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Month: February 2024

Updating Records in a Kusto Database

Published 2024-02-21 by Kevin Feasel

Vincent-Philippe Lauzon shows off a feature now in public preview:

Kusto databases, either in Azure Data Explorer or in Fabric KQL Database, are optimize for append ingestion.

In recent years, we’ve introduce the .delete command allowing you to selectively delete records.

Today we are introducing the .update command.  This command allows you to update records by deleting existing records and appending new ones in a single transaction.

This command comes with two syntaxes, a simplified syntax covering most scenarios efficiently and an expanded syntax giving you the maximum of control.

Read on for more information and a pair of examples of how updating works.

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Transactional Replication in SQL Server on Linux

Published 2024-02-21 by Kevin Feasel

I finish up a series on SQL Server on Linux:

In this video, we will briefly cover the various forms of replication available in SQL Server, as well as what is in SQL Server on Linux. Then, we will create a simple publication and subscription using T-SQL.

As I joke about in the video, this is the video I expect to get the least traction on, if only because DBAs tend to run away from replication. If I were 20% more inclined toward Quixotic endeavors, I’d create an entire series on replication and show that it’s not magic and it’s only 70% as painful as most DBAs think, and even that’s because there’s a relatively limited amount of information out there on how things work.

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Renaming a Column in Microsoft Fabric via Python Notebook

Published 2024-02-21 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers performs a rename:

I thought it would be good to help others in terms of my learning journey when working with partner notebooks and Microsoft fabric.

In today’s blog post, I am going to show you how to rename a column. In my experience this came up because I had a column name which had a forward slash “/” in it which caused the loading of the data for the table to fail because this is a reserved character.

Read on for the code an example of how it works in action.

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Power BI Visual Calculations Now Available

Published 2024-02-21 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld jumps into a new feature:

You might have seen some buzz around already, although the official blog post is not out yet, the February release of Power BI desktop is already available to download. After a month waiting (traditionally, there is no January update) it has some great new features in it! Not only Tabular Model Definition Language is there now, but more towards solution development, we now have Power BI Visual Calculations! It was announced for a while already, the more excited I am that we finally can start exploring Visual Calculations in practice!

Read on to learn what a visual calculation is and why it’s a big deal.

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Indexing for Window Functions

Published 2024-02-21 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Darling talks window functions:

A lot of the time, the answer to performance issues with ranking windowing functions is simply to get Batch Mode involved. Where that’s not possible, you may have to resort to adding indexes.

Sometimes, even with Batch Mode, there is additional work to be done, but it really does get a lot of the job done.

In this post I’m going to cover some of the complexities of indexing for ranking windowing functions when there are additional considerations for indexing, like join and where clause predicates.

Click through for an in-depth article with plenty of good information.

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The Most Recent Issues You’ve Closed

Published 2024-02-21 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar wraps up this month’s T-SQL Tuesday:

So when I’m meeting a new team and learning what they do,  I’ve found it helpful to ask, “What specifically was the last issue you closed?” Note that I don’t ask, “What are you working on now?” because that tends to lead to long-term projects that people want to do, but not necessarily what they’re paid to do. If you ask them about the last specific task they checked off, that’s usually related to something the company demands that they do because it’s urgent. It leads to fun discoveries about what people think they do, versus why managers really keep them around on the payroll.

Click through for this month’s list of respondents.

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Combining Kafka and Flink

Published 2024-02-20 by Kevin Feasel

Gautam Goswami shares some thoughts:

In short, the process of collecting data in real-time as streams of events from event sources such as databases, sensors, and software applications is known as event streaming. With real-time data processing and analytics in mind, Apache Flink is a potent open-source program. For situations where quick insights and minimal processing latency are critical, it offers a consistent and effective platform for managing continuous streams of data. 

I’ve found it interesting that Confluent people have spent a lot of time the past several months talking up Apache Flink and Kafka+Flink combinations.

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Checking for the Existence of Multiple Values in SQL

Published 2024-02-20 by Kevin Feasel

Lukas Eder does a performance test:

But what if you want to check if there are at least 2 (or N) rows? In that case, you cannot use EXISTS, but have to revert to using COUNT(*). However, instead of just counting all matches, why not add a LIMIT clause as well? So, if you want to check if actors called WAHLBERG have played in at least 2 films, instead of this:

Lukas compares performance between two query options in Postgres, Oracle, SQL Server, and MySQL. Because Oracle has weird behavior in the test, Lukas shares a third option that works well for it.

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Feature Toggles for Databases

Published 2024-02-20 by Kevin Feasel

Phil Factor discusses feature toggles for the database:

In software development the concept of feature toggles are used to selectively turn on and off features. They are, for example, used to restrict some newly introduced features to a select group to see how these features work. While this concept has been long used for user-facing application code, it is also a practice that is useful for database code.

In databases, feature toggles are used for several loosely related purposes. One common use is to separate, or decouple, rollout of database features from deployment of new versions of the application code. This allows developers to release software faster and with less risk.

The idea of using roles to determine whether a given user should see a particular feature makes sense, though I was a bit confused at first because I was thinking about feature flags: behavioral changes you slowly turn on for groups of people. This is a bit different.

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