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Month: April 2020

Cleaning Up SQL Server Backup History

Published 2020-04-27 by Kevin Feasel

Stuart Moore has a public service announcement for us:

From looking around at some of the Issues that get logged for dbatools, it looks like people never clear out their SQL backup history from msdb. This causes slow queries and potentially misleading backup trees to be returned.

In my (not so humble) opinion you really shouldn’t let your backup history fill up with, let’s be honest, useless junk. In this post I’ll go through why I think you should be keeping way less in there than people think you should

Read on for Stuart’s thoughts on the topic.

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Cloudera Data Platform High Availability Options

Published 2020-04-24 by Kevin Feasel

Liliana Kadar, et al, explain what options DBAs have around high availability when working with the Cloudera Data Platform:

All Data Replication (DR) combinations are supported:

– hot-hot
– hot -warm
– hot-cold
– hot-warm-cold
– other permutations of these configurations

The direction of replication can be uni-directional, bi-directional or multi-directional replication through advanced geo-distributed topologies. 

It’s interesting to watch the evolution of Hadoop administration, going from “the cluster is our HA option” to having realistic plans if problems occur. The post doesn’t really cover DR, where the evolution has been greater.

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Understanding kubeadm Authentication and Authorization

Published 2020-04-24 by Kevin Feasel

Praveen Sripati takes us through the way that kubeadm handles authorization and authentication for Kubernetes processes:

In the above K8S cluster, the default user (kubernetes-admin) created during the cluster setup has admin privileges to the cluster. This time I was curious on how the authentication and authorization work in K8S for this user to have full access to the cluster. This will enable me to be create additional users with different privileges, authentication and authorization mechanisms. It took me some time to get my mind/thoughts around it, but it’s all interesting. This blog is all about the same.

Note that the cluster has been setup using kubeadm, for kops and other the below varies a little bit. And also, kubeadm cluster setup default used X509 certificates for authentication. Authentication Providers are not built into K8S and so has to be integrated with external systems like Google Accounts, Active Directory, LDAP etc.

Click through to see what Praveen learned in the process.

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Running Multiple Microsoft Teams Orgs Concurrently

Published 2020-04-24 by Kevin Feasel

Mark Lelijveld has a workaround for a really annoying problem:

I do not think that it is a surprise for anybody that working with Microsoft Teams and different organizations is a big hassle. The multi-tenant setup is not very user friendly yet. On the right top in Teams you can switch organizations, but that only works if you are signing in with the same username and password to another organization. In other words, your account needs to be added as a guest account to the Active Directory in the other organization.

For a lot of us, working as a consultant for different clients, this is not our day-to-day practice. We have a separate Microsoft account for every client, which requires signing out and signing in again. If case you have single sign-on enabled, it can become even a bigger struggle to sign in with a different account than your organization one. As a solution, you might be running Teams in a browser window, which is a first step, but it is still hard to keep up with everything that is happening in Teams.

Well… not for long. With the few little tricks I describe below, you can run multiple Teams environments at the same time by using the new Edge Chromium browser and also customize it so you directly see which Teams environment you opened.

I appreciate that Marc has a very useful workaround. I hate that Marc has to spend the time coming up with a workaround in the first place. I definitely prefer the Slack model, where it doesn’t matter which account I’m using—I see all of my workspaces in one go, regardless of the e-mail address I’ve used.

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Poor SQL Formatter’s SSMS Plugin

Published 2020-04-24 by Kevin Feasel

Dave Bland shows us the Poor SQL formatter for SQL Server Management Studio:

So what is PoorSQL Formatter?  Well, as you probably know, formatting is very important when writing T-SQL code.  While we try to format our code as we write it, sometimes the code we need to review was written by someone else and maybe doesn’t follow formatting standards. This is where PoorSQL Formatter will come in handy.  It will help us take the poorly written code and format it in a manner that is more in line with T-SQL formatting best practices.  The best part, it will do the formatting in seconds.

I’ve used that website many a time. It’s not as detailed as I want it to be, but if you just need a quick and dirty way to format a query so that it’s understandable, this does the trick.

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Moving Queries to and from Power BI Desktop and Excel

Published 2020-04-24 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Svensen shows how we can copy queries from Power BI’s Power Query Editor into Excel and back:

Today I discovered a way to easily copy all queries (including the groups) from a PBIX file to Excel without entering the power query editor in Excel.

In my case I needed to copy the data returned by a query and find it some much easier to get the data using Excel instead of generating a csv file from a visual in Power BI Desktop and importing that into Excel.

Click through for a step-by-step demonstration of the process.

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Unioning Datasets in Azure Data Factory

Published 2020-04-24 by Kevin Feasel

Rayis Imayev takes us through the Union Transformation in Mapping Data Flows:

Recently I had a chance to work on a special case of creating a file where the first two rows were static and contained output table metadata (columns names and column types), assuming that further reading process would be able to explicitly identify each column data type and consume new file correctly in a single run.

Read on to see how Rayis solved this with Azure Data Factory.

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Filtering by Distance in Cosmos DB

Published 2020-04-23 by Kevin Feasel

Hasan Savran shows how we can write queries against spatial data in Cosmos DB:

We are ready to use spatial functions to retrieve data. I have the location of Hurricane Katrina. I want to find my customers who might be affected by Katrina. I want to use the Distance function for this. I have the locations of eye of Katrina in my database, first I will pick one of those locations then look for my customers close to that location. How close? You can control the distance with spatial function named distance, In the following example, I use 100 km which is approximately 62 miles.

Hasan has a demo for us, so check it out.

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Currying in Scala

Published 2020-04-23 by Kevin Feasel

Sarfaraz Hussain takes us through one of the most important concepts in functional languages:

Normally we write function and it seems like below:

def multiplySimple(a: Int, b: Int): Int = a * b

We declare a function with all the arguments needed inside a single parameter list.

In currying however, we can split this parameter list into multiple parameter lists.

def multiplyCurry(a: Int)(b: Int): Int = a * b

This doesn’t seem like much, but it does lead to partial application of functions and is one method for how we can have multiple inputs in a functional programming language when mathematical functions allow one input.

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