Press "Enter" to skip to content

Day: May 13, 2020

Counting Table Tennis Ball Bounces

Published 2020-05-13 by Kevin Feasel

Evgeni Chasnovski has some fun counting:

On May 7th 2020 Dan made a successful attempt to beat a world record for the longest duration to control a table tennis ball with a bat. He surpassed current record duration of 5h2m37s by 18 minutes and 27 seconds for a total of 5h21m4s. He also live streamed the event on his “TableTennisDaily” YouTube channel, which later was uploaded (important note for the future: this video is a result of live stream and not a “shot and uploaded” one). During cheering for Dan in real time I got curious about actual number of bounces he made.

And thus the quest begins.

As counting manually is error-prone and extremely boring, I decided to do this programmatically. The idea of solution is straightforward: somehow extract audio from the world record video, detect bounces (as they have distinctive sound) and count them.

Click through for the process as well as a link to a Git repo with the Python code.

Comments closed

Choosing Colors for Visuals

Published 2020-05-13 by Kevin Feasel

Mike Cisneros has some guidance around color selection when designing visuals:

Regardless of how you select it, this key color will be used to denote the data points, or the data series, on which you feel it is the most important for your audience to focus.

All of the other colors we use will be based on where they are on the color wheel in relation to this key color, how many colors we intend to use, and what kind of relationship the rest of the data has to the data represented by the key color. 

I’ll admit that I just reach for the pre-created palettes which have done the work for me already.

Comments closed

Thread Pool Exhaustion and Availability Groups

Published 2020-05-13 by Kevin Feasel

Sean Gallardy lays down the gauntlet:

You’re probably wondering why you couldn’t spawn a new thread, why this error happened, why you shouldn’t just up the max worker threads, and probably also thinking this must be some kind of “bug” in SQL Server. So here’s where our awkward conversation starts… It’s you. Contrary to every relationship breakup you’ve ever had, it’s definitely you. I’m not saying this to be mean but to really drive the point home here. The major reasons for this occurring are large blocking chains, too much workload for the server size (databases, users, etc.), and/or your virtual infrastructure sucks. There aren’t too many reasons for getting yourself into this situation, and while what I’ll be putting forth here isn’t exhaustive of all edge cases and scenarios, these are by far the majority of all the items in the wild that I’ve either worked on or have been involved in at some level. Side Note: If you’ve read this far, are shaking your head, calling me names that an irate sailor might utter, and telling yourself that upping the max worker threads as the product error suggests and Microsoft should fix their bugs then you can stop reading here as you’re probably not open to learning why you have issues in your environments.

One more scenario I’ve seen is mirroring thousands of databases on a single instance. That scenario fit none of Sean’s criteria—there was very little blocking, most of the databases were small and infrequently-used, and the infrastructure was the right size. It was just a huge number of databases and each database requiring a minimum of X worker threads. Mind you, it was still a bad idea…

Comments closed

Publishing a dacpac with .NET Core

Published 2020-05-13 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Ejlskov Jensen shows how to deploy a Visual Studio database project from .NET Core:

In this post, I will describe how you can build a SQL Server Database project in order to create a .dacpac file, using .NET Core only – dotnet build.

For a while now, it has been possible to publish a .dacpac (meaning apply it to an new or existing database) using the cross-platform version of sqlpackage.

But building a database project (.sqlproj) was only possible on Windows, as the .sqlproj project type is based on the classic .NET Framework .csproj project type.

However, thanks to a smart open source effort, you can now also build a .dacpac file, even on a Mac or Linux build agent.

Read on to learn more.

Comments closed

Tips for a Smooth Power BI Report Server Experience

Published 2020-05-13 by Kevin Feasel

Josh Crittenden has a few tips for people installing Power BI Report Server:

As is the case with any enterprise BI product, careful planning and consideration of how the technology will be leveraged should be made up-front. This will help avoid speed bumps during implementation and ensure a smooth ride as you roll out your BI and analytics solutions. Whether you’ve been working with PBIRS from day one, or are starting to use the platform for the first time, the goal of this post is to showcase tips and techniques that you can turn around and apply in your own environment.

Additionally, for those of you considering a hybrid Power BI implementation (Power BI service and Power BI Report Server), we will compare specific features of each platform below.  

Read on for the tips.

Comments closed

Capturing CHECKDB Output

Published 2020-05-13 by Kevin Feasel

Erin Stellato shows how you can track the results of those automated CHECKDB runs you’re doing:

First, you need to be running CHECKDB on a regular basis.  If you’re going to ask what you mean by regular basis, I’ll direct you to a post of Paul’s that is still relevant: Importance of running regular consistency checks.  There are a few factors to consider, but in general I recommend at least once a week.  If you’re a 9 to 5 shop and have the maintenance window to run CHECKDB daily, feel free to do that.

Erin walks us through it and also recommends checking out Ola’s scripts for integrity checks. I’d add to that Minion CheckDB.

Comments closed

Finding Index Usage Stats in Query Store

Published 2020-05-13 by Kevin Feasel

Grant Fritchey gives us another option for determining whether an index is in use:

One of the most frequent questions you’ll hear online is how to determine if a particular index is in use. There is no perfect answer to this question. You can look at the sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats to get a pretty good picture of whether or not an index is in use. However, this DMV has a few holes through which you could be mislead.

I thought of another way to get an idea of how and where an index is being used. This is also a flawed solution, but, still, an interesting one.

What if we queried the information in Query Store?

Be sure to read Grant’s warning before jumping into this, but at least it gives us another option, as well as a better understanding of which queries are using particular indexes.

Comments closed