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Day: May 8, 2023

Speeding Up a Slow Kafka Consumer with Parallelism

Published 2023-05-08 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Brebner continues a series on Kafka consumers:

In Part 1 of this series, we had a look at Kafka concurrency and throughput work, recapped some earlier approaches I used to improve Kafka performance, and introduced the Kafka Parallel Consumer and supported ordering options (Partition, Key, and Unordered). In this second part we continue our investigations with some example code, a trace of a “slow consumer” example, how to achieve 1 million TPS in theory, some experimental results, what else do we know about the Kafka Parallel Consumer, and finally, if you should use it in production. 

Read on to see what Paul has to say about the topic.

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Converting Letters to Pre-Smartphone Numeric Codes

Published 2023-05-08 by Kevin Feasel

Tomaz Kastrun rolls back the clocks:

What a nightmare was to type a short message on these keypads. So, image writing Hello on this keypad, you had to press: 4433555555666 to get the letters “hello”.

44 = h
33 = e
555 = l
555 = l
666 = o

So creating converter would be great to troll on your friends

This seems like as good a reason as any to create such a function. Click through to see how to do it in R.

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pg_stat_statements and Public Sentiment

Published 2023-05-08 by Kevin Feasel

Andreas Scherbaum polls the audience:

For anyone who doesn’t know, I’m running a weekly interview series with people from the PostgreSQL community. It’s called “PostgreSQL Person of the Week“. One of the questions in the default set I give everyone is:

What is your favorite PostgreSQL extension?

And guess what the answer is: by far everyone’s favorite is pg_stat_statements!

Read on to learn a bit more about what the extension does, why people like it, and what other extensions interviewees prefer.

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Tracking Configuration-Based Performance Differences in Postgres

Published 2023-05-08 by Kevin Feasel

Ryan Lambert shows off a Postgres extension:

This is my entry for PgSQL Phriday #008. It’s Saturday, so I guess this is a day late! This month’s topic, chosen by Michael from pgMustard, is on the excellent pg_stat_statements extension. When I saw Michael was the host this month I knew he’d pick a topic I would want to contribute on! Michael’s post for his own topic provides helpful queries and good reminders about changes to columns between Postgres version 12 and 13.

In this post I show one way I like using pg_stat_statements: tracking the impact of configuration changes to a specific workload. I used a contrived change to configuration to quickly make an obvious impact.

Read on for the example.

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Scanning for Startup Procedures in SQL Server

Published 2023-05-08 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Steadman reminds us of a SQL Server feature:

The Scan For Startup Procs feature in SQL Server allows you to specify a list of stored procedures that will be automatically executed whenever the database engine starts. This can be useful in certain scenarios, such as when you want to perform tasks such as restoring a database or performing maintenance tasks when the database engine starts.

“Scan for startup procs” is a configuration option in Microsoft SQL Server that determines whether the server should scan for and execute stored procedures that are marked as “startup procedures” when the server starts up.

I’ve used this to good effect in the past, but there is a fundamental problem with this approach: it’s easy to forget about these, potentially leading to a difficult search for why some action took place. If you only let sysadmins add or change startup stored procedures, then I’d consider this just as little a security risk as xp_cmdshell: if the attacker already has sysadmin, the attacker can simple enable the feature, so there’s no real value to denying yourself the capability if it makes sense in your environment.

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