Neal Waterstreet

Passed 70-452

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Yesterday, after much procrastination, I finally took the 70-452 exam. This exam is for MCITP: Business Intelligence Developer 2008 and expires at the end of the month. I wanted to go ahead and take it now to make the  2012 ( will there be 2014?) certification a little easier. The upgrade path from 2008 to 2012 is 3 exams instead of  5.

What did I use to prepare? I didn’t use anything specifically for 70-452, but I did use the materials I used for 70-448.

  • MSDN
  • MeasureUp 70-448 Practice Test
  • 70-448 Self-Paced Training Kit
  • My own experience

I couldn’t find any information on 2014 exams, so I will go ahead and start on the 2012 exams. I’d like to get those started as soon as possible.

Aereo after 1 month

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I’ve been using Aereo since it was in beta in Atlanta. Some time has passed for me to really test it out and I still like it. Recording is very simple and the menus are easy to navigate. Prior to that, I had not been able to record shows since cutting cable and was watching mostly Netflix. I forgot how much easier it makes watching what you want with a DVR. That is probably not a good thing. One concern I had was the amount of space available for recording, but my drive is not even come close to filling up so there is no problem there.

Anyway, a month in there are a few improvements that I would like to see.

  • Improve the picture quality – Some of the channels can be a little grainy. This does not happen enough to be a big problem, but it does happen enough to be noticeable. It could just be an issue with the local channels.
  • Speed up the launch time – Starting a recorded show can be painfully slow at times. The behavior is similar to Netflix, but with a longer wait. Rewinding and Fast Forwarding also experience this. I’m not sure if this is just me or not.
  • Still no app for Android.

Overall
I think Aereo is here to stay. The service is good will get better over time. I just wish more channels offered a digital subscription.

Try the statement later?

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I got an error message I’d never seen before while altering a database.

Database is in transition. Try the statement later. (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 952)

Try the statement later? What does that mean? I altered a column in a test database and immediately tried to take it offline. That is when I got the error. After searching for the message I found this. One of the solutions suggested was to search sys.dm_exec_requests for an alter process on that database. Sure enough it was suspended. I killed the SPID and the database was back online pretty quickly.

DAX: Divide By Zero Error

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Like most languages, you will probably run into the divide by zero issue at some point with DAX. I checked around and saw some different solutions people are using. The best example I found was this pattern by Kasper de Jonge.

IF([Measure 2] <> 0, [Measure 1] / [Measure 2], 0).

I also looked at the DIVIDE() function for DAX on MSDN. It has the following syntax:

DIVIDE(numerator, denominator [,alternateresult])

Much less code than before!

I ran a very informal test with 1M rows to compare the two. There doesn’t appear to be any difference in performance based on my test, however I should do it again using more data. I checked into it a little more and noticed that both appear to throw the same errors. For instance, when the numerator or denominator is text both methods result in an error.

Has anyone else come across this? There is not too much information out there about error checking in DAX.