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Day: January 10, 2020

Working with R and the Windows Command Line

Published 2020-01-10 by Kevin Feasel

Tomaz Kastrun takes us through calling CMD commands from R:

From time to time, when developing in R, working and wrangling data , preparing for machine learning projects, it comes the time, one would still need to access the operating system commands from/in R.

In this blog post, let’s take a look at some most useful cmd commands when using R.  Please note, that the cmd commands apply only to windows environment, for Linux/MacOS, the system commands should be slightly changed, but the wrapper R code should remains the same.

The need does come up, so it’s good to have that knowledge at hand.

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Not All Cursors are Bad

Published 2020-01-10 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Darling doesn’t want to mess with your cursors (that much):

Read the code. Understand the requirements.

I tune queries all day long. The number of times someone has said THIS CURSOR IS A REAL BIG PROBLEM and been right is pretty small.

Often, there was a tweak to the cursor options, or a tweak to the query the cursor was calling (or the indexes available to it) that made things run in a more immediate fashion. I want to tune queries, not wrestle with logic that no one understands. Old code is full of that.

I’ll grant the premise (and add my own case where a cursor was necessary to solve the problem), though I did work at one company where the entire product logic was driven by nested cursors 5 or 6 levels deep. Those were really big problems. I think you’ll find the problem most frequently in shops with a heavy dose of Oracle, as Oracle cursors do perform well.

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2020 Data Professional Salary Survey Results

Published 2020-01-10 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar has another year of salary data for us:

A few things to know about it:

– The data is public domain. The license tab makes it clear that you can use this data for any purpose, and you don’t have to credit or mention anyone.
– The spreadsheet includes the results for all 4 years (2017-2020.) We’ve gradually asked different questions over time, so if a question wasn’t asked in a year, the answers are populated with Not Asked.
– The postal code field was totally optional, and may be wildly unreliable. Folks asked to be able to put in small portions of their zip code, like the leading numbers.
– Frankly, anytime you let human beings enter data directly, the data can be pretty questionable – for example, there were 14 folks this year who entered annual salaries below $500. If you’re doing analysis on this, you’re going to want to discard some outliers.

It’s on my agenda (somewhere…probably a bit further back than I’d like) to dig into this year’s data and try to come up with something a little more comprehensive now that there are four years of data.

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Working with App Locks in SQL Server

Published 2020-01-10 by Kevin Feasel

Nisarg Upadhyay explains how to use two built-in stored procedures to take and release application locks:

For example, I want to prevent users from executing the same stored procedure at the same time. To demonstrate the scenario, I have created a stored procedure named procInsertEmployees, which inserts data into the tblEmployee table. I want to make sure that no one can access the stored procedure until the stored procedure inserts the data in the tblEmpoyee table. Moreover, I have added a waitfor delay ’00:00:15’ statement to simulate the blocking for the 15 seconds.

Application locks also allow for more complicated scenarios and you can get a bit creative when assigning resources (such as combining a process name and a parent ID).

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Execution Plans: Check the First Operator

Published 2020-01-10 by Kevin Feasel

Grant Fritchey reminds us to look at the first operation when viewing an execution plan:

The first time you see a new execution plan that you’re examining to fix a performance problem, something broken, whatever, you should always start by looking at the first operator.

First Operator

The first operator is easily discerned (with an exception). It’s the very first thing you see in a graphical execution plan, at the top, on the left. It says SELECT in this case:

It’s easy to overlook, but Grant gives some good reasons not to do so.

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