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Day: September 2, 2022

RStudio Connect and Python’s FastAPI

Published 2022-09-02 by Kevin Feasel

Parisa Gregg continues a series on RStudio Connect and Python:

FastAPI is a light web framework and as you can probably tell by the name, it’s fast. It provides a similar functionality to Flask in that it allows the building of web applications and APIs, however it is newer and uses the ASGI (Asynchronous Server Gateway Interface) framework. One of the nice features of FastAPI is it is built on OpenAPI and JSON Schema standards which means it has the ability to provide automatic interactive API documentation with SwaggerUI. You also get validation for most Python data types with Pydantic. FastAPI is therefore another popular choice for data scientists when creating APIs to interact with and visualize data.

In this blog post we will go through how to deploy a simple machine learning API to RStudio Connect.

I’ve taken pretty well to FastAPI for rapid API development. I haven’t had to worry about scaling it out too much, so I’m not sure how well that works in practice. Still, for single-user or few-user apps, FastAPI definitely works well.

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Replacing ZooKeeper with Kafka Raft

Published 2022-09-02 by Kevin Feasel

Dave Shook shows off the Kafka Raft protocol:

Apache Kafka® Raft (KRaft) is the consensus protocol that was introduced to remove Apache Kafka’s dependency on ZooKeeper™ for metadata management. This greatly simplifies Kafka’s architecture by consolidating responsibility for metadata into Kafka itself, rather than splitting it between two different systems: ZooKeeper and Kafka. KRaft mode is available in the Apache Kafka 3.1 release, though it is not yet ready for use in production environments. Refer to KIP-833 to learn more about when KRaft will be marked as production ready.

Below are several key resources to help you learn everything you need to know about the ins and outs of KRaft, its role in the Kafka architecture, and how you can get started in trying it out. These resources are followed by two others that let you “do stuff” with Kraft, i.e., run a KRaft mode cluster and observe how it works when various cluster controller related operations take place.

Eliminating the ZooKeeper dependency was a big goal for the Kafka team for several years. It’s not quite out yet but I’ll be interested to see how that migration works for companies.

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Running Postman Tests in GitLab

Published 2022-09-02 by Kevin Feasel

Rahul Kumar automates Postman tests:

Hi folks, In this brief blog post, we’ll learn more about Gitlab CI and Postman, the API testing tool we use the most frequently. This article’s goal is to provide a quick process for automatically testing the service API response. The solution makes use of the capabilities provided by the Gitlab-integrated Continuous Integration tool.

Click through for the tutorial.

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Creating a Parameterized Table in Tableau

Published 2022-09-02 by Kevin Feasel

Jordan Witcombe does some slicing and dicing:

Let’s say you’re planning to present a large table of information and you want the user to be able to filter based on the top or bottom X number of records. Due to the size of the dataset we would like the customer to have the ability to filter based on more than one column for their comparison. Making a large dataset much easier to digest.

Read on to see how you can accept user input in Tableau and simplify the viewable data.

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PolyBase and Windows Authentication in SQL Server 2022

Published 2022-09-02 by Kevin Feasel

I have some bad news:

Back in the SQL Server 2019 days, I laid out a post which covered a really annoying bug around Windows authentication and PolyBase. The upshot is that SQL Server 2019 CU2 broke Windows authentication, meaning that you could not create external objects on a SQL Server instance while using a Windows authenticated session. In CU2, if you tried, you would get a Level 20 error which would kill your session.

Over the next several CUs, the SQL Server team improved things incrementally: first, the error that you got was a Level 16 error, so your statement would fail but the session would remain active. Then, in CU6, they made it so that if your SQL Server instance is on a server running on a domain, then you would be okay—you could create external objects while connected with a domain-authenticated Windows account.

I decided to give this a try in SQL Server 2022 RC0 and ran into some interesting results. 

Click through for those results.

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Deploying SQL Server via AKS

Published 2022-09-02 by Kevin Feasel

Rajendra Gupta needs to deploy a SQL Server container:

This article uses Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to deploy and manage the Kubernetes cluster. It is a fully managed service that offers serverless Kubernetes with integrated CI/CD solutions, enterprise-grade security, and governance.

You can navigate to https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/services/kubernetes-service/#overview and try Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).

Read on for an overview of Azure Kubernetes Service and how you can get a SQL Server on Linux container running atop it.

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Plotting an ASCII Bar Chart using SQL

Published 2022-09-02 by Kevin Feasel

Lukas Eder is speaking my language:

No need for expensive Tableau subscriptions. Ditch Microsoft Excel. Just use native PostgreSQL to quickly visualise your data!

Here’s an idea I had for a while. As you may know, jOOQ can produce fancy charts from your jOOQ results. But that requires you use jOOQ, and you may not be using jOOQ, because you’re not coding in Java/Kotlin/Scala (otherwise, you’d be using jOOQ). That’s OK. I thought, why not do it with SQL (PostgreSQL, to be specific) directly, then? 

This one’s getting my most coveted category: Wacky Ideas.

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SSRS 2022 Updates

Published 2022-09-02 by Kevin Feasel

Cookie McCray shares some updates:

Back in 2020, we announced the deprecation of Report Server features Pin to Power BI, Mobile Reports, and Mobile Report Publisher. These features will be removed from versions of SQL Server starting with SQL Server 2022 and will no longer be supported. Only the last three releases, SQL Server 2016, SQL Server 2017, and SQL Server 2019, will be supported in maintenance mode until EOL (End of Life) for existing customers.

There are some interesting things in here but nothing that makes me say Reporting Services has a real future.

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