Sam Tran (陈 偉明)

Execute C# Code with Parameters Using PowerShell

The topic for today is a problem I spent close to two hours on last night. Surprisingly there doesn’t appear to be any easy solution on the web with most suggesting workarounds I didn’t find acceptable. To save others the time, I’d thought I’d share what I came up with here. As title of the page suggests, it’s about running C# code within PowerShell, something I’ve been doing more and more off…

Power BI REST API for PowerShell

Perhaps not surprisingly, one of my more popular post this year was Power BI REST API which I wrote exactly twelve months ago. That was originally written in C# but I also did a follow up post that was written in Python. I guess the relative popularity of these posts stems from the enormous and growing popularity of Power BI and REST APIs in general.

Because I’ve been using more and more…

Automating SSAS script only backups with C# for Tabular and Multi-Dimension Models

I was recently asked to create a SQL job to automate the backing up of our SSAS cubes from several servers but unlike the standard SSAS backups, the business didn’t want the data backed up, they only wanted the schema/code as they needed daily backups. The full backup with data would have used up too much space.

Initially, I thought it’d be a piece of cake, just had to Google it, right (while…

Dynamic Charts in Power BI

Ok, I’m not sure this qualifies as a dynamic chart (everyone’ interpretation of what it is is different) but it’s super cool and something I just learnt from Patrick from Guys in Cube. Funny enough, this was something one of our customers/BAs recently asked for and which I initially said was not possible. Did some research, and I was wrong (Baron, if you ever see this, this for you mate).

Rather…

Power BI REST API for Python

One of my more popular posts from last year was ‘Power BI REST API”. This was shown using C# but as this topic has also been asked many times on various other forums but for Python, I thought I’d write a quick piece on that.

As with C# approach, the starting point is registering an app with Azure AD. This linkwill show you step by step on how to do that. Once that’s done and you have your…

Data Lakes Analytics-A Quick Look into Big Data on Azure

Relative to the other big data solutions, Data Lake Analytics is one of the more easier solutions to get up and running on Azure, well in my experience anyway. For a start, other than a background in database and some experience on Azure, you only really need to know SQL and C#, two skills many BI Developers in your typical organisation already have, unlike Hadoop where much more is needed. The…

SQL Python Integration: Unable to communicate with the runtime for ‘Python’ script. Please check the requirements of ‘Python’ runtime

After spending the whole night looking into and eventually fixing this problem, I thought I’d share my experiences as there doesn’t seem to be a solution from Microsoft or anywhere on the net for this. This, and as I was stuck with this problem for over a year (on my secondary computer anyway, it worked fine on my primary and so wasn’t urgent)

If your situation is like mines, there are two…

Create a RESTful Web Services for SQL Server with Odata and Entity Framework (in minutes)

One of the great things about the clouds is that it makes existing good technology even better and in the case of the Azure stack, also much more simpler. One example that came to mind this week was Entity Framework after reading that it now works with CosmosDB, albeit still in beta and for the Core version only. For those not familiar, “Entity Framework (EF) is an object-relational mapper that…

Like most modern servers nowadays, Power BI has a fairly good set of web APIs that developers can leverage to extend functionalities of the product and further automate many processes.

Like most modern servers nowadays, Power BI has a fairly good set of web APIs that developers can leverage to extend functionalities of the product and further automate many processes. The developer’s section of the documentationprovides an easy to follow set of instructions on how to get started and showcases some very useful feature I really like (that’s also not in the Tableau equivalent)…

Came across a few little extensions in Visual Studio Code marketplace recently that has and will further save me considerable time when I need to work with JSON.

Came across a few little extensions in Visual Studio Code marketplace recently that has and will further save me considerable time when I need to work with JSON. Thought I’d share it as JSON is everywhere nowadays and serializing/de-serializing them are frequently asked topics on Stack Overflow and other online forums but with most of the answers there very manual. These extension are…

PowerBI: APIs, Javascripts, HTML, CSS and other fun things

I’m my opinion, there’s no doubt Tableau is still the best and well ahead of everyone when it comes to visualization in terms of looks, functionality and ease. But that’s true only on the client side and as we know, there’s a lot more to BI than this.

For me, a critical component is integration, the ability to integrate and orchestrate disparate data points and consume data anywhere, in any…

Auditing Database Servers with SQL Server-A Primer

I’m not a betting man but if I were, I’d bet your typical SQL or BI Developer have never used the auditing features on SQL Server. Don’t ask them what it is as that’s too easy (term kindda gives it away, right?), just ask them to show you where it is on your servers. My experience is, most developers assume this critical functions rests with and have been implemented by the DBAs but regrettably,…

If you’ve done any of the Microsoft training or certifications in the last few years, you’ll probably noticed they’re really pushing for the use of partition tables-it’s appeared in at least 3 of my exams for the MSCA/MSCE. In my opinion, that’s a probably a good move as I believe partitioned tables are another one of those great features on SQL that’s not used as often as it should despite the…

Untangle and Understand DLL Dependencies with NDepend

If you do any development beyond the most basic on the .Net Framework, understanding and resolving DLL dependencies is a necessity and a fact of life and without the right tools to guide you, this can be a very time consuming and frustrating exercise. One only needs to look on Stack Overflow/ Google on this issue and see the number of developers seeking help with this. Unfortunately, not all…