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Day: December 7, 2023

Leaving Good Comments in a Stored Procedure

Published 2023-12-07 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Darling comments on your comments:

Possibly the least helpful, but most humorous, way of leaving comments, is a large block of green text up at the top of a module.

There are all sorts of helpful insights buried in those comments to help me as a consultant understand my audience.

But… 

I agree with a lot of where Erik is going with his thoughts. The area where we probably have some daylight is that I’d rather limit comments to statements of why rather than what. Sure, when I’m pseudo-coding out a procedure, I’ll have a bunch of little “do this thing here” types of comments, but I remove those as I build out the code. Instead, explain why you’re doing something if it isn’t patently obvious, if you rewrote a query in a more complicated to read fashion because it performs much better, that kind of thing.

But in fairness, as long as your comments actually reflect the code, it’s really hard to say any code base is ever over-commented. It’s way easier to go the opposite direction.

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Documenting a Tabular Model

Published 2023-12-07 by Kevin Feasel

Olivier Van Steenlandt builds the docs:

A few months ago, I chatted with colleagues about our Tabular Model. More specifically the lack of Tabular Model documentation. Since we were thinking about replacing our current model, I started to think about how to integrate documentation easily.

Having documentation is 1 thing, making sure it’s used is something completely different. And then we’re not even talking about keeping it up to date. My initial idea was to include the documentation task during the development phase. That said, time to get the thoughts into practice.

Read on to see what Olivier did.

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Joining on Overlapping Date Ranges in T-SQL

Published 2023-12-07 by Kevin Feasel

Daniel Hutmacher crosses the streams:

You can get into a situation where you have two tables with values associated with date ranges. What’s worse, those date ranges don’t necessarily have to align, which can make joining them a seemingly complex task, but it is surprisingly simple when you learn how to think of overlapping date ranges, along with this relatively simple T-SQL join pattern.

This problem gets even more challenging if you have the possibility of multiple overlaps and you want to find the combination with the biggest overlap for each individual item.

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All about Lakehouses in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2023-12-07 by Kevin Feasel

Tomaz Kastrun gives us the skinny with multiple posts in his Advent of Microsoft Fabric. Day 3 introduces the lakehouse:

Lakehouse is cost-effective and optimised storage, supporting all types of data and file formats, structured and unstructured data, and helps you govern the data, giving you better data governance. With optimised and concurrent reads and writes, it gives outstanding performance by also reducing data movement and minimising redundant copy operations. Furthermore, it gives you a user-friendly multitasking experience in UI with retaining your context, not losing your running operations and working on multiple things, without accidentally stopping others.

Day 4 covers Delta format:

Yesterday we looked into lakehouse and learned that Delta tables are the storing format. So, let’s explore what and how we can go around understanding and working with delta tables. But first we must understand delta lake.

Day 5 covers data ingest:

We have learned about delta lake and delta tables. But since we have uploaded the file directly, let’s explore, how we can also get the data into lakehouse.

Click through for all three posts.

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