The art of simplicity

For an Azure Fabric based data platform we are building I'm evaluating PowerBI as a possible reporting solution. My knowledge of PowerBI is almost non existant so there are a lot of things I learned along the way. Yesterday I talked about the different data fetching strategies. Today I want to focus on how to limit the amount of data. I explained yesterday that PowerBI can handle large amounts of data. This is good news but during development I want to work with a smaller dataset to limit the file size and gain some extra development speed. Limit the amount of data Let’s find out how we can get limit the amount of data in PowerBI. Start by opening the Query Editor view in PowerBI by selecting Transform data from the Home tab: This will load the Query Editor . Here we need to create a new parameter that can be used as a limit value. Click on Manage Parameters and choose New Parameter : We create a LimitRows parameter with a default value of 10: Now that we have...

For an Azure Fabric based data platform we are building I'm evaluating PowerBI as a possible reporting solution. My knowledge of PowerBI is almost non existant so there are a lot of things I learned along the way. My first lesson learned: There are multiple ways to fetch data in PowerBI. I learned this lesson quite fast when I tried to connect to my first datasource. After selecting the ‘Import data from database’ option I immediately got  to choose a Data Connectivity mode : The available options were: Import DirectQuery Let’s find out what each of these options mean and what exactly is the difference. Import mode This mode should be your first choice. As the name implies in this mode the data is imported in the report. When querying the data everything is loaded into memory which gives really fast query performance. This sounds a good idea for really small datasets but what if you have a lot of data? PowerBI makes it possible to work with big dataset...

In C# 9 record types were introduced. A record in C# is a class or struct that provides special syntax and behavior for working with data models. What makes them different from a ‘normal’ class or struct is that they offer the following functionality: Value equality: Two record types are equal if the types match and all property and fields match Immutability: You cannot change any property or field value after instantiation You have 2 ways to define a record type. One way is similar to what you already know when creating classes or structs: A second way is through positional parameters: Behind the scenes, the compiler does a lot of work for us as it creates: A public autoimplemented property for each positional parameter provided in the record declaration A primary constructor whose parameters match the positional parameters on the record declaration.   A Deconstruct method with an out parameter for each positional parameter provided...

In .NET 7 and before the default request logging in ASP.NET Core is quite noisy, with multiple events emitted per request. That is one of the reasons why I use the Serilog.AspNetCore package . By adding the following line to my ASP.NET Core application I can reduce the number of events to 1 per request. The result looks like this in Seq :   Starting from .NET 8 the HTTP logging middleware has several new capabilities and we no longer need Serilog to achieve the same result. By configuring the following 2 options, we could achieve this: HttpLoggingFields.Duration : When enabled, this emits a new log at the end of the request/response measuring the total time in milliseconds taken for processing. This has been added to the HttpLoggingFields.All set. HttpLoggingOptions.CombineLogs : When enabled, the middleware will consolidate all of its enabled logs for a request/response into one log at the end. This includes the request, request body, response, response body...

While investigating some database related performance issues, I discovered the following website:   This site explains everything you as a developer need to know about SQL indexing. Use The Index, Luke is the free web-edition of SQL Performance Explained . It presents indexing in a vendor agnostic fashion but also share product specific guidelines for DB2, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL and SQL Server. Do you think you already know everything you need to know about SQL indexing? Confirm your skills by taking this short 3 minute test: 3-Minute Test: What do you know about SQL performance? I could not say that I did so great:

After creating a new claims rule, our ADFS instance started to return the following error message: The new rule we created just pass an existing claim value: c:[Type == "urn:be:vlaanderen:acm:rrn"]    => issue(claim = c); To explain why this error happened I have to give some extra context. Our ADFS instance is federated with another Identity Provider STS(IP-STS) and is acting as a resource STS(R-STS). The communication between the IP-STS and the R-STS(our ADFS instance) is done through the SAML 2.0 protocol and the tokens returned are also in SAML 2.0 format. However the communication between the R-STS and the relying party(an ASP.NET Core application) is done through WS-Federation and the token format used there is SAML 1.1 . SAML tokens have URI (ClaimType) rules that will differ based on the version of the SAML token you intend to issue. AD FS 2.0 supports WS-Federation, WS-Trust, and SAML 2.0 protocols. WS-Federation protocol only supports SAML 1.1 tok...

ADFS has the concept of claim rules which allow you to enumerate, add, delete, and modify claims. This is useful when you want for example introduce extra claims (based on data in a database or AD) or transform incoming claims. Although the available documentation is already helpful, I still find it a challenge to write my own claim rules. So therefore this post… Claim rule components To start a claim rule consists of 2 parts, separated by the “=>” operator: An optional(!) condition An issuance statement So both these rules are correct: Rule #1: => issue(type = "https://test/role", value = "employee"); Rule #2: c:[type == "https://test/employee", value == "true"] => issue(type = "https://test/role", value = "employee") The first rule will always generate a new outgoing claim of type https://test/role . The second rule will only generate a new outgoing claim of type https://t...