CURL on WINDOWS: double quotes and other issues

I had to insert metadata information to Cloudera Navigator, and the CURL command didn't work for me. Specifically, I was struggling with this piece of code:

$ curl http://localhost:7187/api/v2/entities/ \
-u : \ -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -d '{ "sourceId":"4fbdadc6899638782fc8cb626176dc7b", "parentPath":"myDatabase/myTable", "originalName":"newColumn", "name":"awesomeColumn", "description":"This is going to be an awesome column.", "tags":["fav"], "properties":{"priority":"medium"} }'

This code is copied from here: Cloudera Navigator API - update an entity to add new business metadata.

 and since I'm such a sweet person, here's how it works on Windows:

curl http://localhost:7187/api/v2/entities/ ^ -u : ^ -X POST -H Content-Type: application/json ^ -d "{ \"sourceId\":\"4fbdadc6899638782fc8cb626176dc7b\", \"parentPath":"myDatabase/myTable\", \"originalName":"newColumn\", \"name":\"awesomeColumn\", \"description":\"\This is going to be an awesome column."\, \"tags\":[\"fav\"], \"properties\":{\"priority\":\"medium\"} }"


So what do we get out of this?

1. The "\" to the end of line is changed to ^
2. No single quotes; they are all removed
3. The JSON text is surrounded with double quotes, not single quotes
4. The double quotes inside the JSON files are escaped with a backslash. 

You're welcome.

American date or: Marital crisis

First of all, it's important to note the following: I live in Australia, and in Australia, like in most of the world, the date format is day - month - year.
My husband had asked me this week how should he change the format of the date and then get the day out of the data.
Simple, I said, use the TEXT function to change the format, and use the day () function on the date.
"I get #value! error" he winged, and I thought I needed to help him, only to find out that he was right (see below use of functions and results):
The formulas:

Excel date formulas

Excel date results

I thought maybe to use Google Spreadsheet, but unfortunately and surprisingly enough, they are not better:

Formulas are below:

Google docs formulas

Google Docs values

So now they're killing Microsoft Paint

Ah, the pain is unbearable!
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/24/microsoft-paint-kill-off-after-32-years-graphics-editing-program
Lovely. So how exactly am I supposed to do a quick Print Screen without it?
And what's worse, if you'd like to give a nice photo of your right-click-mouse menu, that's near impossible without our beloved Paint.

Of course, once Microsoft makes up their mind, there's not much you can do. We all remember how in the good-old-days you could easily create a menu and deploy it in MS-Access. Yes, you can do it in versions post 2003, but you'll have to use the Registry for that. Ouch!

How to: Cut & Paste from Excel

I don't know if any of you have read the book "Copying & Pasting from Stack Overflow", but even if you copy from Excel you need to be aware of the following:
If you copy from an old file you might copy the connections & the names as well, not just the values. It's important to either select "values & formulas" after the copying, or alternatively, just clear the name manager:

Partition by Half-a-year using windows functions

Let's say you're using Windows functions, and you want to partition by a quarter.
That's simple, you'd just do:

SELECT SUM ( [MyValue]) OVER (PARTITION BY [Employee], YEAR ([Valuation date]), DATEPART (qq,[Valuation date])  ORDER BY ROW_ID)

But what happens if you would like to run a sum by half a year? If it's just getting the value (first or second half of year), you'd play around with

SELECT CASE WHEN month < 7 THEN 1 ELSE 2 END AS [HalfAYear]

 or with

SELECT CASE WHEN DATEPART (qq, Valuation date)  < 3 THEN 1 ELSE 2 END AS [HalfAYear]

 and that would do.
But since we need a running sum per half a year, you'd like to use this code:

SUM ( [MyValue]) OVER (PARTITION BY [Employee], YEAR ([Valuation date]), YEAR (DATEADD(m, 6, [Valuation date]))  ORDER BY ROW_ID)

Using the YEAR for the first time gives me the current year, when I'm using YEAR over "add 6 month" I'm using the "Australian Financial Year", but this way I am partitioning by half a year. Please note that at the end of the day I don't know which half it is, but it doesn't matter, since I don't care about the label, I care about the results.

Pointer to a function in SQL ?!

If you're coming from C then you would know that there's a thing called a  a function pointer.
It's good to put in a structure, and then whenever you need to "compare" you would call the function pointer. In the "sort" function call in one of the C's library you can see it, so you can compare apples to oranges to your heart's delight.
But what happens in SQL?
Let's say I have different funds (which I do) and they require different calculation according to their Fund type.
So funds A, B, C & D have calculation which is completely different the funds E, F & G.
Had I used a programming language like C I could say that a Fund could have a pointer to a function in their structure, and calculate of that. But how do I handle this in SQL?
I've designed a solution which would look like this:
I would add a field (column) to the Fund table called "CalcType" which would refer to the calculation type. Now, I can use the following code:


SELECT *
FROM PerformanceCalc1 (@param) --that's a function
INNER JOIN dbo.FUND
WHERE Fund.CalcType = 1
UNION ALL
SELECT *
FROM PerformanceCalc2 (@param) --that's a function
INNER JOIN dbo.FUND
WHERE Fund.CalcType = 2
UNION ALL
SELECT *
FROM PerformanceCalc3 (@param) --that's a function
INNER JOIN dbo.FUND
WHERE Fund.CalcType = 3



This calculation has its limitation: each Performance Calc functions run on all the funds, but the return set is limited to the appropriate Fund Type. The number of funds I have is as such that it doesn't really matter; if I had more it could have been an issue. Yet, what I like about this solution is that it is set based in its thinking, and not using Dynamics SQL (which requires elevated permissions of the end-user, if we want her to run it).

Sub totals in Excel's Pivot Tables - which total should I sub?

This wonderful feature shows you why Pivot Tables (Power Query or other pivot table) wins hands-down vs Power BI, the much hyped MS app.
Let's say you have a Pivot Table (which I do, plenty of them).
And let's say they are summed by different values: Year, Quarter, and forecast vs. Actual (just an example). But you want to pick which columns (or rows) you want the sub totals to run on.
You can choose if you want to sub total all column or only few of them.
Let's look at an example:
This is what the header looks like:

Now I would like to have the total on the Year, but not on the Quarter.
First of all I need to go to PivotTalbe tools -> Design -> and pick the Subtotals that I want
( chose the Show all Sub Totals at the bottom of the group; you can pick top, but don't chose non).

I can go to the columns definition, right click the setting (FyQ, in my case) , choose the Field Settings, and then I have the choice of Subtotals: Automatic or None. So If I want it to be summed I would and if not then I don't.

The beauty here is that I don't need complicated MDX functions in order to design my Pivot table. Great!