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Day: March 5, 2020

The Hype Cycle for Artificial Intelligence

Published 2020-03-05 by Kevin Feasel

William Vorhies takes a look at Gartner’s hype cycle for AI (among other things):

Supposing you’re a business leader and supposing you’re trying to make an intelligent decision about prioritizing your AI adoption plans.  It’s likely that like many of us the first thing you’d reach for would be one of Gartner’s many hype cycle or magic quadrant analyses.

What you might not know is that you now need an expert just to guide you through the expert literature.  There has been such a proliferation of hype cycles and magic quadrants that you could easily be looking in the wrong place.

The hype cycle is definitely opinion-based, but I think it’s a useful look at the relative maturity of different segments of an industry or technology cluster. Do read the whole thing, though, as these things aren’t perfect.

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Confluent Developer

Published 2020-03-05 by Kevin Feasel

Tim Berglund announces Confluent Developer:

Today, I am pleased to announce the launch of Confluent Developer, the one and only portal for everything you need to get started with Apache Kafka®, Confluent Platform, and Confluent Cloud! Everything on Confluent Developer is completely free and ungated. It’s a single online source of everything you’ll need to learn Kafka: links to documentation, collections of video tutorials, links to sample code, the entire collection of guided Kafka Tutorials, an index of podcast episodes, and a link to our global network of meetups.

The site is laid out really well.

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Running and Scheduling Azure SQL DB Elastic Jobs

Published 2020-03-05 by Kevin Feasel

Kate Smith continues a series on Azure SQL Database Elastic Jobs:

In previous posts, I have demonstrated how to create an Elastic Jobs Agent, setup credentials for Elastic Jobs, create a target group of servers/databases for the agent, and how to create and define an elastic job using both PowerShell and T-SQL.

In this post, I drill down into how to run an Elastic Job both in an ad-hoc fashion and how to schedule a job to run regularly. I do this both for PowerShell and for T-SQL.

The Powershell version is a one-liner and the T-SQL version looks a good bit like it does with SQL Agent jobs.

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Deprecated and Discontinued Features in SQL Server

Published 2020-03-05 by Kevin Feasel

Randolph West takes a look at my favorite activity: deleting code:

The following statements are true:

– SQL Server 2019 does not have any deprecated features, but does have discontinued features
– SQL Server 2017 does not have any discontinued features, but does have deprecated features
– SQL Server 2016 has both deprecated and discontinued features

Let’s discuss the difference between deprecated and discontinued features, and explain how this affects database administrators looking to move to SQL Server 2016 or newer. My current advice is to target SQL Server 2019 with at least Cumulative Update 2 (CU2).

Read on for more details.

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ASYNC_NETWORK_IO and Execution Plans

Published 2020-03-05 by Kevin Feasel

Jonathan Kehayias dives into an interesting problem:

A few weeks ago, an interesting question was asked on the #SQLHelp hash tag on Twitter about the impact of execution plans on the ASYNC_NETWORK_IO wait type, and it generated some differing opinions and a lot of good discussion.

My immediate answer to this would be that someone is misinterpreting the cause and effect of this, since the ASYNC_NETWORK_IO wait type is encountered when the Engine has results to send over TDS to the client but there are no available TDS buffers on the connection to send them on. Generally speaking, this means that the client side is not consuming the results efficiently, but based on the ensuing discussion I became intrigued enough to do some testing of whether or not an execution plan would actually impact the ASYNC_NETWORK_IO waits significantly.

To summarize: Focusing on ASYNC_NETWORK_IO waits alone as a tuning metric is a mistake. The faster a query executes, the higher this wait type will likely accumulate, even if the client is consuming results as fast as possible. (Also see Greg’s recent post about focusing on waits alone in general.)

Click through for the things Jonathan tested.

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Resizing the SSMS Grid Results

Published 2020-03-05 by Kevin Feasel

Kenneth Fisher shows how you can resize SQL Server Management Studio’s results grid:

After my post last month about configuring your tools I’ve been on a make my life easier kick and one of the things that gives me grief every day is that my eyesight is at best mediocre and some days it’s worse than others. (I have issues. No, not just those issues, issues that effect my eye sight.) I’m in SSMS 90% of my day or more so it really helps that it’s easy to zoom in and out on the query window, and even the message results pane. There is a little box with a percentage in the bottom left corner of each of the two panes. This controls the font size of that pane.

This is also helpful if you ever present using SSMS and don’t have a strong grasp of Zoom-It or the magnifier app.

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