Monthly Archives: October 2017

Seattle for Summit 5×5: No. 1

By Airborne Geek on October 10, 2017

Seattle Coffee Works sign

via max137; Creative Commons

It’s now October (OK, over a week in), and that means for a lot of us SQL Server folks, we have the PASS Summit in Seattle to look forward to at the end of the month. Yes, fine, it tends to fall in November more often.

ANYWAY, a lot of us have gone there for a lot of years, and so we’ve seen a good chunk of downtown and know some good places to eat/such and things to do. So, although Denny’s already done his annual “Summit Firsttimers” webcast, I’m adding some more places/things for newbies and veterans alike. I’ve got five lists of five things coming up over the coming weeks to help you find some good coffee, fun things to do, and where to find all of us crazy people who tend to stay up too late most nights.

Coffee & Quick Bites

There’s a lot of good coffee and good food in Seattle, a lot of which is close to the convention center or otherwise within walking distance. This list of five places–in no particular order–are some of my favorite places to fuel up during the long week of partying learning.

Victrola Coffee Roasters

https://www.victrolacoffee.com/
310 E Pike St
I tend to forget the actual name of this place, so will refer to it as “telegraph” or similar old technology thing when I can’t get it together. This place is up on Capitol Hill up Pike St from the Convention Center and is home to some of the best coffee in town. It’s one of Joey’s favorite places to go, although it is a bit of a hike to get there, plus it can be a total house in the mornings. It’s still worth it, as the coffee truly is great.

Seattle Coffee Works

www.seattlecoffeeworks.com
107 Pike St.
In the opposite direction, down towards the Sound and the market and also on Pike Street is Seattle Coffee Works. As drinking coffee from the same place all week may not be what you’re looking for (also, you’re in Seattle, spread the love), this is another great option.

Cafe Campagne

http://cafecampagne.com/
1600 Post Alley
Do you like Croques Madame? Do you know what a Croque Madame is? If you answered yes to these–or you just looked up what it was and decided you can’t live without one now (good choice)–there’s this awesome little French restaurant/café in Post Alley in the Pike Place Market. Croques, real baguettes, the menu’s mostly/all in French, so yeah. If you’re into this sort of thing, it’s a nice Saturday or Sunday morning before you head out of town stop, but get there early, because this place gets pretty busy pretty fast in the mornings.

La Creperie Voila

http://www.lacreperievoila.com/
It’s in the Convention Center. On the street. Next to the Subway. No, the other Subway.
This is handy for grabbing breakfast on the way in or a mid-afternoon snack. Pretty cheap, pretty good, and location, location, location.

Starbucks Reserve Roastery & Tasting Room

http://roastery.starbucks.com/
1124 Pike St
Yes, not everyone likes Starbucks, I know. But, a few years ago, Starbucks built this enormous coffee roastery, tasting room, and general temple to the coffee bean. It’s a neat place to go to due to the elaborate coffee conveyor belts that populate the place to feed the roasters. They’ve got some good single-source coffees here and other stuff that you can’t get in regular Sbux stores, and unique mugs & such.

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SQL Server 2017: New Security in Analysis Services Tabular 1400

By Airborne Geek on October 3, 2017

With SQL Server 2017 going GA this week, there’s been a lot of talk last week and this about new and improved features; this post is no different, but, I’m going a slightly different direction.

SQL Server Analysis Services Tabular models were first introduced with SQL Server 2012 (suddenly that seems so long ago) and have undergone continual and sometimes rapid revisions ever since. This remains true with SQL Server 2017, with the introduction of decent list of new features and other improvements.

One of the most exciting for me is the introduction of built-in support for object-level security.

But, We’ve Had Roles and Row Filters the Whole Time!

We have; you’re right. But, one thing that Tabular has never had–or Multidimensional models, either–is a built-in, easy way to do security in the other direction–columns!

Row level security is a very robust feature, and remains great. However, if there are situations where some columns or tables in the model shouldn’t be visible by all users (think Personally Identifiable Information), there wasn’t really a way to handle this before. Hoops would have to be jumped through utilizing DAX and possibly utilizing two different copies/versions of the same table in order to implement this behavior. Sometimes there would even need to be different versions of the same reports, based on which user group they were intended to target (with the underlying security/configuration of the cube driving what the user could or couldn’t see). This was, generally, a pain.

Perspectives are/were never intended as a security feature, and that hasn’t effectively changed with this.

In order to utilize this new feature (and the others), your tabular models will need to be developed/deployed in the 1400 compatibility level. This can be set when creating new models, in addition to being able to upgrade existing models (but this is a one-way street).

Azure Analysis Services

Since AAS is still my favorite thing, I can’t talk about SSAS without plugging it a little bit. Although 1400 compatibility has only been available in the on-prem product for about 24 hours now, it has been available in Preview in AAS since May. This is indicative of Microsoft’s cloud-first strategy–features will be available here first, filtering down to the on-premises software “later.” This may not be for everyone, but I think it’s one of the great reasons to consider Azure’s Platform as a Service offerings (another one is the built-in high availability).

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