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Day: March 17, 2020

Microsoft to Acquire npm via GitHub

Published 2020-03-17 by Kevin Feasel

Joab Jackson breaks the news:

Code repository service GitHub is in the process of acquiring the preeminent software registry for Node.js and JavaScript modules, npm, the two companies announced Monday.

GitHub plans to invest in npm’s infrastructure, with the hopes of bringing some much-needed modernization to the platform, GitHub CEO Nat Friedman promised in a blog post. It also may help free the rapidly-growing registry from the considerable financial and personnel turmoil that it has been inflicted with over the past few years.

I for one welcome leftpad by Microsoft.

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Elasticsearch Backups

Published 2020-03-17 by Kevin Feasel

Guy Shilo shows how you can back up an Elasticsearch cluster:

Elasticsearch is facing the same challenge and it’s built-in backup method is snapshots. Unlike classic storage snapshots, Elasticsearch snapshot can be stored remotely on external storage systems, and that is supposed to enable them deal with large amounts of data.

Snapshots can be stored on a shared file system (mounted on all cluster nodes), on all major cloud storage providers (Amazon S3, Azure and GCS) and on HDFS.

The documentation can be found here.

Read on to see the demo. Even if your Elasticsearch data is not the home of record and you could rebuild the cluster doesn’t mean ignoring backups is wise.

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Dynamic Resource Scheduling and SQL Server

Published 2020-03-17 by Kevin Feasel

David Klee offers some advice on Dynamic Resource Scheduling:

Dynamic Resource Scheduling (DRS) should be enabled for all VMware host clusters, especially those who run SQL Server. It provides for resource consumption load balancing functionality into a host cluster. Consider enabling the DRS load balance based on consumed memory rather than active memory (available as of vSphere 6.7), as the active memory counter for SQL Server-based VMs is not a true representation of memory usage by the SQL Server layer.

Read on for more details.

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PolyBase Bug Around Windows Authentication

Published 2020-03-17 by Kevin Feasel

I have a post documenting a bug in SQL Server 2019:

Here’s the short version of the bug. If you are connected using a Windows authenticated account and attempt to perform a PolyBase-related action, such as creating an external data source or querying from an external table, you receive the following error:

Msg 46721, Level 20, State 1, Line 5
Login failed. The login is from an untrusted domain and cannot be used with Integrated authentication.

Because this is an error with a severity level of 20, it kills your session.

Click through for the workaround. I had hoped that this would have been fixed with CU3, but it’s still in there.

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Quickly Finding Distinct Values with T-SQL

Published 2020-03-17 by Kevin Feasel

Paul White does some amazing things with T-SQL, news at 11:

I will be looking for distinct values in the BountyAmount column of the dbo.Votes table, presented in bounty amount order ascending. The Votes table has just under 53 million rows (52,928,720 to be exact). There are just 19 different bounty amounts, including NULL.

The Stack Overflow 2013 database comes without nonclustered indexes to minimize download time. There is a clustered primary key index on the Id column of the dbo.Votes table. It comes set to SQL Server 2008 compatibility (level 100), but we will start with a more modern setting of SQL Server 2017 (level 140):

Getting the query down from 10.5 seconds to 1ms is crazy.

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ADF.PROCFWK 1.1 Released

Published 2020-03-17 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Andrew has a new name for the metadata-driven framework in Azure Data Factory:

Hi data friends! Version 1.1 of my ADF.procfwk is ready!

Following the great response I got to the version 1.0 blog series I decided to push ahead and get version 1.1 out there as soon as possible. The main thing I’ve addressed with this release is the big problem of having hard coded service principal credentials in the body of the Azure Function request that called our execution pipelines. Hopefully we can all agree this was/is not great for a number of reasons.

Read on for more details including a detailed changelog, and check out the GitHub repo.

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Visualizing Power BI Query Parallelism

Published 2020-03-17 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb gives us a way to visualize Power BI Premium and Azure Analysis Services query parallelism:

Why is this important? When you’re tuning the performance of a Power BI report the first thing to do is to look at the performance of the individual DAX queries run and make them run as fast as possible. However when a Power BI report is rendered any one query is likely to be run at the same time as several other queries run for the same report, and this will have an impact on its performance. How much of an impact there is will depend on how many queries need to be run and the number of back-end v-cores available on your Premium capacity, or the number of QPUs available on your Azure Analysis Services instance if you’re using a Live connection to AAS. The more v-cores/QPUs you have available, the more of the work needed for a query that can be run in parallel; you can see a table listing the number of v-cores for each Premium SKU here, and the number of QPUs for each Azure Analysis Services SKU here. As a result of this if you have reports with a large number of visuals that generate slow DAX queries, scaling up your Power BI Premium capacity or AAS instance may improve overall report performance. Reducing the number of visuals on your report and/or reducing the number of visuals needed to display the same information will also reduce the number of queries that need to be run and therefore improve overall performance.

Read on for the demo.

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SQL Server 2019 Supports Ubuntu 18.04, SLES 12 SP5

Published 2020-03-17 by Kevin Feasel

Tejas Shah announces a couple new versions of Linux distributions SQL Server 2019 supports:

We are also glad to announce the availability of SQL Server 2019 CU3 container image build on Ubuntu 18.04. It is fully supported for production use. You can read about how to deploy the container at following page.

Running SQL Server 2019 CU3 container with Ubuntu 18.04 base: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/linux/quickstart-install-connect-docker?view=sql-server-ver15&p…

You could run SQL Server on these versions of Ubuntu and SUSE, but now you get production support, making it prudent to run on these. Ubuntu 20.4 is coming out soon, so we’ll see when that gets supported.

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