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Day: February 11, 2021

Plotting Multiple Plots in R using map and ggplot

Published 2021-02-11 by Kevin Feasel

Sebastian Sauer gives us a quick solution to plotting one graph per variable:

Say we have a data frame where we would like to plot each numeric variables’s distribution.

There are a number of good solutions outthere such as this one, or here, or here.

When I read this, my first thought was along the lines of, “Why not use facets or something like cowplot?” But then it clicked that this is per-variable plotting, whereas faceting requires you choose a variable and see the plots based on that variable’s distinct values..

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Image Sizing in RMarkdown Documents

Published 2021-02-11 by Kevin Feasel

The Jumping Rivers team shares some insight on image creation:

In this series of posts we’ll consider the (simple?) task of generating and including figures for the web using R & {knitr}. Originally this was going to be a single post, but as the length increase, we’ve decided to separate it into a separate articles. The four posts we intend to cover are

– setting the image size (this post)
– selecting the image type, PNG vs JPEG vs SVG
– including non-generated files in a document
– setting global {knitr} options.

Read on for the first post in the series.

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More Number Series Generators

Published 2021-02-11 by Kevin Feasel

Itzik Ben-Gan continues a series:

This is the second part in a series about solutions to the number series generator challenge. Last month I covered solutions that generate the rows on the fly using a table value constructor with rows based on constants. There were no I/O operations involved in those solutions. This month I focus on solutions that query a physical base table that you pre-populate with rows. For this reason, beyond reporting the time profile of the solutions like I did last month, I’ll also report the I/O profile of the new solutions. Thanks again to Alan Burstein, Joe Obbish, Adam Machanic, Christopher Ford, Jeff Moden, Charlie, NoamGr, Kamil Kosno, Dave Mason, John Nelson #2 and Ed Wagner for sharing your ideas and comments.

Read on for three more solutions, as well as a re-evaluation of the solutions in the first article.

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5 Useful Tools for DBAs

Published 2021-02-11 by Kevin Feasel

David Fowler recommends five helpful tools and products:

Backups are easily the most critical part of any DBA’s job so having a reliable way of managing them is essential. There are various tools and scripts out there but easily top of the tree for me is Minion Backup from Minionware.

Controlled by a number of configuration tables, it makes sceduling backups and configuring them down to a really granular level dead easy. If you’re like me and you’ve got a large number of databases on a server that each need to run on different days, go to different locations and need to run with different settings, Minion is about the only tool that I’ve found that lets me control things how I want without needing 101 different agent jobs. All your backups are controlled from a single agent job and that’s what I really love about it.

I’ve always liked Sean & Jen’s products, and would also recommend their indexing and CHECKDB solutions. David’s other suggestions are great as well.

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Powershell Tools and Excel Tips

Published 2021-02-11 by Kevin Feasel

Jess Pomfret shares a few useful Powershell modules and follows up with tips for maximizing your Excel game:

Since I’ve written a lot about PowerShell previously, I wanted to highlight some other tools that I depend on. I’ve always been a fan of Excel, my personal life is full of spreadsheets – most decisions end with a spreadsheet (lucky for me, my wife is also a big fan of Excel!).  I often find myself copying data into Excel to keep track of work, or to quickly analyse data.  It’s also a great way of sharing data with a clear structure.  I’m also a big fan of shortcuts – so here’s a few I use often.

Jess also reminds me that it’s about time to tune up the bicycle…

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Tooling Outside of SQL Server

Published 2021-02-11 by Kevin Feasel

Dave Mason shares a few useful tools::

I’m a proponent of “Show me, don’t tell me”. Screen captures go a long way toward that. Sure, Windows has Paint, but Paint.NET is a bit more advanced. I almost always have an instance of it open in the background. Hit the Print Screen keyboard button and paste (CTRL + V) it into Paint.NET (you can also use the ALT + Print Screen key combination to screen capture just the active window). From there you can do anything: trim down to just a specific part of the image, add some red arrows or circles for emphasis, blur/obscur any sensitive data that’s in the image, etc. I take tweaked screen shots and paste them into just about anything…Word documents, email, even Twitter.

As far as it goes, I think I use different tools than Dave across the board, save for 7Zip. I like Notepad++, SnagIt, WinDirStat, LastPass, 7-Zip (yay for agreement), and mRemoteNG, and despites headphones respectively. But that goes to show that there are plenty of good alternatives for products and it’s worth trying a few out.

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Hyperscale and RBIO_RG_STORAGE

Published 2021-02-11 by Kevin Feasel

Reitse Eskens runs into a strange bug in Azure SQL Database Hyperscale:

This single wait made sure our complete environment went dead in the water. Everything halted. To get some context, Microsoft has some documentation on this wait:

Occurs when a Hyperscale database primary compute node log generation rate is being throttled due to delayed log consumption at the page server(s).

Well, that’s not really helping, because that’s about everything they tell you about it.

Click through for Reitse’s findings and Microsoft’s advice.

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Preparing an Availability Group for VM-Level Replication

Published 2021-02-11 by Kevin Feasel

David Klee takes us through an interesting scenario:

If you have a SQL Server Availability Group (AG) and the VMs are being replicated to a disaster recovery site (cloud or on-prem), chances are the networking topology is not the same at the second site. These replication technologies can include VM replication, SAN LUN replication, or replicating server-level backups to the second site. It is quite complex to have the same network subnet existing at both sites, so usually, the secondary site contains a different networking subnet structure. It means that the servers being brought up at the secondary site are going to receive different IP addresses.

The Availability Group architecture, especially with its dependency on the Windows Server Failover Cluster (WSFC) layer, are quite intolerant of having these IP addresses changed. The utilities performing the failover might not even be aware of the WSFC-specific components that need to be adjusted.

Click through to see what you can do.

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