Month: February 2022

Power BI Learning Opportunity at SQLBits

~ sqlswimmer ~ Leave a comment

If you’ve been thinking about learning Power BI, I have a wonderful opportunity for you. I will be presenting, along with my friend and colleague Michael Johnson (Blog | Twitter), a full day of training at SQLBits on 8-March-2022. Our Training Day session is called Zero to Dashboard.

Our session assumes you have no knowledge of Power BI, so if this is your first encounter with Power BI, no worries, we’ve got you covered. We will cover the Power BI ecosystem, talk about the importance of data cleansing and data modeling, introduce visualization best practices, and review governance considerations. We reinforce all these concepts through hands on labs that we go through as a group. By the end of the day, you will be able to create a dashboard. If you are one of those folks who need to do things multiple times before they “stick” (like me), you will walk away with the lab manual used in class so you can go through the labs again to help solidify what you have learned.

SQLBits is a hybrid event this year, so if you cannot attend in person, no worries, you can attend virtually as well. If you are interested in attending, there are still registration slots available, but seats are limited, so don’t wait to long to register.

Michael and I hope to see you there.

Unable to Validate Source Query in Tabular Editor

~ sqlswimmer ~ Leave a comment

I recently encountered the error, “Unable to validate source query” when trying to refresh the metadata for the tables in my tabular model using Tabular Editor. I immediately googled that at came up with a great post by Koen Verbeeck (Blog | Twitter). I had never seen this error before and since my metadata refreshes had been working flawlessly for weeks, I was so excited when I found this post.

Long story short, this post did not help me. I tried everything suggested, I ran my partition queries wrapped in SET FMTONLY ON and they came back instantaneously in SSMS. I added the TabularEditor_AddFalseWhereClause annotation from this thread. Neither worked. So wasn’t quite sure what was going on.

My last-ditch effort was to add a new table to my model to see if I was even getting a successful connection to my data source. I was prompted for the password, which it had not done before when adding new tables or refreshing table metadata (for weeks). I was using a legacy data source (Azure SQL Database) w/ SQL Server Authentication. Once I supplied the password, I could see a list of available objects in my database. I cancelled out of the new tables dialog and clicked Refresh Table Metadata and winner-winner chicken dinner, no more “Unable to validate source query” error. Turns out my password “mysteriously disappeared” from my connection string.

The moral of the story is: It’s not always zebras when you hear hoofbeats, sometimes it is horses.

Hopefully, this post will help someone else waste significantly less time than I did on fixing this error.

Bits Buddies

~ sqlswimmer ~ Leave a comment

SQLBits is fast approaching, in fact, Training Days start 2 weeks from today, on March 8, 2022.

I’ve attended SQLBits before, as well as other large conferences, but I still remember the first conference I attended. I was attending on my own and didn’t know anyone at the conference. I’m sure I’m not alone when I say that I felt a bit ill at ease. Just seeing one friendly face would have made a world of difference.

With this in mind, the good folks at SQLBits have created a program called Bits Buddies. It’s a program where first timers or those thinking about attending but aren’t quite sure yet, can reach out to a few folks who are not affiliated with SQLBits to provide insight into what SQLBits is about. It also gives you an opportunity to meet someone BEFORE you attend, so once you arrive, you will see at least one friendly face (actually we are all very friendly, but this is someone you will know!).

I have volunteered to be part of the Bits Buddies program and would love to be that one friendly face for those that may be ill at ease. We are holding a few virtual drop-in sessions and would love to chat with you, so stop by and meet some friendly faces.

I hope to see you there.

Cheers.