A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Dieu Phan takes us through the Azure Load Testing service:
Azure Load Testing is a fully managed load-testing service that enables you to generate high-scale loads. The service simulates traffic for your applications, regardless of where they’re hosted so I would like to share a walkthrough Azure Load Testing in this post.
Okay, this post isn’t very data platform-centric, but I do like the Load Testing service and think more companies and people should use it.
Comments closedMarco Russo and Alberto Ferrari explain when Sankey charts can actually make sense:
Picture this: you manage a company that sells subscription services on the web, and you want to track the evolution of your customers by analyzing different events to understand how many customers start a trial before they purchase or how many renew or cancel their subscriptions.
The report should look like this: the darker flow indicates the number of customers who skipped the trial and went directly from a phone call to purchasing a subscription.
Read on for that sales funnel example and how you can prepare the data to make best use of Power BI’s Sankey chart visual.
Comments closedErik Darling doesn’t update all the rows at once like some barbarian:
The goal of batching modifications is to accomplish large numbers of row modifications with exacerbating locking problems, and being kinder to your server’s transaction log.
There is generally an appreciable difference in transaction time in modifying 1,000 rows and modifying 10,000,000 rows. Go try it, if you don’t believe me.
Click through for more information on good ways to set up batching, including the use of the highly underrated OUTPUT ... INTO ... clause on DML statements.
Kevin Wilkie continues a Quixotic quest. Part 1 sets up the story:
Now we get to work with a set of numbers that our elf played and a set of winning numbers for each card. This sounds like something that SQL is meant for!
As always, we load the fun input data provided by the AoC group into our database. I actually loaded it in as 2 columns – Card and String. I’m just not a fan of throwing all of our data into one column of a table and letting it all get sorted out later.
With part 1, we just had to figure out how many times each of the winners showed up. With part 2 though, we have to jump through several hoops since we now have to determine how many cards we will end up with if we win the next series of cards for every match.
I slimmed down the table that I’m working with to only 2 columns – yes, in the real world, I would have used a view, but today was not that day.
By the way, as soon as I saw OverlyLongNamesThatNoOneCanTypeWithoutUsingIntellisense I wondered when Kevin got access to my code base. I have, on a few occasions, created punishment names, names so long that they punished the people who had to type or track them. In fairness, it wasn’t just a fit of pique, though pique was a common factor in all of those situations.
Aaron Bertrand plays red light, green light:
WAITFORis a very useful command to prevent further operations from occurring until a certain amount of time has passed (WAITFOR DELAY) or until the clock strikes a specific time (WAITFOR TIME). These commands are covered quite well (including pros and cons) in a previous tip, “SQL WAITFOR Command to Delay SQL Code Execution.”
WAITFOR DELAYis also commonly used to “let SQL Server breathe.” For example, when performing some operations in a loop, on a resource-constrained system, an artificial delay can potentially allow for more concurrency, even if it makes the intensive operation take longer.But these commands can also be used to synchronize multiple query windows for local testing and debugging, and I thought I would share a recent example.
Click through for some of the ways you can use WAITFOR in your scripts.
Eugene Meidinger continues learning about Azure Fabric:
I want to preface that a lot of the issues I run into below are because of my own ignorance around the tooling, and a lot of the detail I include is to show what that ignorance looks like, since many people reading this might be used to Fabric or at least data engineering.
Read on to learn about Eugene’s mistakes so you don’t make them yourself.
Comments closedIn the realm of data management, ensuring the safety and recoverability of data is paramount. Relational databases, being at the core of many business operations, require robust backup and recovery strategies. This article delves into the general concepts of backup and recovery in relational databases, followed by specific strategies for SQL Server, Oracle, MariaDB/MySQL, and PostgreSQL.
Click through for a high-level overview of general database backup concepts and a variety of options available in the major relational database platforms.
Comments closedPhil Seamark tries out Vega in a Microsoft Fabric notebook:
I recently needed to generate a quick visual inside a Microsoft Fabric notebook. After a little internet searching, I found there are many good quality charting libraries in Python, however it was going to take too long to figure out how to create a very specific type of chart.
This is where Vega came to the rescue. The purpose of this short article is to share a very simple implementation of generating a Vega chart using a Microsoft Fabric notebook.
Click through for the example code.
Comments closed