Press "Enter" to skip to content

Day: February 8, 2018

Themes And Legends In ggplot2

I have another part of my ggplot2 series up, this time on themes and legends:

You are not limited to using defaults in your graphs.  Let’s go back to the minimal theme but change the fonts a bit.  I want to make the following changes:

  1. Use Gill Sans fonts instead of the default

  2. Increase the title font size a little bit

  3. Decrease the X axis font size a little bit

  4. Remove the Y axis; the subtitle makes it clear what the Y axis contains

By the time we’re through this, we have publication-quality visuals in a few dozen lines of code.  I also have provided a bonus rant on Windows and R and fonts because that’s a nasty experience.

Comments closed

Installing Apache Mesos On EC2

Anubhav Tarar has a guide for setting up Apache Mesos along with Spark and Hadoop on EC2:

Apache Mesos is open source project for managing computer clusters originally developed at the University Of California. It sits between the application layer and operating system to manage the application works efficiently on the large-scale distributed environment.

In this blog, we will see how to setup mesos client and master on ec2 from scratch.

Read on for the step-by-step guide.

Comments closed

Backup Management Is More Than Taking Backups

Kenneth Fisher makes a great point regarding backups:

I’ve said before that backups are at once one of the easiest things DBAs do, one of the most important, and one of the most complicated. Take a full backup, restore it. Pretty simple right? And yet it’s vital when accident or corruption require recovering data. And as simple as it can be on the surface, the more you dig, the more there is to know, and the more complicated it can become. Well, one of those complications is the backup of the backup files. I mean, assuming you are using native backups, that full backup is sitting on a drive somewhere, and hopefully, that drive gets backed up right?

Why? Well, for performance purposes you probably back up your databases locally. To a drive attached to the server. Now you may not, heck you could be backing up to Azure, but for the sake of this argument let’s say you are. Part of a careful disaster recovery plan is making sure you have access to those backups. I’ve heard stories of entire data centers going underwater (literally). You need to at least have a copy of your backups in a separate system, separate location from production.

The proliferation of S3/Blob Storage for “warm” backups and Glacier/Cool Blob Storage for “cold” backups has made it much cheaper to retain longer-term backups.

Comments closed

SQL In Kubernetes On Docker On Windows

Andrew Pruski is two buzzwords away from sending me into sensory overload:

Now, if this is the first time working with Kubernetes you won’t have to perform the next couple of steps but just to confirm, run the following: –

kubectl config current-context

If your shell cannot find the kubectl command, add
C:\Program Files\Docker\Docker\Resources\bin\
to your PATH environment variable and restart your shell.

If the command outputs anything other than docker-for-desktop you will need to switch to the desktop cluster.

Click through to see how to set this up.

Comments closed

Finding Palindromes With T-SQL

Chris Hyde has started a new series on palindromes in T-SQL:

Immediately I realized that this algorithm will need to accomplish two different things.  I first need to remove all non-alphabetic characters from the string I am testing, because while “able was I ere I saw Elba” is palindromic even leaving the spaces intact, this will not work for other well-known palindromes such as “A man, a plan, a canal, Panama!”  Then the second task is to check that the remaining string is the same front-to-back as it is back-to-front.

With the help of Elder’s Dead Roots Stirring album I set out to find the most efficient T-SQL code to accomplish this task.  My plan was to avoid resorting to Google for the answer, but perhaps in a future post I will go back and compare my solution to the best one I can find online.  For this first post in the series I will tackle only the first task of removing the non-alphabetic characters from the string.

Read on to see how Chris takes on this task.

Comments closed

The SQL Server Backup Survey

Mike Fal ran a survey recently and shares his findings:

This leads me to last week. In order to have some data, I decided to run an informal backup survey targeted at the SQL community. The results floored me: 344 of you decided to take my short survey. This really helps me understand some of the trends out there and now I want to share those results with you.

Before I get started, I want to first thank each and every person who responded from the bottom of my heart. This data is the result of your participation. Secondly, I want to underscore the “informal” nature of this. There’s a lot of holes that can probably be poked in the process, but I think the data is still useful and can give people insight into the trends.

I’ve posted raw data along with a few tools out on GitHub, where you are welcome to download and play with it.

Check out Mike’s findings and then dig into the data on GitHub.

Comments closed

Performing A Database Migration With dbatools

Viorel Ciucu has a Powershell script using dbatools to configure a new SQL Server instance and migrate databases using TDE over to the new instance:

The second option (and the one we chose) was to leave the encryption enabled. In order to be able to attach the files, or to do restores from the backups you need to have the same certificate that was used for encryption. This certificate is protected by the master key.

To accomplish this:

  1. Make backups of the master key and the certificates

  2. Restore the key and certificates on the new principal and mirror pairs

Read on for the process.

Comments closed

Finding Long-Running Transactions

David Fowler has a dream:

It was 3am in the morning and I was asleep and enjoying a delightful dream (I knew it was a dream because I was surrounded by drifting clouds, singing angels and hundreds of softly humming SQL Servers where the hardware had been sensibly provisioned and all code carefully optimised) when I was rudely awoken by a Service Desk call informing me that the systems were unresponsive.  A quick check and I could see that everything was being blocked a particular transaction.  My suspicion was that someone had run a script which had opened a transaction and then toddled off home without checking that either the script had finished or closed the transaction that it had opened.

My guess was right and killing the transaction got the cogs turning again.

Click through for the script.

Comments closed