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Month: December 2023

Random Number Generation in T-SQL

Published 2023-12-11 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Yun has a method:

This is a quick blog to “document” a T-SQL technique for generating random numbers. I’ve been using this for years, but don’t use it frequently enough to have it fully memorized. So whenever I do need it, I must constantly have to go look up whenever I need to use it.

Click through for Andy’s method. This will generate random numbers based on a uniform distribution: the likelihood of getting any value in the range is equal. If you want to build out some data that approximates a normal distribution, I have a blog post for that.

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Formatting Your Stored Procedure Code

Published 2023-12-11 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Darling takes a tour of the land mine garden:

When you think about formatting code, you probably think primarily of organizing a single query so that it’s inoffensive to civilized society.

But you should also apply this to your code as a whole, too. People who use words wrong will call this “holistic”.

I won’t get too deep into level of agreement here (probably about 60-70% of Erik’s list I can agree on), but I do argue that the best standards are the ones your team agrees on. It’s frustrating seeing hairball messes of T-SQL. Especially when developers’ non-SQL code looks a lot neater.

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Spline Regression

Published 2023-12-08 by Kevin Feasel

Steven Sanderson performs a different form of regression:

Spline regression is particularly useful when the relationship between the independent and dependent variables is not adequately captured by a linear model. It involves fitting a piecewise continuous curve (spline) to the data. Let’s dive into the process using R.

Click through and you’ll be reticulating splines just like it’s Sim City 2000.

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Application Portability Challenges with Kubernetes

Published 2023-12-08 by Kevin Feasel

Kiana Harris lays out some challenges:

As organizations embrace containerization and Kubernetes for their applications, the need for seamless portability across the Kubernetes ecosystem coupled with cloud object storage and local persistence has become a pressing concern.  In this blog post, we will dive into the core problem and dissect the complex challenges that customers face in achieving containerized app portability.

Read on for the list of challenges, followed by what you can do to address them. This is at a really high level but can provide food for thought.

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Refreshing Individual Tables and Partitions using Semantic Link

Published 2023-12-08 by Kevin Feasel

Sandeep Pawar doesn’t have time to refresh everything:

The latest version of Semantic Link (0.4.0) has many methods that provide a convenient abstraction for calling Fabric/Power BI REST APIs. You can see them here. In this blog, I will show how to use the .refresh_dataset() which uses the Enhanced Refresh API to refresh Power BI semantic models, tables and partitions.

Read on for two ways to do it.

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Continuing the Advent of Code

Published 2023-12-08 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Wilkie has been busy. Here’s Day 1 Part 2:

Today, I want to review part 2 of Day 1 of the Advent of Code series. Hopefully, everyone was able to complete part 1 with no troubles, or at least understood what I did to get there.

For part 2, they added a slight wrinkle to the part 1 puzzle. They spell out the numbers into actual words! How do you find them as well as find the numbers? Well, my friend, let’s go through that process, shall we?

After that is Day 2 Part 1:

On day 2, we are asked to gather data from a series of games and to see which of those are possible given a specific number of dice for a few colors. Fun times!

And then there’s Day 2 Part 2:

Today, we’ll be working on the next in the series using the data and processes that we found yesterday in Day 2 Part 1 – found here.

Thankfully, we were smart when we began working through the data and we have the data for each of our dice in separate tables, so breaking the data apart has definitely paid off! Now we can do just a little bit of work with the data from yesterday and we’ll be ready to give the results!

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Anti-Joins and Folding in Power Query

Published 2023-12-08 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb has a workaround:

Power Query allows you to merge (“join” in database terms) two tables together in a variety of different ways, including left and right anti joins. Unfortunately, as I found recently, anti joins don’t fold on SQL Server-related data sources, which can result in performance problems. Luckily there is a different way of doing anti joins that does fold.

An anti-join, by the way, is the type of thing you use when performing a NOT EXISTS operation: what is in driver table A that is not in lookup table B given some condition set?

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Reviewing Table-Level Statistics in Postgres

Published 2023-12-08 by Kevin Feasel

Muhammad Ali explains what information you can find regarding tables in Postgres:

Database monitoring, performance tuning and query optimization are critical operations for maintaining an efficient database system. A key component in PostgreSQL for this purpose is the pg_stat_all_tables view.

pg_stat_all_tables offers real time statistics on table activities such as number of sequential and index scans performed on a table, updates, deletes, inserts, and more. It also offers information on dead tuples along with vacuum and analyze stats which enables DB admins to make data-driven decisions. Here’s a table detailing the columns in the pg_stat_all_tables:

Click through for that table about tables.

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