A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Amy Esselman only needs one Y axis:
You may be confused and overwhelmed at first. Dual-axis graphs like this are inherently challenging. Whether you call them dual-axis graphs, combo charts, or secondary y-axis graphs, they always demand extra effort from a reader to figure out which data series to read against which vertical axis.
Click through for a variety of ways to improve a busy dual-axis chart.
Comments closedThe Big Data in Real World team is done with this index:
Simple problem with a simple solution. In this post we will see how to delete an index in Elasticsearch.
Read on for the command to delete an index, and a demonstration of it in action.
Comments closedKevin Wilkie generates some random data:
One of the many things that the business team asks me to do is to create random-ish data. Thankfully, in Snowflake, there are many ways to make this happen. Today, I want to go thru just a few of them.
Perhaps the one that most people are familiar with is making Snowflake create a random number.
Click through for initial coverage of the RANDOM() function, as well as how you can generate data across a uniform distribution over a given range.
Reitse Eskens shares some initial thoughts:
So, these preliminary opinions I’m offering now are based on the preview I’ve worked with and will keep on working with.
That’s the first observation, I’ll keep on working with this. Why? To be honest I think it’s a step forward from the Data Factory, Synapse, PowerBI experience. Everything together in one product makes life easier. Even though I’m having a really hard time adopting to the interface. I keep selecting the wrong buttons to get stuff done. Then again, only being able to do this after working hours and during the weekend may have something to do with that. But making the interface a little more intuitive would really help me.
Read on for what Reitse has to share so far.
Comments closedKhushbu Ghandi puts a padlock on it:
Resource locks are just locks that we can associate to different scopes in Azure allowing us to override permissions at that resource scope and down. When we talk about the scope of the resource lock, we can lock subscriptions, we can lock resource groups and individual resources, and the lock restrictions that we have based off the type of lock we select will apply to all users and roles that have access to that resource. Also, it’s worth noting that locks are inherited by child resources. So, if we apply a lock on a subscription, it is inherited by all the resource groups that have been created under that subscription along with the resources that will be created under the resource groups.
Resource locks come with their own considerations, and Khushbu dives into those. This is a concept I like more in theory than in practice, save for pretty stable systems where you keep things running 24/7.
Comments closedMatthew McGiffen gives us the numbers:
SQL Server has had the ability to automatically update statistics since version 7.0. Nonetheless for a long part of my career working with SQL Server, whenever a performance issue raised its head everyone’s knee-jerk response would be “Update Statistics!” In most cases though the people shouting that didn’t really understand what the “Statistics” were, or what mechanisms might already be in place for keeping them up to date.
Of course SQL Server isn’t perfect and sometimes it is helpful for human intelligence to intervene. But to provide intelligent intervention one has to understand how things work.
Read on to learn what triggers automatic stats updates in various versions of SQL Server.
Comments closedMartin Schoombee shares a learning experience:
When you’re young and inexperienced you may have the determination to succeed (read: youthful exuberance), but the lack of experience (or understanding of the context) may get you in a lot of trouble because you may see something as black or white when in reality it’s a shade of grey.
This story is how my inexperience (almost) got me into a whole heap of trouble, and how it defined the rest of my career.
Read on for Martin’s story. Some advice I received early in my career is, give the auditors exactly what they ask for, no more and no less. Don’t assume they have detailed technical expertise—some do, but many don’t. And don’t assume they have the full story—they have what you’re saying and (typically) a built-in assumption that you’re soft-shoeing them.
Comments closedAndrea Allred doesn’t want that index to resume:
It had been building for about 10 minutes, when I realized I had the fields in the wrong order. No big deal, I just canceled it, corrected it and tried to start it again. “Tried” was the keyword here. I got an error because I had set RESUMABLE = ON but hadn’t properly cleared it out of the system. I started to furiously dig through articles about how to clear out an index that was resumable but had been canceled.
Read on to see what Andrea found.
Comments closed