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Month: March 2019

Databricks Dashboards

Published 2019-03-27 by Kevin Feasel

Megan Quinn takes us through building dashboards with Apache Zeppelin on Databricks:

The first step in any type of analysis is to understand the dataset itself. A Databricks dashboard can provide a concise format in which to present relevant information about the data to clients, as well as a quick reference for analysts when returning to a project.

To create this dashboard, a user can simply switch to Dashboard view instead of Code view under the View tab. The user can either click on an existing dashboard or create a new one. Creating a new dashboard will automatically display any of the visualizations present in the notebook. Customization of the dashboard is easily achieved by clicking on the chart icon in the top right corner of the desired command cells to add new elements.

This isn’t quite a step-by-step guide but does spur on ideas.

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Fun with Emoji in SSMS

Published 2019-03-27 by Kevin Feasel

Solomon Rutzky shares a method to generate any Unicode character in SQL Server Management Studio:

I used to go to the Emoticons (Emoji) 1F600—1F64F page of unicode-table.com to copy and paste characters, code points, or check the encoding chart at the bottom of each character page (the “hex” column of both “UTF-16BE” and “UTF-16LE” rows have proven most useful).
But not anymore. Now, I just hit:   Ctrl + 0.

When I do that, I get a list of 188,657 code points. Each row contains the official code point value (“U+HHHH”), the integer value, the hex value (“0xHHHH”), the character itself, the UTF-16 Little Endian byte sequence (how it is actually stored, and what you get if you convert an NVARCHAR value to VARBINARY), the surrogate pair values, the T-SQL notation (which does not require using an _SC or _140_ collation), the HTML notation (“&#xHHHH;”), and finally the C-style notation (“\xHHHH” ; used for C / C++ / C# / Java / etc). I can copy and paste any of those values and use them in queries, emails, blog posts, .NET code, and so on.

Click through to see how Solomon does this.

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Working with Columns in Spark

Published 2019-03-26 by Kevin Feasel

Achilleus has a two-parter on working with columns in Spark. Part 1 covers some of the basic syntax and several functions:

Also, we can have typed columns which is basically a column with an expression encoder specified for the expected input and return type.

scala> val name = $"name".as[String]
name: org.apache.spark.sql.TypedColumn[Any,String] = name
scala> val name = $"name"
name: org.apache.spark.sql.ColumnName = name

There are more than 50 methods(67 the last time I counted ) that can be used for transformations on the column object. We will be covering some of the important methods that are generally used.

Part 2 covers other functions including window functions:

17) over
This is one of the most important function that is used in many of the window operations.We can talk about the window function in detail when discuss about aggregation in spark but for now, it will be fair enough to say that over method provides a way to apply an aggregation over a window specification which in turn can be used to specify partition, order and frame boundaries of the aggregation.

Check out both of these posts for useful tidbits.

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Creating Threadpools with ExecutorService in Kafka

Published 2019-03-26 by Kevin Feasel

Prasanth Nair shows how we can use Java’s ExecutorService to create threadpools for Kafka consumers:

Apache Kafka is one of today’s most commonly used event streaming platforms. While using the Kafka platform, quite often, we run into a scenario where we have to process a large number of events/messages that are placed on a broker. Traditional approaches, where a consumer is listening to a topic and then processes these message within the consumer itself, can become a performance bottleneck if the number of messages being placed on the topic is high. In such cases, the rate at which a consumer can process messages will be very low, as there are a large number of messages getting placed on the topic. A potential solution that can be applied in such a scenario is to offload message processing to the worker threads in a thread pool.

Click through for the Java code.

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Conditional Formatting on Text Fields in Power BI

Published 2019-03-26 by Kevin Feasel

Matt Allington shows how you can apply conditional formatting to non-numeric fields in Power BI:

The high level process is to:
1. Create a measure that returns a colour as the result

1. It can be a word, such as blue, red, green
2. It can be a hex code for a colour, like #40E0D0″, “#FFA07A”
2. Use conditional formatting and use the measure to apply the formatting on the text as a rule.

Read on for a demo.

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Defending ANSI-89 Syntax

Published 2019-03-26 by Kevin Feasel

Allan Hirt prefers ANSI-89 join syntax:

Pedro Lopes who is now on the SQL Server dev team wrote the blog post “T-SQL Misconceptions – JOIN ON vs. WHERE” which does a good job of explaining the “it depends” around the newer style of joins. Why link this article? Microsoft deprecated the OUTER JOIN operators in SQL Server 2008. Two other sources of information on this are here and here (the first is Ward Pond’s old technet blog, and sadly will probably go away soon). If you’re keeping score at home, WHERE clauses are not deprecated except if you’re using *= and =*). The changes people made were wholly unnecessary and as the author, the newer stuff is harder to decipher than what I originally did. They were putting their own biases onto things.

I personally do not like ANSI-89 syntax because it blurs the lines between filters and join criteria. Those are separate things serving different purposes and keeping them separate clarifies queries more than it obscures. Allan’s example doesn’t have any filters but in a more complex scenario with several filters and several join criteria, it can require extra care figuring out what’s going on, especially with multi-column join criteria and filters mixed in (meaning it’s not join criteria and then filters, but a mishmash of the two).

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Query Store: Forcing Parallel Plans

Published 2019-03-26 by Kevin Feasel

Grant Fritchey shows us that you can force a parallel plan using Query Store:

I love the questions I get when presenting: Can You Force a Parallel Plan in Query Store. I haven’t a clue. The trick I think is going to be in setting up the test. Let’s try it out.

Reliably Getting a Parallel Plan
Because this is for testing, rather than try to build some crazy query that may or may not go parallel, I’ve decided to cheat. I’ll take advantage of a little functionality that ensures I see a parallel plan when I want to.

Read on to see Grant’s trick and also the results of this test.

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Putting TempDB Files On Azure IaaS D Drive

Published 2019-03-26 by Kevin Feasel

John McCormack tries out using the temporary drive on Azure VMs for tempdb:

Azure warn you not to to store data on the D drive in Azure VMs, but following this advice could mean you are missing out on some very fast local storage. It’s good general advice because this local storage is not permanently attached to your instance, meaning you could lose data or log files if your VM is stopped and restarted but what if you could afford to lose certain files? Say files that are recreated during startup anyway.

TempDB is the ideal candidate for this. No other database is suitable! Putting the tempdb data and log files onto D drive can be achieved quite easily with a little bit of effort. And you will most likely see a big improvement in tempdb read/write latency.

John ended up seeing much bigger gains than I did when I tried this, but with a difference that big, it’s definitely worth using the temporary drive for tempdb.

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Desired State Configuration’s Local Configuration Manager

Published 2019-03-26 by Kevin Feasel

Jess Pomfret continues a series on Desired State Configuration in Powershell:

Once we have crafted the perfect configuration and shipped it out to our target nodes, it’s time for the magic to happen. The MOF file that we created by executing our configuration is translated and enacted by the Local Configuration Manager (LCM) on each target node. The LCM is the engine of DSC and plays a vital role in managing our target nodes.
The LCM on each target node has many settings that can be configured using a meta configuration. This document is written very similarly to our regular DSC configurations and then pushed out to the target node.

I’m going to cover a few of the important LCM settings for use in push mode. This is where the LCM passively waits for a MOF file to arrive. The other option is pull mode- this is a little more complicated to set up and in this scenario the LCM is set to actively check in with a pull server for new configurations.

Click through to see some of those important settings.

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CTP 2.3 Scalar Function Improvements

Published 2019-03-26 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Darling see a marginal improvement between CTPs in SQL Server 2019’s ability to optimize scalar functions:

To test FROID, which is the codename for Microsoft’s initiative to inline those awful scalar valued function things that people have been griping about for like 20 years, I like to take functions I’ve seen used in real life and adapt them a bit to work in the Stack Overflow database.

Read on for a case where Erik saw major improvements.

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