Voice of the DBA

Tag: Git

  • Power BI and Git

    When Power BI was released, I was working with customers to try and adopt DevOps for their database code. At that time, I thought the Microsoft developers had made an extremely poor decision with the PBIX format in that it wasn’t well suited for version control. In 2011, when it was first released, we not only had decades of knowledge about version control and the power of DevOps, but we’d also been living with the extremely poor format of code in Integration Services packages (among other data tools), that were poorly suited for understanding in version control systems.

    Power BI has grown, and with the Fabric announcements, there are integrations with git for your workspace. There is also a Power BI Developer mode that saves your project in a folder structure rather than one file, which is better. I’m not sure it’s great, especially if it doesn’t enforce text in a way that ensures a developer can easily see changes between settings and understand them. I can certainly diff the XML in two SSIS packages, but that doesn’t mean that it’s easy to understand what has changed.

    I think all modern tools used to build software, including the various reporting systems, need to be built with a pipeline and team development in mind, and set up to ensure that multiple developers can review code in some sort of Git-pull-request format. For those tools that use GUI formatting, I’d hope they separate out GUI elements from others, as no one needs to pull request a change that moves a visual box on screen left 2 pixels. However, if you change the OnError response or formula inside the box, that should be easy to see in code.

    This isn’t a simple concept to design for, especially for software that is based on a novel idea and is often built by a small team. However, periodic review of how the software stores changes and how a less experienced developer might review those changes is important to ensuring that our tools scale to the modern needs of distributed team development where our collaboration is often through protocols like pull requests.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher, Spotify, or iTunes.

  • A New Git Default Branch

    I learned a new trick from Andrew Pruski. In a blog on avoiding PowerPoint, he had htis neat trick:

    git config --global init.defaultBranch main

    Apparently, this is a new setting in git v2.28. This allows you to set a default branch for all new repos. Since I often create a local repo first before pushing to a remote, this is handy for me.

    This was on the git blog, if you want to know more.

  • Remembering the Past

    Just a short time ago, the SQL Family lost Gareth Swanepoel. It was fairly sudden and sad to have someone I knew fairly well pass away. He was the first person that I directly knew that was lost to the COVID-19 pandemic.

    I’m getting older. I seem to hear about a person I’ve known passing away almost every year now. I know I’ve got more life behind me than in front of me, and I cherish the moments I do have and the memories of others.

    A few years ago Andy Warren and I were talking about this subject. This was after we lost a common friend, and we wanted to have some way to remember them. We kicked around a few ideas, but other than adding an “Obituaries” category to Database Weekly, I didn’t do much.

    I decided to change that after I heard about Gareth. While processing my grief, I bought sqlmemorial.org and started to put something together. I’ve been hearing about Jekyll and I spent a little time messing around with it. I ended up deciding to put this up and start ensuring that we have a way to remember the people that have taught and touched us. I’ll also share some articles on how I put this together.

    I set this up as a GitHub repo, and I am taking pull requests for people that want to add a memory, a link, a picture, or something else. I’m also hoping that people will let me know as others pass, a sad fact of life that we will continue to experience in the years to come.

    I’m hoping this helps me, and many of you, fondly remember the people in our SQL Family.

    Steve Jones

  • Getting a New Remote Git Branch–#SQLNewBlogger

    Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers.

    I was notified of a new PR at DataSaturdays, and I went to look at the changes. In this case, a lot of styling items in the code, which I can’t quite picture. I also wanted to check the behavior of some sorting changes. How could I do this?

    I saw the branch, but I wasn’t sure how to get it locally. For me, I started with Google, which too me to StackOverflow. Here I found an answer.

    I have git v2.29, so I could probably have used just the checkout command, but I ended up doing this command:

    git fetch

    which got me the new branch.

    2021-01-05 10_27_18-cmd

    From here, I did a checkout of this branch, tested the code, and then could approve the PR.

    I know I’ve likely had to get a branch before, but I am hoping that writing this post will help me remember.

    SQLNewBlogger

    This is a skill that is handy for working with code, and these days, even infrastructure and management. Git is an important skill, so showcase some things you learned, how, and why, on your blog.

    This post took me about 6 minutes to write.