Press "Enter" to skip to content

Month: March 2023

Tips for People Moving to Postgres

Published 2023-03-06 by Kevin Feasel

Ryan Booz shares a few bits of advice about people learning about Postgres:

I was much further in my SQL Server career than I should have been before I understood the usefulness of APPLY in T-SQL. I didn’t realize that APPLY isn’t a SQL standard and so when I started using PostgreSQL and needed similar functionality, I was perplexed trying to find the equivalent. Fortunately, I wasn’t the only one searching.

My recollection here is that Microsoft introduced the APPLY operator before there was an ANSI standard, so as long as my memory isn’t faulty here, this wasn’t a case of a vendor just deciding to name something differently for the sake of it.

Regardless, Ryan has a lot of good advice for learners of PL/SQL.

Comments closed

Removing SQL Server Native Client 2012

Published 2023-03-06 by Kevin Feasel

Sean Gallardy answers a question:

I see many questions, and have been on the receiving end of many myself, about out of support items and removing them from their SQL Server servers. One of these items is the SQL Server Native Client, aka SNAC, aka SQLNCLI, and I’m sure many others. I remember investigating the connections a very long time ago when availability groups first came around (2012) and haven’t looked at it since that time. A question on the database administrators stack exchange asked the question about if SNAC could be removed on a SQL Server 2019 instance used in high availability and my gut reaction was, “nope.” Gut reactions are great but not always correct, so I did a little testing.

Click through for the results of Sean’s testing.

Comments closed

SqlPackage Support for the Serverless SQL Pool

Published 2023-03-06 by Kevin Feasel

Rui Cunha announces an update to SqlPackage.exe:

SqlPackage release 161.8089.0, dated February 13, 2023, brings a new feature: support for Synapse serverless SQL pools. According to the release notes, you can use SqlPackage to extract and publish both external and internal objects from serverless SQL pools. This includes the T-SQL surface area of serverless SQL pools is limited by design to external tables, external views, stored procedures, functions, statistics, and credentials. 

The following features are included in support for serverless SQL pools:

  • delta external file format
  • openrowset provider CosmosDB with PROVIDER, CONNECTION, OBJECT, and CREDENTIAL or SERVER_CREDENTIAL specified
  • openrowset format SStream
  • with () clause on openrowset

Rui also includes a quick demonstration of this new functionality.

Comments closed

Text Search Performance Optimization in Power BI

Published 2023-03-06 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb provides advice about a relatively new feature:

In the blog post for the October 2022 release of Power BI Desktop there’s a brief description of a new optimisation in Power BI for filters that perform searches in text columns. In this blog post I’m going to share more details about this optimisation and how you can make sure your reports can benefit from it.

Read on to learn a bit more about how it works, as well as a few tips on ensuring that you’re able to take full advantage of this optimization.

Comments closed

Visualizing PyTorch Models

Published 2023-03-03 by Kevin Feasel

Adrian Tam describes a model:

PyTorch is a deep learning library. You can build very sophisticated deep learning models with PyTorch. However, there are times you want to have a graphical representation of your model architecture. In this post, you will learn:

  • How to save your PyTorch model in an exchange format
  • How to use Netron to create a graphical representation.

Click through for the article, which is mostly about training the PyTorch model. Visualizing it turns out to be pretty easy with the right tool.

Comments closed

Understanding the Fold Function

Published 2023-03-03 by Kevin Feasel

Prakhar takes us through the fold function in functional programming, using Scala as the language of choice:

“fold” is a common operation in programming languages including Scala where we essentially use it to “reduce” (note that “reduce” is also an operation in programming languages and has a special meaning in Scala as well). In this blog, we will learn how to use the fold function, understand different types of fold operations (including foldLeft and foldRight), and try to understand how it all works. Although fold operation can be applied on Option, Future, Try, etc.. but here we will understand it through List

Fold is extremely useful for things like “I want to calculate a sum but it’s got to be a conditional sum” or when you have more complex mathematical operations to combine elements together. It can take a while to get comfortable with the syntax, but once you do, it opens mental doors.

Comments closed

Working with Kafka from Python

Published 2023-03-03 by Kevin Feasel

Dave Shook has a new course for us:

If you’re a Python developer, our free Apache Kafka for Python Developers course will show you how to harness the power of Kafka in your applications. You will learn how to build Kafka producer and consumer applications, how to work with event schemas and take advantage of Confluent Schema Registry, and more. Follow along in each module as Dave Klein, Senior Developer Advocate at Confluent, covers all of these topics in detail. Hands-on exercises occur throughout the course to solidify concepts as they are presented. At its end, you will have the knowledge you need to begin developing Python applications that stream data to and from Kafka clusters.

Read on to learn more about it and give it a try.

Comments closed

Data Mesh Q&A

Published 2023-03-03 by Kevin Feasel

Jean-Georges Perrin answers some questions:

How about data virtualization? If you have different Data Hubs with different data models, how do you integrate them?

As illustrated in the next figure, you can use data virtualization pointing to various physical data stores. Your onboarding pipeline can be “virtual” or at least leveraging virtualized data stores. You will gain in data freshness by reducing latency but you may be limited in the number of data transformations you want to perform towards your interoperable model.

Read on for the full set of questions and answers.

Comments closed

Trying out DuckDB

Published 2023-03-03 by Kevin Feasel

Mark Litwintschik gives DuckDB a go:

DuckDB is primarily the work of Mark Raasveldt and Hannes Mühleisen. It’s made up of a million lines of C++ and runs as a stand-alone binary. Development is very active with the commit count on its GitHub repo doubling nearly every year since it began in 2018. DuckDB uses PostgreSQL’s SQL parser, Google’s RE2 regular expression engine and SQLite’s shell.

Click through to see how you can install it on Ubuntu, perform some basic configuration, and work with the tool.

Comments closed