I previously wrote about writing an extension for Azure Data Studio based on my experiences creating the First Responder Kit extension. Since that post I had the opportunity to present on the topic at SQL Saturday in St.Paul, MN on October 6th, 2018. I had a great time at SQL Saturday and more importantly, my demo worked!
This post is going to assume you are familiar with the .xlsx/.zip conversion that was used in a previous post on BI360.
I have a report that I would like to distribute the summary information without any drill-to capabilities. After triple checking all of the report options, I came to the conclusion that I would have to edit each individual cell and uncheck the “use default drilldown” option in the layout editor under drill-to. That felt unsatisfactory, so I found another way to disable all drilldowns in a BI360 report.
Solver Global’s flagship reporting tool, BI360 Report Designer has several strong features and enables many businesses to create financial and operational reports. Unfortunately, one of the limitations of the report designer (v4.6 at this time) is that creating custom drill-down views is extremely repetitive. There isn’t a built-in copy function for the drill-to definitions, which would be especially handy for reports where the row filters deviate just slightly (such as a P&L statement).
Earlier today I needed to create a ton of nearly identical drill-to definitions in BI360 report designer (~40) for a single report and cut a corner using the XML definitions inside the Excel file. This isn’t as user-friendly as the Excel report designer interface, but it saved me about 3-7 minutes per drill-to definition.
If you’re not familiar with SQL Operations Studio – here’s my quick take on the application: it’s a cross-platform open-source data platform tool built by Microsoft on the groundwork of VS Code. Current functionality is a fundamental and can be extended or customized to fit your required toolset through available APIs and an extension marketplace.
I LOVE extensibility. Especially for small/medium businesses, extensibility of software can extend the usefulness of software to the business in both impact and longevity. Here’s how you can take the reins and get started creating extensions for SQL Ops Studio.
I’m going to talk about a bad day. It could have been a very very bad day, but it wasn’t.
Around 3am, one of our main storage devices restarted and when it booted - BAM “Pool 1 RAID Group 1 is inactive.” Excuse me? The drives are in RAID 10 and hadn’t reported any faults until this moment. Granted, this particular model of QNAP device, the QNAP TS-879U-RP, has caused us significant heartache in the past.
It’s a check run day, so all of our current AP batches need to be released. A common error in the release process is for the batch to stop at the status S (for stuck, suspended, or partially released).
It’s a busy Monday morning and the first day of the new month, soooooo it’s ERROR MESSAGE TIME!
System Message 6124: Process started: Mon Apr 03 09:15 A.M. Module: 'BI' Batch: '000754' Processing: Module: 'BI' , Batch: '000754' System Message 3011: is not in balance and not posted. System Message 6125: Process ended: Mon Apr 03 09:15 A.M.
On Monday morning I passed
70-473
, “Designing and Implementing Cloud Data Platform Solutions.”
When I was done with the test, my first thought was – I expected the exam to be more difficult.
Microsoft offers tons of information in FREE MVA courses, complete with videos, slide decks, white papers, and assessments. However, the sometimes lengthy videos can be a lot to take in from a laptop screen, especially when you want to play along from your machine.
The every present struggle to incorporate more learning into busy days can be helped out by making learning materials more accessible. If you have a Roku player connected to your tv and on the same network as your PC, you can watch Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA) videos from the comfort of your big screen.
There comes a point in many IT technician’s lives where they wonder if they’d like to go beyond putting out fires. Hopefully, they’re not thinking about setting fires, but that’s another topic. What I’m alluding to is that one of the skills that you will likely need in your progressing technology career is project management. Back in October 2016, I gave a webinar for the cool folks of the Dynamics SL User Group on “Technical Project Management.”