A bad dress is a good rehearsal
ok. I have to admit. I was not in the understanding that my preview session of last week should mean that I would not have a good presentation. As you might have read in my previous post on my sort of bad hairday, I have survived and taken action.
Yesterday evening the Final of my investigation on #DataAPIBuilder was going to finalize. Or not? At least, when Brian Bonk Ruelokke contacted me to do a presentation for Microsoft Fabric – DK: Overview | LinkedIn on something new, I accepted that challenge. After my first Blog on this channel and posting it to LinkedIn he added another one: can you do some fabric with the tool. I answered not negative, not positive.
Reasons for that were that I am not a DBA Analyst and more platform related. I need to dive into Fabric. I am doing that at this moment. From the level of what is available in Fabric, that is a lot. And strange enough, it all connects using a TCP port 1433. Which makes me think of the OleDB stuff.
But lets go back to yesterday.
I started to stop active working a bit earlier. Not telling at what time, because that might harm me :). So when i stopped active working I looked at my demo database. Damn… that is a bit empty, lacking some of the demo stuff like Stored Procedures and Views. I took the Stored Procedures from the files I have created to support this setup. But the View… I need to restore that from the other VM on 2019. It is easy, but it still needs to be done. When it was there, and I updated some data, I made a backup…
Then reran the script on creating the dab-config.json. That went smooth.. would it work? When I ran “dab start” some errors appeared. Again that freaking Stored Procedure about the Sales data. But it is important for my demo so lets fix it. I knew it had to do with the parameter of the Stored Procedure. I ended up by adding this in the dab-config.json file:
<pre class="wp-block-code">
"parameters":{
"Year" : "2018"
}
Why these? Well the Year (with a capital Y) is the parameter I have added in this simple Stored Procedure and since there must be a default value, I added 2018. One of the last full years in the US
After this, the Data API Builder came to life and all the stuff was working:
– Swagger on https://localhost:5001/swagger
– API on https://localhost:5001/API
– GraphQL on https://localhost:5001/graphql (using banana cake pop)
Also, a quick round over the Powershell script learned that it is working as expected. Time to restore the database and look at the uggly presentation. Well, with 50 minutes and a dinner to go, no time to improve there. Content is ok, so lets stay on.
Then 15 minutes before the actual presentation Teams popped up that the meeting was started. I joined and chatted to Brian and further prepared the tools that need to be active. Closed the unneeded apps and before we knew it, it was time to do the presentation. I did a bit of an explanation how the story became a presentation and that the shop now was owned by a World Champion on the bike (I hope he can do the trick tomorrow also on the mountainbike)
The presentation went ok, on some small issues like font sizes in SSMS. Next time I will use Azured Data Studio for this.
I am interested how the audience experienced and looked at this. There were some good questions at the end. I will probably collect a few more and answer them in one of my next posts. Because, as Brian clearly asked “When can we expect a post on Data API Builder consuming Fabric stuff”. So, I have work to do. Lots of work.