Steffeks

Tableau – Parse Parameters From URL

Well, file this under “just because you can doesn’t mean you should.” Search the forums on parsing strings with Tableau and you’ll find a lot of guidance which pretty much says “don’t do it!” and “better to do it in your source!” These people are undoubtedly right. But, what if your source is an existing Tableau extract which you can’t modify? In that case, parsing with Tableau may be your only…

SSRS: Parse parameters column from ExecutionLog

Ever worked on a quick little project, come across what you assume is a common need and think “I’ll just google up some code that someone else has written and then be off to the races”?  Have you done this and not been able to find the code you’re looking for? Well, that was me yesterday. I needed to parse a few parameters from the URL string stored in the SQL Server Reporting Services…

Tableau + Git: Ignore default directories and preference files.

Here’s a quick little item you might find handy. If you find it annoying that git keeps showing some of your default Tableau directories and files (which would probably only happen if you change your Tableau default repository) then you can set git to exclude those files and directories when it checks for modifications.

In your git repository you should see a file called “.gitignore” (yes it…

Tableau: Format Date As String mm/dd/yyyy hh:mm

gah.

Why is some of this stuff so challenging in Tableau?  You have a date and you want to format it as a string? Why? So you can concatenate it with another string perhaps? Maybe you’re creating a calculated field to use in a label (that’s what I was doing).

Unfortunately, when you convert a datetime to a string in Tableau it uses the format yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss. Fine for a lot of cases, not fine…

Tableau: Custom Date Range Picker

Looking for a way to add custom date ranges to your worksheet or dashboard? For requirements like “Last 7 Days”, “Previous 30 Days”, and “Last 60 Days” this is your ticket. (With some modifications “Last Quarter” and “Prior Year” are also possible). As a Tableau amateur I was having a tough time wrapping my head around this one. A little Google-Fu brought me to the post “Custom date ranges using…

Tableau – Where is the path to my extract!?!

Suppose you create an extract in your desktop version of Tableau and everything is running great. Then one of your peers casually asks “how big is that .tde file anyway?” You quickly check file explorer and discover the extract is not in the default location (What is the default path?). It seems like there should be some way to see this in Tableau but I sure couldn’t figure it out (hit me in the…

Tableau – What is the default path for extracts?

What is the default path for tableau extracts on a windows desktop?

C:\Users\<your user name>\Documents\My Tableau Repository\Datasources

For example mine is:

C:\Users\psteffek\Documents\My Tableau Repository\Datasources

Boom.

Parse pg_dump Functions Into Their Own Files (GreenPlum / Postgres)

Here’s what we wanted: Each function from our GreenPlum (aka Postgres) database scripted out into it’s own file. I think after much hacking I’ve got something working that only requires a small amount of manual intervention.

For whatever reason PostgreSQL/GreenPlum doesn’t seem to have a native way to split objects into separate files. This functionality is super useful when moving the database…

Easy SQL Server Snapshot Script / Proc

Man!!!! Why is the code to create a database snapshot so ridiculously complicated? Actually, I guess I understand why but how about allowing it to be done through SSMS and then setting a bunch of the parameters as defaults for us? Come on Microsoft! Help a SQL brother out!

Well luckily, where Microsoft fails, I’m there for you. Here’s my brilliant proc which will automatically create a database…

DBFit and SQL Server: How to connect and create your first test

I love the idea of DBFit (being able to run tests against every database system under the sun) but have found it very challenging to get up and running. There is documentation but it seems to assume a level of familiarity with FitNesse that I definitely did not have. The primary hurdle for me was getting the SQL Server JDBC drivers set up for DBFitand then creating the connection string in the…

DBFit and SQL Server: Missing JDBC Driver.

If you are using the java version of DBFit and you want to connect to SQL Server you’ll need to download the JDBC SQL Server Driver. You can get it at Microsoft JDBC Drivers for SQL Server.

If it’s missing you’ll see an error message like this:

dbfit.SqlServerTest java.lang.Error: Cannot load SqlServer database driver com.microsoft.sqlserver.jdbc.SQLServerDriver. Is the JDBC driver on the…

Cygwin and Git – Tired of typing your password? Cache it!

I’m a git and cygwin noob. Despite that I like using the command line. It’s a bit of mental gymnastics and keeps the mundane from getting mundane. One thing that irritated me though was having to constantly retype my password when pushing or pulling from remote.

Through dumb luck I stumbled across the secret config that cache’s your password for fifteen minutes. Yes!

git config --global…

Just a quick little stub of a post to track progress using the DBFit Test Driven Database Development Tool with our GreenPlum installation. DBFit seemed like a great option since it will theoretically support both GreenPlum and SQL Server.

  I ran through the getting started documentation on the DBFit site fairly quickly and had the initial test page open in my browser in just a few minutes.

Upon…

Postgres/Greenplum Get The Last Two Values In A Delimited String

Yuck. This works and I’m recording it here in case I need it again but yuck.

Here’s the scenario: there is a column in a database with a delimited string. The number of delimited values can vary. SOmetimes there will be one delimited value, sometimes there will be twenty. For this specific case I needed to get the last two values. If we weren’t on GreenPlum I would probably go with using the…

Configuring Kdiff3 and Git with Cygwin (now with Spaces!)

Oh my word. I don’t know what else to say. This was waaaay harder than I thought it would be. The goal was to able to open up two files from different branches and see the changes between them. the git command “difftool” looked to be the secret sauce and everything was working great until I tried to diff a file with a space in the name. That’s when the wheels fell off.

Here’s the command I was…

Finding all the checkins in a git branch (aka finding all the files with a commit)

Identifying files which have changed between two branches in git using the cygwin command line. (Note: I assume this works for any command line git tool).

1. If the files were checked in using windows there may be issues with line endings. To make your git command line ignore line ending differences in files perform the following:

In your git config file (in my case the path is…