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Day: November 27, 2024

Table Cloning in Snowflake

Published 2024-11-27 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Wilkie creates a clone:

In this coding scenario, I am copying everything from TableA and pushing it into a new table called TableB in the same database and schema.

If you check the size of the database before and after you clone a table, it will be the same size – no matter the size of TableA. This is because, at this point in time, TableB exists only as a “pointer” to the data that constitutes TableA. It is not until something changes in one of the tables – say adding a row to TableA, that it stops being a “pointer” and is artificially constituted.

Read on to learn more about how this works.

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Handling a Consumer Fetch Request in Kafka

Published 2024-11-27 by Kevin Feasel

Multiple Confluent employees (who apparently don’t get to have names this time around) wrap up a series:

It’s been a long time coming, but we’ve finally arrived at the fourth and final installment of our blog series. In this series, we’ve been peeling back the layers of Apache Kafka® to get a deeper understanding of how best to interact with the cluster using producer and consumer clients.

Read on for the final part, as well as links to previous parts if you missed them.

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Comparing Azure Kubernetes Service and Container Apps

Published 2024-11-27 by Kevin Feasel

Gaurav Shukla makes a comparison:

Hello Readers!! Welcome to the new blog!! AKS vs ACA, which is best in cloud migration? When migrating an application to the cloud, choosing the right platform is crucial to ensure scalability, cost-effectiveness, and ease of management. Two of the prominent services offered by Azure for running containerized applications are Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Azure Container Apps (ACA). Both are excellent choices, but their use cases, complexity, and operational overhead differ significantly. This blog will provide a detailed comparison of AKS and ACA, helping you decide which is the best approach for your cloud migration.

Read on for an overview of each service and a nice table outlining the differences.

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The Challenge of Major Version Upgrades in PostgreSQL

Published 2024-11-27 by Kevin Feasel

Peter Eisentraut lays out the explanation:

Upgrades between PostgreSQL major versions are famously annoying. You can’t just install the server binaries and restart, because the format of the data directory is incompatible.

Why is that? Why can’t we just keep the data format compatible?

Perhaps surprisingly, the data format is actually mostly compatible, but not completely. There are just a few things missing that are very hard to solve.

Perhaps I’m not as sympathetic as I should be to the core developers, but there are other RDBMS platforms that have a direct path for upgrade from version to version, so it’s hardly insurmountable.

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A Mechanism for Change Management for DBAs

Published 2024-11-27 by Kevin Feasel

Terri Hurley shares one path:

Back in the day when I received an email from a developer who requested a Production Change, I would copy and paste SQL code from an email to SQL Server to run against a production database. I never bothered to save that code. But later when I was asked for a history of database changes, it was awkward to locate all the previous email requests asking for production changes. Fast forward to present day, most businesses have embraced Change Management Separation of Duties in companies of all sizes.

My preferred path to change management is:

  • All changes go into source control. You can either have the people making changes create the actual scripts to run, or generate them from base changes in source control, dealer’s choice.
  • Each changeset goes to a specific environment when it gets PR’d into the appropriate branch—that is, dev, QA, test, pre-prod, prod, post-prod, next-gen-post-dev-unprod, whatever.
  • DBAs are on pull requests, at least after a certain point. PR to dev? Let the team handle that code review. Once you move nearer to prod, at least one DBA performs a code review.
  • After PR gating happens, your CI/CD system automatically deploys the changes, assuming it passes any continuous integration tests.

This takes time to get right, but it’s very much worth the effort. I worked at a company where they built the release management processes on top of Git + Azure DevOps. You can also use tools like Flyway.

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Contrasting Power BI and Power BI Report Server

Published 2024-11-27 by Kevin Feasel

Soheil Bakhshi makes me sad:

Depending on your organisation’s preferences, data governance requirements, and the platforms you intend to use for report deployment you may use either Power BI Desktop, the “standard version”, or Power BI Desktop RS (Report Server). Power BI Desktop has variations tailored to meet specific needs, such as cloud-based analytics or on-premises reporting. While many users might only encounter the standard version, there’s another important variant for specialised scenarios.

You know the meme where the kid asks, “Mom, I want Power BI!” and mom says, “We have Power BI at home.” Power BI Report Server is Power BI at home, in all of the senses of the joke. I’ve been stuck with it at two employers and although it is better than nothing, you quickly find out how annoying it gets when that thing you know how to do in Power BI Online doesn’t work because they never supported it in PBIRS.

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