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Day: August 15, 2024

String Concatenation of Vectors in R

Published 2024-08-15 by Kevin Feasel

Steven Sanderson glues together some vectors:

Welcome to another exciting R programming tutorial! Today, we will explore how to concatenate vectors of strings using different methods in R: base R, stringr, stringi, and glue. We’ll use a practical example involving a data frame with names, job titles, and salaries. By the end of this post, you’ll feel confident using these tools to manipulate and combine strings in your own projects. Let’s get started!

Read on to see how to do this in several ways.

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Comparing Transaction State and Transaction Count Functions

Published 2024-08-15 by Kevin Feasel

Sergey Gigoyan talks transactions:

When working with transactions, identifying active transactions often becomes quite important. In SQL Server, there are XACT_STATE and @@TRANCOUNT system functions that allow one to get information about active user transactions. However, the question about the differences between these functions is one of the most common questions among database development. Understanding the details of each function and their differences will help developers make the correct choice between these functions to solve a specific problem related to transactions.

Read on to learn more about each.

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Transferring CLR Binaries from SQL Server to Azure SQL Managed Instance

Published 2024-08-15 by Kevin Feasel

Mihailo Joksimovic shows a use case for Azure SQL Managed Instance link:

Azure SQL Managed Instance link is a new feature enabling you to create a distributed availability group between your SQL Server and Azure SQL Managed Instance. It makes it super simple to connect on-prem. and cloud, providing near real-time replication speeds. Benefits are many and if you aren’t familiar, I’d strongly suggest you read our official blog post about it.

One great benefit for our use-case is that MI Link takes care of transferring the CLR assemblies for you! You can import your assemblies on your SQL Server instance, using all too familiar syntax (i.e. CREATE ASSEMBLY FROM ‘C:\path\to\assembly.dll’), and MI link will ensure that those same assemblies get transferred to cloud. Easy peasy and no need to deal with hex literals anymore.

Read on to learn more about this capability.

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A Reference Architecture for Microsoft Fabric

Published 2024-08-15 by Kevin Feasel

James Serra draws boxes:

Microsoft Fabric uses a data lakehouse architecture, which means it does not use a relational data warehouse (with its relational engine and relational storage) and instead uses only a data lake to store data. Data is stored in Delta lake format so that the data lake acquires relational data warehouse-like features (check out my book that goes into much detail on this, or my video). Here is what a typical architecture looks like when using Fabric (click here for the .vsd):

Click through for the image as well as James’s explanation of the components.

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Request: State of the Database Landscape Survey 2024

Published 2024-08-15 by Kevin Feasel

Grant Fritchey needs you:

Hello all! This post is nothing but a simple request. Please, if you have a few spare minutes, meander on over to this link and fill out the State of the Database Landscape Survey for 2024. Yeah, it’s for Redgate Software, my employer. But, really, it’s for everyone. Why is it for everyone? Because, every time we do one of these surveys, we don’t sit on the data, we share it. Here are the results from the 2023 survey, published earlier this year.

Yeah, but, I hear you opining, what does this really do for me? Well, let’s talk about it.

Check out the benefits and also fill out the survey.

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Database Code is Code

Published 2024-08-15 by Kevin Feasel

Tom Zika speaks the truth:

This month’s invitation is from Mala Mahadevan (b) asking us how we manage the database code. Since this is my passion project, I have a few basic tips to share.

I have yet to see a perfect implementation but even a partial one benefits you. My experience is mostly with enterprise-scaled environments – large servers, minimal downtime, brownfield development and also mostly single-tenant.

But these concepts and building blocks should be generic enough.

Read on for Tom’s thoughts, as well as some pros and cons of the state-based versus migration-based approaches for database changes.

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Backing SQL Server up to S3 Buckets

Published 2024-08-15 by Kevin Feasel

David Fowler backs up a database:

Way back in the mists of time I wrote a post on how to backup SQL server to an S3 bucket using TNTDrive, https://sqlundercover.com/2018/06/18/backup-your-on-premise-sql-server-directly-to-an-aws-s3-bucket/.

Back then, if we wanted to backup SQL to S3 we needed to use a third party tool. Since SQL 2022 things have changed and we’ve now got the option to backup directly to S3 in a similar way that we can backup to Azure BLOB store.

And, going one step further, you can also use PolyBase to read data from S3 buckets in SQL Server 2022.

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