A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Hequn Cheng announces Apache Flink 1.9.2:
The Apache Flink community released the second bugfix version of the Apache Flink 1.9 series.
This release includes 117 fixes and minor improvements for Flink 1.9.1. The list below includes a detailed list of all fixes and improvements.
We highly recommend all users to upgrade to Flink 1.9.2.
Read on to see all of the things they’ve fixed and improved.
Comments closedChris Brown gives us three ways to calculate distance in R:
Calculating a distance on a map sounds straightforward, but it can be confusing how many different ways there are to do this in R.
This complexity arises because there are different ways of defining ‘distance’ on the Earth’s surface.
The Earth is spherical. So do you want to calculate distances around the sphere (‘great circle distances’) or distances on a map (‘Euclidean distances’).
Then there are barriers. For example, for distances in the ocean, we often want to know the nearest distance around islands.
Then there is the added complexity of the different spatial data types. Here we will just look at points, but these same concepts apply to other data types, like shapes.
Read on to learn these three separate techniques. H/T R-Bloggers.
Comments closedTaryn Pratt had a post-upgrade problem:
Recently, I kicked off a project to start moving us to SQL Server 2019. During my initial review of our servers, I found quite a few (9 total) that were still running on Windows Server 2012 R2. This meant that I would need to upgrade the operating system and move us to SQL Server 2019. Having completed plenty of SQL Server upgrades, as well as operating system upgrades, I couldn’t possibly make a mistake, right? Wrong…I completely forgot to script out the linked servers on the server I upgraded this week. I screwed up and decided to write about how I went about fixing it.
Click through to understand the problem and solution.
Comments closedRob Sewell forwards on some exciting news:
A notebook experience for PowerShell 7 that sounds amazing. This will enable a true cross-platform PowerShell Notebook experience which is lacking from the Python version as it uses Windows PowerShell on Windows and PowerShell Core on other OS’s
The first thing I asked was – Will this come to Azure Data Studio. I got an immediate response from Sydney Smith PowerShell Program Manager saying it is on the roadmap
Two notes of importance. First, these are kernels for Jupyter Notebooks and not Azure Data Studio or VS Code (yet). Second, Rob buried the lede on the most important language in there: F#. You can also read the full announcement from Maria Naggaga, to which Rob linked.
Comments closedMax Vernon wants to audit Data Definition Language events:
SQL Server doesn’t audit DDL events out of the box, aside from several major events which are captured in the Default System Trace. By “audit”, I mean there is no log of the data-definition-language statements issued against the server. So, if someone creates a table in a database, you can see the table, and when it was created, but details about who created it, and what code they used to create it isn’t saved anywhere. The code in this blog post shows how to configure SQL Server Event Notifications in tandem with SQL Server Service Broker to capture all SQL Server DDL events asynchronously to a database specially configured for the purpose.
Click through for the code and explanation of what’s happening.
Comments closedJoseph Yeates continues a series on financial statements in Power BI:
I had created a measure to populate the matrix visual. It uses
=SWITCH()to return the YTD amount for the revenue and expense row headers and returns a subtotal for the net income header.To finish building the income statement, I needed to add two more line items: retained income from the beginning and end of the year. I had already created the categories in the Power Query Editor, so I had to update the DAX statement to return logic for these lines.
Read on to see how to add these.
Comments closedMark Wilkinson has a new blog and an itch to explain the notion of runspaces in Powershell:
So I have a problem with some of the posts I’ve read about runspaces. It all comes down to a small detail that I think makes a big difference in your understanding of them.
$Runspace = ::Create()This code looks innocent. What does it do? You’d probably think it’s creating a new runspace, but it’s not. This code is instead creating a fresh instance of PowerShell. If you run this code and run
Get-Runspaceyou’ll see there is still just one listed, the one attached to your current session. So what is this instance we just created?
Click through for an example and a step-by-step breakout of that example.
Comments closedMilos Radivojevic takes us through improvements with interleaved execution in SQL Server:
As you might know, the Interleaved Execution is the member of the Intelligent Query Processing family of features. It has been introduced with SQL Server 2017 (as a part of the Adaptive Query Processing). It is designed to improve the performance of queries referencing multi-statement table-valued functions (MSTVF). Actually, it addresses currently only queries using MSTVF, but is hopefully designed for much more. The query optimizer usually has two issues with queries using MSTVF:
– MSTVF is a black-box for the optimizer; it does not know what’s inside, it cannot perform cross-statement optimization (as it is a case with inline TVFs) and it assumes it is a cheap and fast operation
– MSTVF has a fixed cardinality of 100 (prior to SQL Server 2014, it was 1)Interleaved execution does not improve the first issue (MSTVF is still a black-box for the optimizer), but solves the cardinality issue.
Read on to understand how this second aspect has changed for the better.
Comments closed