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Day: February 10, 2022

Identifying R Functions and Packages in GitHub Gists

Published 2022-02-10 by Kevin Feasel

Bryan Shalloway looks at gists:

A problem I bumped into was that most of Chelsea’s gists don’t actually have .R or .Rmd extensions so my approach skipped most of her snippets. I wanted to parse my own gists but ran into a related problem that most of my github gist code snippets are saved as .md files1.

In this post I…

1. create a function to extract code chunks from simple .md files

2. parse the functions and packages in my code using funspotr.

Click through to see the code in action.

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Handling Optional Parameters in SQL Server

Published 2022-02-10 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Darling embraces dynamic SQL:

You’ve got tables. So many tables And columns. So many columns.

Users — demanding as they are — might wanna see, search, and order by all sorts of things in those many columns in those many tables. Writing a query to do that is hard at first, especially if you’re afraid of dynamic SQL.

Read on for reasons why dynamic SQL is usually the right answer here and check out a video as well.

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Who You Gonna Call? Upgrade Edition

Published 2022-02-10 by Kevin Feasel

Kenneth Fisher pulls out the company directory:

This month the topic we are blogging about is Upgrade Strategies. Or, how do we look at SQL Server upgrades. In my case I want to talk about the absolute hardest part of any upgrade at my company.

I should point out that I work for a large company with a lot of moving parts. Over the course of my tenure here I’ve helped to support hundreds to thousands of SQL Server instances. And at least for us, the technical part of an upgrade isn’t too bad. Where we almost always run into problems is Who do we contact?

Read on for Kenneth’s thoughts on the topic.

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Finding Locking Chains in SQL Server

Published 2022-02-10 by Kevin Feasel

David Fowler is looking for lead blockers:

By far the most common cause for poor performance that I see is blocking. Unless you’ve got some monitoring in place it’s near impossible to identify the cause of any historical blocking incidents. Luckily, if you’re doing as I do and running the First Responder Kit regularly into tables, you will have a history of running statements thanks to sp_BlitzWho. That data will contain the SPIDs of any blocking processes.

Now, if you’ve ever had to look at that data and tried to figure out what the blocking chain is then you’ll know that it can be a total headache.

But David has a solution to find those fullbacks and pulling guards.

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Postgres Backup and Restore

Published 2022-02-10 by Kevin Feasel

Grant Fritchey is learning about PostgreSQL:

One of the first things I worry about when I’m looking at a new system is the status of the backups. I don’t see anything in PostgreSQL that will lead me to a different conclusion. However, I didn’t realize just how big a can of worms I would open by pursuing backups and restores.

Instead of talking immediately about backups, let’s talk about restores.

This is a bit different from what we’re used to in SQL Server, so definitely check it out if you are looking at Postgres development or administration.

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The Azure SQL DB Serverless Compute Tier

Published 2022-02-10 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Randal explains why there is yet another tier of Azure SQL Database:

Over the past several years, I’ve helped numerous customers migrate SQL Server workloads to Azure SQL, including Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance, and Azure SQL Virtual Machines. 

In this article, I’ll explain some of the challenges of optimizing the compute cost for an Azure SQL Database deployment and review how the serverless compute tier can greatly simplify it.

Click through to see where the serverless tier fits and how you can make it work best in your environment.

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Power BI Delivery Options

Published 2022-02-10 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Turley has a list:

When you sign-up for the Power BI service at PowerBI.com (this address redirects to App.PowerBI.com), use establish a tenant for your organization, hosted in the Azure cloud. Even if you setup a 90-day trial account, you have a tenant that you can upgrade later on. By default, all of the datasets, reports and other assets you publish to the workspaces in your tenant, are in a shared capacity. This means that Microsoft will manage the storage and resource allocation among shared servers in their data centers. Larger organizations will benefit from a dedicated capacity “Premium” tenant. This means that Microsoft dedicates at least one virtual machine in the Azure data center, with guaranteed capacity, for your tenant. With Premium-per-User (PPU) licensing, you pay per user.

Click through for a list of available options and some of the implications of each.

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