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Month: August 2023

Adding Text to a Plot in R

Published 2023-08-09 by Kevin Feasel

Steven Sanderson texts up a plot:

As a programmer, you’re well aware of the importance of data visualization. A well-crafted plot can convey complex information with clarity and impact. In R, creating stunning plots is a breeze, especially when you’re armed with the versatile text() function. This little gem allows you to add custom text to your plots, enabling you to annotate and highlight essential details. Let’s dive into the world of text() and uncover its syntax and potential through some hands-on examples.

I’m also a big fan of geom_text_repel() in ggplot2’s ggrepel library. It is by no means perfect but it does do a good job of not overlapping important visual features like plotted lines.

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GTIDs for Replication in MySQL

Published 2023-08-09 by Kevin Feasel

Aisha Bukar continues a series on replication in MySQL:

Welcome back to another replication series! As a quick reminder, we explored various methods of using MySQL’s replication capabilities in our previous discussions. Initially, we employed the traditional binary-log-based replication approach to set up our replication servers. This involved tracking the binary log file and its positions to facilitate replication.

In this article, we will dive into a more recent and acceptable approach to creating replication – using the Global Transaction Identifiers (GTID) based replication.

Click through to understand how they work and the trade-offs you’ll need to make regarding them.

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Refreshing Excel in SharePoint without Power BI Gateways

Published 2023-08-09 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers needs a refresh:

I have been answering some questions on the Power BI (Or is it now Fabric?) community forum, and I have found recently that there are some people asking how to get data from Excel that is stored in SharePoint Online.

In this blog post I will show you how to connect to a single Excel file using Power BI desktop, and then configure it in the Power BI Service where it does not require a gateway.

Read on to see how.

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Delayed Transaction Durability in tempdb

Published 2023-08-09 by Kevin Feasel

Bob Ward does some digging:

I have found almost every day of my career at Microsoft, I learn something new about Microsoft SQL. It is one of the reasons I enjoy my job. In April of 2023, I was speaking at the MVP Summit in Redmond, Washington. One day I was spending time in a side conversation with MVP Rob Farley discussing some of his “wish list” items for SQL. One of these wish list items was delayed transaction durability for tempdb.

Good news for Rob on that front.

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Recommendations for Snapshotting HDFS

Published 2023-08-08 by Kevin Feasel

Tsz Sze provides some recommendations:

The snapshots feature of the Apache Hadoop Distributed Filesystem (HDFS) enables you to capture point-in-time copies of the file system and protect your important data against corruption, user-, or application errors.  This feature is available in all versions of Cloudera Data Platform (CDP), Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop (CDH) and Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP). Regardless of whether you’ve been using snapshots for a while or contemplating their use, this blog gives you the insights and techniques to make them look their best.  

Read on for those tips and tricks.

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Key Metrics for Kafka Clusters

Published 2023-08-08 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Brebner tracks some measurements:

Like a steam locomotive, Apache Kafka also has lots of “moving parts”. A Kafka cluster is actually a distributed system, a cluster, which consists of multiple brokers (servers)—messages are sent to Kafka with producers, and consumers receive messages. Topics are used to direct messages between producers and consumers—producers write to selected topics, and consumers subscribe and read from selected topics. Topics are divided up into partitions, and the partitions are distributed over the available brokers for high availability and concurrency. Partitions are replicated to other partitions (followers) from the leader partition (3 is common for production clusters).  

Click through for the description of metrics on brokers, topics, consumer groups, and more, as well as an extended analogy to steam locomotives which works surprisingly well.

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Row Rank Min in KQL

Published 2023-08-08 by Kevin Feasel

Robert Cain continues a series on KQL:

In this post we’ll cover the next in our series on KQL Windowing Functions, row_rank_min. The row_rank_min function will assign rank numbers to an incoming dataset, with the rank of 1 being assigned to the minimal value in the dataset and increasing as the values increase.

First though, if you’ve not read the introductory post on Windowing Functions, Fun With KQL Windowing Functions – Serialize and Row_Number, you should do so now as it introduced several important concepts needed to understand how these Windowing Functions work.

Read on for Robert’s explanation.

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Azure Data Studio 1.45 Released

Published 2023-08-08 by Kevin Feasel

Erin Stellato gives us an update:

In this release we updated to VS Code version 1.79.2, from version 1.70, bringing ADS nearly current with VS Code.  Keeping up with VS Code is an artifact of Azure Data Studio being a fork of VS Code, and the team accomplished a major feat with this latest merge.  Many of the changes are not immediately obvious to users, but there are improvements across security, performance, and the application interface.

Read on for the highlights.

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