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Day: September 13, 2022

Format_DateTime in KQL

Published 2022-09-13 by Kevin Feasel

Robert Cain continues a series on KQL:

Reformatting dates is very common when querying data. You may, for example, wish to come up with a more compact date than the default KQL returns. Perhaps you work for an international company. In some countries you may want the date in month/day/year format, while other countries would prefer day/month/year.

Fortunately Kusto provides the format_datetime function that allows you to do just this. We’ll take a look at it in this article.

Read on for a variety of examples.

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Spark Query Optimization in Synapse

Published 2022-09-13 by Kevin Feasel

Daniel Coelho lays out a few optimizations in Azure Synapse Analytics Spark pools:

The Azure Synapse Analytics team has prominent engineers enhancing and contributing back to the Apache Spark project. One of our focus areas is Spark query optimization techniques, where Microsoft has decades of experience and is making significant contributions to the Apache Spark open source engine.

The attachment at the bottom of this blog post will be presented at the 48th International Conference on Very Large Databases (#VLDB2022) and covers the latest developments in query optimization for Apache Spark 3. Those optimizations were developed by Microsoft engineers and are available today in the Azure Synapse runtime for Apache Spark versions 3.1 and 3.2.

Check out the high-level updates as well as a complete technical paper laying out the changes.

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Try out Chocolatey

Published 2022-09-13 by Kevin Feasel

Grant Fritchey makes a recommendation:

Chocolatey, as it says on the web site, is a package manager for Windows. But what does that mean? Basically, a package manager is a central place to install, upgrade and remove software. You get a database of the software you have installed, then it can help you to manage your software. Package managers are built into most operating systems. For example, apt or yum on a Linux box. However, not Windows. That’s where Chocolatey comes in.

I do like Chocolatey a lot as well and not just on VMs that I regularly need to rebuild.

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Working with CROSS APPLY

Published 2022-09-13 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Randal takes us through one of my favorite operators:

Introduced by Microsoft in SQL Server 2005, SQL CROSS APPLY allows values to be passed from a table or view into a user-defined function or subquery. This tutorial will cover the incredibly useful and flexible APPLY operator, such as how the CROSS APPLY and OUTER APPLY operators work, how they’re like the INNER and LEFT OUTER JOIN, and give you some examples of both. All the examples use the AdventureWorks example database.

Later in the article, I’ll also discuss a highly pervasive SQL Server performance problem—one I still encounter with customers on a weekly basis. This problem is related to using the APPLY operator against a specific type of user-defined function. It’s so problematic and can overwhelm tempdb, bringing your SQL Server instance to a crawl!

If you’re not too familiar with APPLY in its two forms, read the whole thing.

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ALLSELECTED in DAX

Published 2022-09-13 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari explain how the ALLSELECTED function works:

There are two ways to describe what ALLSELECTED performs and what its use cases are: a simple way and a complex way. In this article, we focus on a simple description of the function and its main use cases. We also provide details about when and how you can use ALLSELECTED without having to worry about the intricate details. If and when you want to go to the next level, invest the proper amount of time required to study this article: The definitive guide to ALLSELECTED. Be careful, the details are really complex and if you stick to the best practices, you can safely ignore said details. A real DAX guru should know all the details, but in this article we focus more on an introduction to ALLSELECTED.

Because of its inherent complexity, we describe ALLSELECTED by first focusing on a business case where ALLSELECTED is a good fit. We then provide an imperfect – yet useful – description of what ALLSELECTED is performing. And finally we provide the few best practices to follow when using ALLSELECTED. We will not provide the complete description of ALLSELECTED in terms of shadow filter context, not even as an introduction.

Even the simple solution is fairly complex.

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query_antipattern_type Extended Event

Published 2022-09-13 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Bertrand is intrigued:

But one thing that caught my eye in all the ruckus is a new Extended Event called query_antipattern, which is a lot more up my personal alley. You may have come across my Bad Habits series, or might have seen me rant about some of these in person. I think this is a promising compromise between manually parsing every single query and just not realizing how many little things are collectively bringing SQL Server to its knees.

This event is not yet documented, but it seems like it could be some combination of runtime code analysis and execution plan inspection. Right now, all we have to go on is a set of cryptic values in sys.dm_xe_map_values:

Read on to see those values and Aaron’s speculation.

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Powershell Colors and Icons

Published 2022-09-13 by Kevin Feasel

Jeff Hill has fun with terminals:

If you have followed along with me before, chances are you know I like color. Color helps me zoom in on the information I want faster. Color can help me know if I have the right number of curly braces. Modern browsers and word processors show a red squiggly line when you misspell a word. Your eye is drawn to that bit of color that is different than the rest of the page. Keep reading and I’ll show you how to add some spice to your PowerShell experience.

I heartily endorse the mention of Windows Terminal later on. If you haven’t tried it before, it’s a worthy successor to CMD and the basic Powershell terminal.

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