Aveek Das
Edit Parameters

Getting started with parameterized Power BI reports

June 16, 2020 by

In this article, I am going to explain how we can develop parameterized Power BI reports locally and then migrate the same report across multiple environments, like development, QA, and production. Parameterized Power BI reports are essential because we can use the same report to develop the charts and the KPIs and then provide the same report to the QA who will test it on a separate environment and finally when the testing is completed, it can then maybe provided to an administrator who can publish it to the production workspace.

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Dinesh Asanka
SQL Service Broker objects in the SQL Server Management Studio after creating them.

Using the SQL Server Service Broker for Asynchronous Processing

June 10, 2020 by

Introduction

In the real-world implementation of SQL Server of an enterprise system, it always needs to implement data in multiple databases. In most of the cases, a single transaction will span across multiple databases. If there are multiple databases, there will be performance issues and implementation issues during the cross-database transactions. However, with the use of SQL Service Broker that was introduced in SQL Server 2005, you can implement asynchronous transactions between databases.

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Timothy Smith
Before designing our security testing, we should know what types of attacks will do the most damage to our business

Security Testing Around Our Business Model and Risks

June 9, 2020 by

When we create an environment and consider our security testing from development to production and how changes are deployed throughout each environment, we want to consider what we’re protecting and how much resources we’ll devote to this protection. Every company has limited resources, so protecting against all possible threats will not be something we can achieve.

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Aveek Das
Child Function Executed

Calling an AWS Lambda function from another Lambda function

June 9, 2020 by

In this article, I am going to explain how to create an AWS Lambda function and then call this function from another Lambda function within the same region. This is a useful scenario in which we may need to execute a second lambda function based on the outcome of some previous logic. Another scenario may be to execute a second lambda function several times by using different parameters.

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Aveek Das
AWS Explorer

Getting started with AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio Code

June 8, 2020 by

In this article, I am going to explain how to start using the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio Code to develop serverless functions locally. Serverless applications or functions gives us the ability to develop, test and execute code in the cloud without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. These applications are scalable which means we can easily increase or decrease the resources consumed by them. AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio Code is an extension available for Visual Studio Code using which we can directly communicate with the resources on Amazon within the code editor.

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Aveek Das
Creating the Date Dimension in Power BI

Using a Date Dimension Table in Power BI

June 5, 2020 by

In this article, I am going to describe how to use a date dimension table in Power BI. Using a date dimension table becomes extremely important while visualizing facts and figures over some time in the calendar. Sometimes it is possible that we do not have the continuous date values in our dataset that we are trying to work upon.

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Aveek Das
Deployment Report

Exploring actions and tasks in the SQLPackage Utility

June 4, 2020 by

In this article, I am going to explain in detail about actions and tasks in the SQLPackage Utility. In my previous article, I have explained the overview of the SQLPackage utility. The SQLPackage utility is a command-line utility tool provided by Microsoft to automate SQL Server database deployments. Since this utility is cross-platform, you can easily install it on any operating system of your choice. SQLPackage actions are the types of functions that we can achieve with this utility. You can install this utility directly on any production server and it can be used as is. You can find more information about this utility and SQLPackage actions from the official documentation from Microsoft.

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Timothy Smith
We can see the option to enforce password policy when we manually create a login through the interface or selecting this option as ON when scripting logins for creation

Security Testing SQL Logins with the PWDCOMPARE function

June 3, 2020 by

In this article, we’ll look at using the built-in PWDCOMPARE function in SQL Server for security testing passwords. While this tool may seem like it exposes a weakness in Microsoft SQL Server because we can test for passwords, it should be of note that an attacker could do the same attack by attempting to login to our database server assuming the attacker was able to access a connection to it. Therefore, this function does not increase the risk of an attack on SQL Server but does help us identify possible weaknesses in our environment so that we can quickly mitigate these risks. In addition, we’ll also combine this with other related tools in SQL Server to help us with logins.

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Aveek Das
Microsoft Power Platform - Virtual Agents

A quick overview of the Microsoft Power Platform

June 2, 2020 by

In this article, I am going to explain the various products offered by the Microsoft Power Platform. Microsoft Power Platform is a group of products offered by Microsoft to develop and build complex business solutions, analyze, and draw data visualizations, automate a business process, or build virtual agents for communication. All these products offer a platform in which no code is required to build the applications. These products are in the form of simple GUI which can be used by any business users or developers, thus helping to reduce the need for IT in the organization.

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Aveek Das
Grafana Dashboard Demo

Overview of the Grafana Dashboard with SQL

June 2, 2020 by

In this article, I am going to demonstrate how to set up Grafana Dashboard for real-time analytics or data monitoring purposes. Grafana is an open-source, cross-platform analytics service tool that can be used to fetch data from several data sources, and then the data can be visualized in a much intuitive way in the form of bars and graphs. This is quite a useful feature for the DevOps or the IT team as it can make their job easier to find abnormalities or spikes in the production environment by observing the logs generated.

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