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Month: December 2019

Structuring Databricks Notebooks

Paul Andrew has put together a basic structure for Databricks notebooks using titles, markdown, and widgets:

For me, one of the hardest parts of developing anything is when you need to pick up and rework code that has been created by someone else. That said, my preferred Notebook structure shown below is not about technical performance or anything complicated. This is simply for ease of sharing and understanding, as well as some initial documentation for work done.

In my example I created a Scala Notebook, but this could of course apply to any flavour.

This makes good use of markdown capabilities without being too heavy. I like it. The same general principles apply if you’re putting together Jupyter notebooks outside of Databricks.

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The Problems with RDPing into SQL Server Hosts

Emanuele Meazzo enumerates the issues with using RDP to connect directly to a server hosting SQL Server (or any other database system):

When there are SERIOUS performance problems, i.e. your instance is totally pinned as far as resources go, the only way to log into the instance to do something about it is using DAC; even if you are on the same machine, if you’re trying to log in, as usual, it won’t make any difference.
Enable Remote DAC and save yourself from future troubles, now.

There are several problems. Better is to run client tools from a client machine and something like SSH or Powershell remoting to do things against a server itself.

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Editing Rows in SSMS–Behind the Scenes

Randolph West explains what happens when you use the editor built into SQL Server Management Studio to modify rows directly:

A customer recently brought up an interesting thesis, that if you edit a table’s values using SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) using the edit feature, that the table is dropped and recreated in the background when you commit the changes.

This is false, but there had to be a good reason why they were under this misapprehension.

Read on to understand what does happen and where the customer might have gotten this idea.

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Beginner’s Guide to Azure Data Factory

Cathrine Wilhelmsen has started a new series:

Azure Data Factory = Azure Data Factory v2

This means that today, when I talk about “Azure Data Factory”, I refer to “Azure Data Factory v2” and skip the “v2” part of the name. I mostly pretend that Azure Data Factory v1 doesn’t exist anymore 🙂

That’s something we all do.

This first post is a quick “What is this product?” intro, giving us a basis for later posts.

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Testing SQL Server Storage Performance

Brent Ozar walks us through CrystalDiskMark 7 to check whether storage speed is up to snuff:

The Peak Performance + Mix setting runs a pretty cool mix of tests that will push your storage hard. Note that I don’t try to get CDM to replicate exactly how SQL Server does IO: I’m just trying to get a quick 5-minute idea of whether my storage is hot or not.

Click through for the demo. Mind you, this is something you want to do before setting up SQL Server…

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