A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Continuing my series of articles on latches, this time I’m going to discuss the APPEND_ONLY_STORAGE_INSERT_POINT latch and show how it can be a major bottleneck for heavy update workloads where either form of snapshot isolation is being used.
I strongly recommend you read the initial post in the series before this one, so you have all the general background knowledge about latches.
As always, read the whole thing.
Comments closedSean Gallardy explains access violations:
Access Violations (AV) are another common error that will cause SQL Server to take a memory dump. These can occur for a variety of reasons, and unlike the last one (Non-Yielding Scheduler) it’s quite the task, especially given public symbols don’t have structure data and offsets.
Read on to see what they are, what a dump file may include, and why they can be so difficult to debug.
Comments closedChris Webb has an answer, but you may not like it:
There are a lot of articles and blog posts out there on how to handle OAuth2 authentication when connecting to REST APIs from Power Query in Power BI. However there is also a lot of confusion and contradictory information too so in this post I want to give you the definitive, Microsoft-endorsed answer to this question, which is:
If want to connect from Power BI to a REST API that uses OAuth2 authentication then you need to build a custom connector.
Read on for documentation showing how to implement and the big risk you’re taking if you don’t use a custom connector.
Comments closedHolger von Jouanne-Diedrich lays out the math for us:
The Bundesliga is Germany’s primary football league. It is one of the most important football leagues in the world, broadcast on television in over 200 countries.
If you want to get your hands on a tool to forecast the result of any game (and perform some more statistical analyses), read on!
What I would like is a tool which has SC Freiburg utterly dominating Bayern. Said tool may be more mythological than scientific (or at least a copy of Football Manager and a little bit of save scumming…), but I’ll take it.
Comments closedNir Ohfeld and Sagi Tzadik discovered a flaw in Azure Cosmos DB:
Nearly everything we do online these days runs through applications and databases in the cloud. While leaky storage buckets get a lot of attention, database exposure is the bigger risk for most companies because each one can contain millions or even billions of sensitive records. Every CISO’s nightmare is someone getting their access keys and exfiltrating gigabytes of data in one fell swoop.
So you can imagine our surprise when we were able to gain complete unrestricted access to the accounts and databases of several thousand Microsoft Azure customers, including many Fortune 500 companies. Wiz’s security research team (that’s us) constantly looks for new attack surfaces in the cloud, and two weeks ago we discovered an unprecedented breach that affects Azure’s flagship database service, Cosmos DB.
Read on for details about the attack. Microsoft has already mitigated the issue by disabling the functionality necessary to pull off the attack. H/T Ben Stegink.
Comments closedJames Serra lays out some of the benefits and drawbacks of using multiple cloud providers:
A discussion I have seen many companies have is if they should be single-cloud (using only one cloud company) or multi-cloud (using more than one cloud company). The three major Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) that companies use for nearly all use cases are Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
Without spoiling it too much, James is not really sold on the idea.
Comments closedChad Callihan looks at the SET NOCOUNT ON option:
You may have a stored procedure that completes in an acceptable amount of time for the dozen or so times a day it gets called. Maybe it returns results in a few seconds and that makes the users calling it happy enough that you can move onto more pressing matters. But what about a stored procedure being called millions of times a day? The definition of acceptable can be drastically different when you consider the speed and traffic that type of stored procedure produces. When every millisecond matters, it’s worth checking to see what your setting is for SET NOCOUNT.
Click through for a demo and what you can realistically expect from SET NOCOUNT ON. This works best with big loops, and incidentally, one pattern I like to use is to combine SET NOCOUNT ON with an occasional RAISERROR('%i iterations run...', 10, 1, @loopvar) WITH NOWAIT. That way, you can still see progress on the screen, but instead of printing results every single run, you might see one every 100 runs.
Elayne Jones dives into paginated reports in Power BI:
Paginated Reports for Power BI offer pixel-perfect control over the format of each element of a report. They allow users to fine-tune each field of the report, such as text size, colors, spacing, and print layout, in a more precise way than using regular visuals in Power BI Desktop. Users can access Paginated Reports directly from workspaces in Power BI Service. Additionally, users can embed Paginated Reports directly onto a Power BI report page with the new visual option. This article will explain how to create a Paginated Report and how to configure the new Paginated Reports visual in Power BI Desktop. Please note that Paginated Reports require a Premium subscription. This tutorial is based on a fictional Sales Report.
If you’re familiar with SQL Server Reporting Services, you’ll find Power BI paginated reports simultaneously comfortable and confining—it’s much the same functionality as SSRS, but doesn’t feel as complete.
Comments closedKenneth Fisher discovers a secret of the sysname datatype:
The other day I was creating a table to store some metadata. Since the metadata I was collecting (sys.databases.name for example) uses the datatype sysname I used the same datatype. In case you didn’t know sysname is an nvarchar(128) user defined datatype used in a number of the system views.
Click through for Kenneth’s finding.
Comments closedJim Galasyn shows how to use the Confluent.Kafka NuGet package to connect to a Kafka cluster from C#:
Sometimes you’d like to write your own code for producing data to an Apache Kafka® topic and connecting to a Kafka cluster programmatically. Confluent provides client libraries for several different programming languages that make it easy to code your own Kafka clients in your favorite dev environment.
One of the most popular dev environments is .NET and Visual Studio (VS) Code. This blog post shows you step by step how to use .NET and C# to create a client application that streams Wikipedia edit events to a Kafka topic in Confluent Cloud. Also, the app consumes a materialized view from ksqlDB that aggregates edits per page. The application runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows, with no code changes.
Now, if only the .NET package supported a bunch of stuff which has come out over the past few years (the big one being Streams)… That’s no knock on the maintainers, mind you—they’ve done a good job given available resources—but it’s still unfortunate. At least there’s an unofficial implementation and hey, the original Confluent.Kafka .NET package started out as one of those too.
Comments closed