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Day: June 19, 2024

An Overview of gganimate

Published 2024-06-19 by Kevin Feasel

Dario Radecic shows off a neat library:

The main criticism people have when it comes to ggplot2 is the static nature of the charts it has to offer. Truth be told, it will never be an interactive visualization king like Highcharts, but it doesn’t mean animation is out of the picture.

Meet R gganimate – a natural extension of ggplot2 that allows you to visualize your data change through time or some other variable, and then render and export the chart as a set of PNGs, or a single GIF/MP4.

Click through to learn more about it. I remembered the original gganimate and was going to say, “Wow, I hadn’t heard of that library in forever.” But it turns out that Thomas Lin Pedersen built a newer version of the library and has added in quite a bit of functionality since the last time I looked. H/T R-Bloggers.

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New Video: Online Passive-Aggressive Algorithms

Published 2024-06-19 by Kevin Feasel

I have a new video:

In this video, I cover the series of classification algorithms with the best possible name: online passive-aggressive algorithms.

I remember, when reading up on this, being incredulous that the idea even worked. But it turns out that it’s actually pretty good in practice, especially on constrained hardware. Still, this is definitely an algorithm you’d want to test in comparison to others before jumping right in, as there’s a risk you can end up with terrible results.

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Automating SQL Server Installation via Powershell

Published 2024-06-19 by Kevin Feasel

Vlad Drumea performs an installation:

In this post I cover a script I’ve been using to automate SQL Server installation with PowerShell in my home lab.

As opposed to my previous blog post that demos the creation of a SQL Server Developer edition container, this installs a full-fledged SQL Server instance.

Read on for an overview of the script, from where you can download it, and how it works.

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PostgreSQL ON CONFLICT Directive

Published 2024-06-19 by Kevin Feasel

Shane Borden walks through an issue you might not expect:

I’m always working with customers migrating from Oracle to PostgreSQL. One of the things in Oracle that didn’t necessarily have any additional impact other than I/O against an index was if the application executed insert statements which violated a PK constraint. Typically an exception handler was added to the code and while you could argue that the application shouldn’t do that, it typically was not something that had to be dealt with too often. However in PostgreSQL it IS something you need to be aware of.

Read on to learn why, as well as what you can do about it (other than making your INSERT operation resilient to this sort of issue).

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TempDB Contention and SQL Server 2022

Published 2024-06-19 by Kevin Feasel

Simon Liew shows off a change in SQL Server 2022:

Tempdb often acts as a high-traffic repository in SQL Server, experiencing significant contention. This includes not only temp table usage but also processes such as triggers, worktables for storing intermediate results for spools, cursors, sorts, work files for hash join, and temporary large object (LOB) storage, just to name a few.

A prominent issue is Global Allocation Map (GAM) and Shared Global Allocation Map (SGAM) system page latch contention, which can be particularly problematic under specific high concurrency workloads.

Read on for a demonstration of this.

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T-SQL Tuesday 175 Round-Up

Published 2024-06-19 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Leonard rounds ’em up:

It’s time to celebrate and confess.

I was honored to host the June 2024 edition of T-SQL Tuesday – #175! That’s the celebration.

Confession: I had GoDaddy add a firewall back in February and it worked well. Too well, in fact! A friend reached out to let me know comments on the blog post – titled T-SQL Tuesday #175: Old Tech, New Tech, Bold Tech, Blue Tech –  was returning a nasty ACCESS DENIED message:

It was a bit of a short month in terms of turnout, but click through for Andy’s summary.

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Retaining SQL Agent Job History in a Managed Instance

Published 2024-06-19 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword gets around the limitations:

In a Managed Instance, the SQL Agent job history is fixed at 1000 records or 100 records per job. This isn’t configurable like a regular SQL Server install. So how can we maintain a history of these if we want to retain those records?

There are 3 approaches which could be worth considering. Two of these have been well covered by others and the final one I’ll demonstrate here:

Click through for those three techniques.

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