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Day: March 28, 2024

Processing GitHub Data with Kafka Streams

Published 2024-03-28 by Kevin Feasel

Lucia Cerchie hits the GItHub API:

GitHub’s data sources (REST + GraphQL APIs) are not only developer-friendly, but a goldmine of interesting statistics on the health of developer communities. Companies like OpenSauced, linearb, and TideLift can measure the impact of developers and their projects using statistics gleaned from GitHub’s APIs. The results of GitHub analysis can change both day-to-day and over time. 

Apache Kafka is a large and active open source project with nearly a million lines of code. It also happens to be an event streaming platform. So why not use Apache Kafka to, well, monitor itself? And learn a bit about Kafka Streams along the way?  

Click through for the full article, including a demonstration.

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Working with INTERSECT and EXCEPT

Published 2024-03-28 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Darling wounds me:

I have never once seen anyone use these. The most glaring issue with them is that unlike a lot of other directives in SQL, these ones just don’t do a good job of telling you what they do, and their behavior is sort of weird.

Unlike EXISTS and NOT EXISTS, which state their case very plainly, as do UNION and UNION ALL, figuring these out is not the most straightforward thing. Especially since INTERSECT has operator precedence rules that many other directives do not.

I’ve used EXCEPT to check if two datasets are equivalent for testing purposes: A EXCEPT B should be zero rows, and B EXCEPT A should be zero rows. It has built-in handling of any NULL madness. Set intersections have their uses as well.

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Working with TRY-CATCH in SQL Server

Published 2024-03-28 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones gives it the ol’ college try:

This is a common error handling technique in other languages. C# uses it, as does Java, while Python has TRY EXCEPT. There are other examples, but these are good habits to get into when you don’t know how code will behave or if there is something in your data or environment that could cause an issue.

In SQL, I think many of us get used to writing one statement in a query and forget to do error handling, or transactions. However, this can be a good habit as your code might grow and people might add more statements that should execute.

Read on for a few examples of how to use SQL Server’s TRY-CATCH functionality. It’s not perfect, but as Steve shows, there are definitely good uses for it.

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Comparing pg_basebackup Compression Settings

Published 2024-03-28 by Kevin Feasel

Kaarel Moppel puts on the lab coat and safety glasses:

In my last post I did a quick check on the performance of the newer (lz4, zstd) pg_dump compression options, which included setting up a small framework to download some openly available “real life”-ish sample datasets. And the general result was that, indeed – the new algos in lower levels provide the best value, especially zstd.

But pg_dump is about compressing essentially text based data…but how about binary Postgres data? Thus the tool to test here additionally is pg_basebackup, with its newer (v15+) compression options. So let’s see if something stands out consistently again.

Click through for the test results.

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DBCC CLONEDATABASE and Production Deployments

Published 2024-03-28 by Kevin Feasel

Madhumita Tripathy takes a step back:

DBCC CLONEDATABASE command generates a schema-only copy of a database. Effective March 1, 2025, Microsoft will discontinue support for the use of the DBCC CLONEDATABASE command as a tool to copy database to production environment. The command is intended for diagnostic and troubleshooting purposes only. Any use of the command for purposes other than those specified will not be supported by Microsoft from the aforementioned date. All editions of Microsoft SQL Server 2016 and later versions are affected by this change.

Now I’m a bit curious about the why behind this post.

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