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Day: March 11, 2022

The Right Amount of Detail on a Visual

Published 2022-03-11 by Kevin Feasel

Mike Cisneros answers a tricky question:

How much context, then, is necessary to include, so that we have an understandable (but un-cluttered) visual, presented with enough background information for the viewer to grasp its meaning, with the key insights and recommended actions emphasized?

When we’ve addressed this question in the past, we’ve relied on the always-true, if sometimes unsatisfying, response of, “It depends.” Every situation is unique, and there’s no checklist or scorecard you can use in every circumstance to ensure that you’ve hit the perfect amount of detail.

Read on for two factors upon which it depends.

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Making Kafka Clients Faster

Published 2022-03-11 by Kevin Feasel

Yeva Byzek has a few whitepaper recommendations:

Over the years, incredible technical content has been written about data plane performance, general principles and tradeoffs, cloud-native architectures, etc. These writings describe how you can get low latency and high throughput without compromising on a mature and reliable platform that provides persistence, no data loss, audit logs, processing logs, and more—all the things that enable you to go from proof of concept to production. This blog post highlights the top five reading recommendations to help you gain a deeper understanding of what makes applications that run on Confluent Cloud so fast. They cover the key concepts and provide concrete examples of how we do it, and how you can do it too, with specific benchmark testing and configuration guidelines.

Click through for links to those resources.

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Azure Purview Announcements

Published 2022-03-11 by Kevin Feasel

Wolfgang Strasser looks at some of the new Azure Purview announcements:

For me, Data lineage is one of those fascinating techniques to better understand your data estate and get a better knowledge how systems are connected and what data flows are there in your data landscape.

Lineage was there in Azure Purview since the beginning (Azure Data Factory, SSIS lineage, Power BI) but this week another very important part of data lineage was put into public preview: Dynamic Lineage Extraction from Azure SQL Databases.

Read on for more information.

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Database Code Reviews: a Process

Published 2022-03-11 by Kevin Feasel

Kenneth Fisher reviews some code:

I’ll be honest, ever since I did a SQL Homework about doing code reviews I’ve wanted to do a blog post about them. Recently Emily Krager (TikTok | Twitter) did a TikTok about code review suggestions which seemed like a good excuse for me to do this. If you don’t follow her I recommend it, she does a great job of combining humor and technology and is just a lot of fun to listen to. Here is her list as best I was able to transcribe it.

Click through for Kenneth’s thoughts on the topic.

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Column References in DAX

Published 2022-03-11 by Kevin Feasel

Teo Lachev makes a reference:

Suppose you use a DAX table variable, such as to group by certain columns and add an extension column as a calculation. Then, you want to count the rows in the table by filtering on one of the columns. At your first attempt, you might try using CALCULATE.

That doesn’t work and Teo explains why, as well as what you do need to use.

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Queries and Batch Mode

Published 2022-03-11 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Darling takes us on a batch mode joyride:

Prior to SQL Server 2019, you needed to have a columnstore index present somewhere for batch mode to kick in for a query.

Somewhere is, of course, pretty loose. Just having one on a table used in a query is often enough, even if a different index from the table is ultimately used.

Batch mode is pretty great and Erik explains why.

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