (8.5 by 11.0 inches) The UK equivalent, A4, is 210 by 297 mm (8.26 by 11.69 inches) One of our customers is based in the UK but has remote sales offices in the US, so their SSRS report are set to A4 and when they printed them in the US offices, the footer is cut off....

Today’s Windows Insider email included a few new cool features, here are my Top 3 Do more at once with the new Compact Overlay window. Keep watching a movie or video chat on one corner of your screen — even when switching apps to check email or browse the web. When an app window enters compact overlay mode, it’ll be shown above other windows so it won’t get blocked. Look for updates to the Movies & TV app and Skype Preview app to take advantage of this feature in the near future....

If you ever need a lesson in the importance of picking a good domain registrar, then read about Rosetta@Home recent problems. Dear Rosetta@Home participants, We — like many of you who have contacted us — have been extremely frustrated by the long project downtime. We (bakerlab.org) had a domain name registration verification lapse, and our registrar (dotster.com) and ICANN turned off DNS for bakerlab.org. We went through the steps to...

WordPress is an amazing blogging platform. However it does require a fair amount of love. Despite Mythic Beasts managing a large portion of my stack (hardware, OS, Apache, PHP, MySQL) and WordPress having automatic background updates I still find myself logging in and finding pending updates for WordPress. The solution was WP-CLI. With the shell add-on, I SSH onto my account, then What the above script does is download WP-CLI, grant it execute permission, then downloads my script and again, gives it execute permission....

I’ve been getting errors with MSSQL server on Ubuntu on Windows 10. The error, Failed to connect to bus: No such file or directory dpkg: error processing package mssql-server (–remove): subprocess installed post-removal script returned error exit status 1 Processing triggers for libc-bin (2.23-0ubuntu5) … E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) I managed to fix it in the end by Of course, you should try uninstalling correctly first, which is latter of the two...

Been trying to find out the following from my local council: How many resident parking permits have been issued How many resident parking bays are available What exactly has the money been spent on in terms of fines issued. To say they are being evasive is an understatement. So far, I’ve got, the response of: _This info is fluid as it is not only static residents who can apply for waivers within a given zone but also agencies who provide medical needs and other statutory services....

So once again we have another major security leak. You can read about it, here and below is the email CEO Matthew Prince wrote to customers: Dear Cloudflare Customer: Thursday afternoon, we published a blog post describing a memory leak caused by a serious bug that impacted Cloudflare’s systems. If you haven’t yet, I encourage you to read that post on the bug: https://blog.cloudflare.com/incident-report-on-memory-leak-caused-by-cloudflare-parser-bug/ While we resolved the bug within hours of it being reported to us, there was an ongoing risk that some of our customers’ sensitive information could still be available through third party caches, such as the Google search cache....