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Month: January 2024

Accessibility Guidelines for Apps and Visuals

Published 2024-01-16 by Kevin Feasel

Benedict Ampea-Badu shares some guidelines:

We live in the height of the digital age, where the digital space has become a thriving community, with every person craving a great yet personalized experience. In this era, there is one centralized truth with undeniable clarity: Accessibility is no longer a mere option; it is the cornerstone that will lead to the creation of a truly welcoming community.

In this second part of our series on accessibility design, we will discuss essential topics that lie at the heart of crafting accessible digital environments. We’ll begin by throwing more light on three of the five fundamental visual patterns vital to your designs:

  • Color Contrasting
  • Font Sizing
  • Labelling and Iconography

Read on for good information and plenty of examples.

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Merge Replication: Publisher Failed to Allocate a New Set of Identity Ranges

Published 2024-01-16 by Kevin Feasel

Taiyeb Zakir brings back bad memories for me:

Message: The Publisher failed to allocate a new set of identity ranges for the subscription. This can occur when a Publisher or a republishing Subscriber has run out of identity ranges to allocate to its own Subscribers or when an identity column data type does not support an additional identity range allocation. If a republishing Subscriber has run out of identity ranges, synchronize the republishing Subscriber to obtain more identity ranges before restarting the synchronization. If a Publisher runs out of identit

Click through for one solution. I’ve seen the error pop up in other cases where the column was already a bigint or the ranges were nowhere near the max and have had to mess around with range values to get things working again. My simple advice with merge replication and identity integers is to include something in addition to the identity column that guarantees uniqueness–for example, ID plus a column for subscriber name, if that makes sense in your situation–and don’t auto-assign ranges. Yeah, you may end up with five rows with ID = 1, but it doesn’t matter because there’s something making that row unique.

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Simple Change Auditing in SQL Server

Published 2024-01-16 by Kevin Feasel

Vitaly Bruk keeps it simple:

Some time ago, one of my customers asked me about a simple audit system. The system must collect all “user” changes in the database. The need appears because a lot of users (like developers, DevOps, technical support, analysts, etc.) have access to the DB. Due to an internal problem, he cannot change or take permissions, but he wanted to be able to track the changes.

In this article, I want to talk about the simplest way to track changes in SQL Server. The idea for this came due to an incident that happened to one of my customers – one of the tables disappeared. Yep, like that, the entire table was missing, and no one knew where it had gone.

Table disappeared? I blame the network.

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Sample Data in Azure ML Designer

Published 2024-01-15 by Kevin Feasel

Tom LaRock shows us where the hidden data is:

Recently I was working inside of Azure ML Studio and wanted to browse the sample datasets provided. Except I could not find them. I *knew* they existed, having used them previously, but could not remember if that was in the original ML Studio (classic) or not.

After some trial and error, I found them and decided to write this post in case anyone else is wondering where to find the sample datasets. You’re welcome, future Tom!

Click through to see where those sample datasets are. And yeah, they don’t get updated that frequently. And that’s probably a good thing, as it means when you run the demo two years after someone created it, you’ll still get predictable results.

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T-SQL Tuesday 170 Roundup

Published 2024-01-15 by Kevin Feasel

Reitse Eskens writes up a roundup about abandoned projects:

When I thought of this subject last year, I was really on the fence if it would work or not. Part of me was convinced it would elicit some response from the community, part of me was convinced people would be looking for a ‘happy’ start of the year and might not want to think or write about past learnings.

Part of me was right, but I never expected SO MANY of you to jump in and write so many wonderful blogs. It feels a bit unfair to summarise all your hard hard work, so please click the links to read the full stories. Well worth your time!

Click through for plenty of stories on the topic of lessons learned from abandoned projects.

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Cross-Database Sync in Azure SQL Database

Published 2024-01-15 by Kevin Feasel

Jose Manuel Jurado Diaz goes through a lot of work to replicate replication:

This week, we addressed a service request from a customer who wanted to keep two tables synchronized across different databases on the same Azure SQL Database server. Unfortunately, in Azure SQL Database, it’s not possible to directly call the database in the operation, for instance using the command select * from master.sys.sys_databases. For this reason, I’d like to share an alternative to tackle this limitation.

This is a way to do it, and it’s fine if there’s only one entry point for the data and you’re okay with writes taking more than twice as long. But this is a perfect use case for transactional replication. The only problem is, Azure SQL Database doesn’t support being a transactional replication publisher or distributor, only a (push) subscriber.

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The Power of Schema Binding

Published 2024-01-15 by Kevin Feasel

Guy Glantser explains what schema binding is and why it’s important:

In SQL Server, when we use the “WITH SCHEMABINDING” clause in the definition of an object (view or function), we bind the object to the schema of all the underlying tables and views. This means that the underlying tables and views cannot be modified in a way that would affect the definition of the schema-bound object. It also means that the underlying objects cannot be dropped. We can still modify those tables or views, as long as we don’t affect the definition of the schema-bound object (view or function).

At one point, I was a lot more gung-ho about schema binding and would do it even for views that didn’t require it, as I liked the idea of protecting the schema from changing. This turned out to be more of an annoyance than a benefit, though, so I quietly modified that belief a while ago. Nowadays, I’ll typically use schema binding when it’s required and on the rare occasion in which I create a function (assuming the function complies).

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Fixing Key Lookups

Published 2024-01-15 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Darling has some advice:

Key lookups represent a choice made by the optimizer between:

  • Clustered index scan
  • Nonclustered index seek/scan + Clustered index lookup

Lookups can be quite useful to avoid creating quite wide nonclustered index, but the optimizer is heavily biased against them. It does not like random I/O.

Read on for Erik’s thoughts on the matter and how you may be able to improve the performance of a query by removing a key lookup—or sometimes, how you may safely ignore a key lookup because hey, it’s a 1 millisecond difference on a query that runs once a day.

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Blocking and Waiting in Power BI Import Mode Refreshes

Published 2024-01-15 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb has some ‘splainin to do:

Following on from my previous post showing how you can visualise the job graph for a Power BI Import mode semantic model refresh, I this post I will look at how you can interpret what the job graph tells you – specifically, explaining the concepts of blocking and waiting. As always, simple examples are the best way of doing this.

Click through for the explanation using a job graph.

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An Overview of Clustering Techniques in R

Published 2024-01-12 by Kevin Feasel

Peter Laurinec gives us an overview:

Clustering is a very popular technique in data science because of its unsupervised characteristic – we don’t need true labels of groups in data. In this blog post, I will give you a “quick” survey of various clustering methods applied to synthetic but also real datasets.

Read on for a quick description of what clustering is and a few use cases. Then, Peter dives into a variety of techniques and important things you should know about them. H/T R-Bloggers.

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