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Day: December 10, 2021

An Introduction to BugLab

Published 2021-12-10 by Kevin Feasel

Miltos Allamanis and Marc Brockschmidt take us through a new paper:

Finding and fixing bugs in code is a time-consuming, and often frustrating, part of everyday work for software developers. Can deep learning address this problem and help developers deliver better software, faster? In a new paper, Self-Supervised Bug Detection and Repair, presented at the 2021 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2021), we show a promising deep learning model, which we call BugLab. BugLab can be taught to detect and fix bugs, without using labelled data, through a “hide and seek” game.

I think there’s a lot more research required before we get to the point where this is useful in practical circumstances, but it’s exciting to see.

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Pattern Matching in Scala

Published 2021-12-10 by Kevin Feasel

Kuldeepak Gupta shows off pattern matching in Scala:

Pattern Matching is a mechanism of checking a value against a Pattern. It gives a way of checking the given sequence of tokens for the presence of a specific pattern. Here, we match expressions against a pattern.

Compared to the ‘switch’ in C++, C, JAVA, there’s no fall through to the next alternative in Scala pattern matching. A Match error is thrown when no pattern matches.

This is a powerful part of functional programming.

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Using GREATEST and LEAST in Azure SQL DB

Published 2021-12-10 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Bertrand preps us for SQL Server 2022:

In an earlier tip, “Find MAX value from multiple columns in a SQL Server table,” Sergey Gigoyan showed us how to simulate GREATEST() and LEAST() functions, which are available in multiple database platforms but were – at least at the time – missing from Transact-SQL. These functions are now available in Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance, and will be coming in SQL Server 2022, so I thought it was a good time to revisit Sergey’s methods and compare.

Read on to see how the workaround compares.

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Understanding the Oldest Page Wait

Published 2021-12-10 by Kevin Feasel

Tom Collins explains a database wait:

SQL Server Log truncation deletes inactive Virtual Log Files (VLF) from the SQL Server database transaction log . The Log truncation process frees  space in the logical log for reuse by the Physical transaction log. If no truncation occurs , eventually it will fill all the disk space allocated to physical log files.

SQL Server Log truncation can be delayed for a range of different reasons.A good starting point is to  query the sys.databases log_reuse_wait and log_reuse_wait_desc columns. This will supply different waits describing the reason for a delay 

Read on for more info about the OLDEST_PAGE wait.

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Azure Synapse Analytics November Updates

Published 2021-12-10 by Kevin Feasel

James Serra keeps us up to date on Synapse:

Delta Lake support for serverless SQL is generally available: Azure Synapse has had preview-level support for serverless SQL pools querying the Delta Lake format. This enables BI and reporting tools to access data in Delta Lake format through standard T-SQL. With this latest update, the support is now Generally Available and can be used in production. See How to query Delta Lake files using serverless SQL pools

Click through for the full list of what James likes.

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