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Day: July 26, 2021

Digital Forensics with Apache Kafka

Published 2021-07-26 by Kevin Feasel

Kai Waehner continues a series on using Apache Kafka as the backbone for computer security:

Storing data long-term in Kafka is possible since the beginning. Each Kafka topic gets a retention time. Many use cases use a retention time of a few hours or days as the data is only processed and stored in another system (like a database or data warehouse). However, more and more projects use a retention time of a few years or even -1 (= forever) for some Kafka topics (e.g., due to compliance reasons or to store transactional data).

The drawback of using Kafka for forensics is the huge volume of historical data and its related high cost and scalability issues. This gets pretty expensive as Kafka uses regular HDDs or SDDS as the disk storage. Additionally, data rebalancing between brokers (e.g., if a new broker is added to a cluster) takes a long time for huge volumes of data sets. Hence, rebalancing takes hours can impact scalability and reliability.

But there is a solution to these challenges: Tiered Storage.

Click through to learn more.

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Detecting a Fraud: Power BI Edition

Published 2021-07-26 by Kevin Feasel

Brett Powell has an interesting post on determining a Power BI consultant’s chops:

This post discusses the forms, origins, and indications of fraud and misrepresentation in the context of Power BI consulting and contract engagements. The intent of this content is to help the reader determine whether a fraud or misrepresentation has occurred and identify characteristics that suggest the potential for a significant variance between expectations and deliverables.

Brett comes at this from the viewpoint of an expert sharing information on the types of things you should expect to see from a qualified consultant. Incidentally, this also works to give you an idea of the types of skills necessary to become a Power BI consultant so if that’s your goal, study this and you’ll be in a solid mindset—especially because this isn’t just a knowledge quiz.

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Working with Complex Return Types in Power Query

Published 2021-07-26 by Kevin Feasel

Gerhard Brueckl works with some complex data:

When working with Power Query, you have probably already realized that every expression you write returns a value of a specific type. Usually this will be a primitive type like text, number, or date. (A full list of types available in Power Query can be found here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerquery-m/m-spec-types). If for some reason the type of an expression cannot be defined, the special type *any* will be used. For sure you already encountered this when using Table.AddColumn which, by default, results in the new column being of type *any*.

Read on to learn more, including what you can do if you’re creating Power Query functions.

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Setting Resource Constraints on Containers

Published 2021-07-26 by Kevin Feasel

Anthony Nocentino won’t let this container run amok:

Docker gives you the ability to control a container’s access to CPU, Memory, and network and disk IO using resource constraints, sometimes called Limits. You define limits as parameters when creating containers. In its default configuration, a container will have no resource constraints for accessing resources of the host operating system. This post will look at how to configure resource constraints in Docker and look at how SQL Server sees the resources when CPU and Memory resource constraints are in place.

In this post, we will focus on using CPU and Memory Limits using the parameters --cpus <value> and --memory <value>. These provide the essential resource controls for access to CPU and Memory available on the host. If you want to dive deep into the various types of resource constraints available in Docker, check out this page https://docs.docker.com/config/containers/resource_constraints/. The goal of this post is to introduce the SQL Server DBA into resource constraints in containers.

Read on to learn how you can use CPU and memory limits to control resource allocation for SQL Server containers—including at runtime.

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