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Day: January 8, 2025

Building a QR Code Clock

Published 2025-01-08 by Kevin Feasel

Tomaz Kastrun checks what time it is:

Ever wanted to have a clock on the wall or in the office, that is not binary. But it is QR-Code clock. Well, now you can have it.

This useless R function generates new QR Code for every given period and tells the time.

Click through for the code. I could see this being useful in scenarios where you want to avoid people copying the QR code, so you embed the time in there. Then, your reader service can check to see if the time is within some valid boundary, returning an error if not.

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The Use Case for Memory-Optimized tempdb Metadata

Published 2025-01-08 by Kevin Feasel

Ben Johnston takes us through a scenario:

I recently had an interesting production SQL Server issue that turned out to be very easy to fix. The fix doesn’t fit every workload or server, but for the limited use cases described below, it’s a simple configuration change. The general best practice for server level configurations is to leave things at default, unless there is a specific reason for changing the settings. This will outline a use case for using memory-optimized tempdb metadata.

This covers a very specific scenario and workload. You won’t use this on a typical server, which is why it isn’t a default setting. You will see this for very specific server workloads, those with many transactions and high temp table usage. Most systems can better use the memory for the regular workload instead of optimizing tempdb metadata, so don’t use this as a default setting for your servers.

Click through for the scenario.

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Cloning a Table in Snowflake

Published 2025-01-08 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Wilkie creates a clone:

Recently, I was asked to compare data from a table in Snowflake with the same table’s data from a few hours before. As always, no one had thought about copying the data into another table before they started working with it. They just remembered an approximate time they started working with the table — 10 AM — and the table’s name — Public.WorkingTable. So, let’s see what we can do, shall we?

Read on for the process, as well as circumstances in which cloning might fail.

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Postgres 18 Backend I/O Statistics

Published 2025-01-08 by Kevin Feasel

Bertrand Drouvot looks at some new statistics that will be available in Postgres 18:

It means that, thanks to the new pg_stat_get_backend_io() function, we can see the I/O activity in each backend (in addition to the overall aggregate still available through the pg_stat_io view).

Click through for some examples of what you can see and how it works. This seems like it’d be pretty helpful in a clustering scenario to make sure that you’re getting the load balancing that you expect.

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