Vertica on Azure

For some time now you’ve been able to deploy a Vertica cluster to Azure via a manual process, but now, the Azure marketplace has the HPE Vertica Analytics Platform available to deploy via an ARM template a cluster with up to 5 nodes.

If you’re not familiar with Vertica, then in brief, it’s a column store relational database with rapid data load features (ingesting to memory) and then optimises the storage of that data on disk through different encoding schemes.

Having worked with Vertica for over 5 years I can recommend it for use in particular scenarios, particularly when your data is very tabular, denormalised, compresses/encodes well and is such that you may want to execute analytic workloads (queries) over that data. It works less well in situations where you need to join table data or perform transactional workloads with update or delete operations.

If you’re looking for an alternative to the likes of AWS Redshift or Azure Data Warehouse and are content to consider IaaS alternatives, then why not give Vertica a go, and spin up a cluster in your cloud of choice, it may just give you better performance, have a deeper feature set for your analytics and could work out cheaper than PaaS offerings.

Debugging the PowerBI Enterprise Gateway

I recently configured the PowerBI Enterprise Gateway to connect to two different types of data source:

• A local File on the same server as the gateway, and
• A Web datasource, a URL reachable from the gateway server 

I added the data sources to PowerBI Online via "Manage Gateways". I could see the data sources refreshing and available within PowerBI Online. So I built a report that used the data sources and published the report to PowerBI Online.I then configured the datasets to use the Gateway connection and also scheduled a daily refresh.

A day later, I revisited my reports to check that the data sources had successfully refreshed overnight, but instead had a failure as follows:

The data gateway abcdef is offline, so refresh scheduling is currently disabled. Last refresh failed: Fri Aug 12 2016 17:09:06 GMT+0100 (GMT Summer Time)
Cannot connect to the mashup data source. See error details for more information.

Concerned that the gateway service had gone down I logged onto the server running the gateway and checked the service was running and the logs files here:

C:\Users\PBIEgwService\AppData\Local\Microsoft\on-premises data gateway\Gateway*.log

See this link for more troubleshooting tips.

It turned out that even though the File data source was still available, the Web data source had become unreachable.

Therefore, rather than just indicate that one data source was unavailable, PowerBI Online appears to report the entire data gateway as offline. Which isn't entirely true, the gateway service was running, but one of the data sources was unavailable.