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Day: January 20, 2025

Building Flowcharts in R

Published 2025-01-20 by Kevin Feasel

Pau Satorra makes a chart:

Fortunately, there are several packages in R for drawing flowcharts using different approaches. The problem is that the programming is generally quite complex, and the numbers have to be entered manually or parameterized beforehand. These flowcharts can have reproducible problems because if data changes, we have to manually change the parameters again.

To make our lives easier, there’s a new {flowchart} package that uses the tidyverse workflow, which allows to create many different types of flowcharts in just a few steps.

Read on to learn more about the package. I originally thought it was based on mermaid.js based on the way the final product looked, but a quick code review has disabused me of the notion. H/T R-Bloggers.

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Musings on the State of Apache Kafka and Apache Flink

Published 2025-01-20 by Kevin Feasel

Adron Hall shares some thoughts:

I’ve worked with (** references at end of article) a number of Apache projects over the years, often pretty closely; Apache Cassandra, Apache Flink, Apache Kafka, Apache Zookeeper and numerous others. But the last few years I’ve not been immediately hands on with the technology. A few questions popped up recently, that fortunately I was able to answer based on existing knowledge, but it made me real curious about what the SITREP (Situational Report) is for the Apache Kafka and Flink Projects for TODAY, i.e. rolling into 2025! The following is a quick dive into the history and then the latest details (and drama?) with Apache Kafka, Flink, and tangentially some other projects (Zookeeper?).

Click through to see how the pieces fit together.

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An Example of TMDL View in Action

Published 2025-01-20 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb puts the pieces together for us:

For me the biggest new feature in the January 2025 release of Power BI Desktop is the new TMDL View; many other people like Marco are excited about it too. For more advanced Power BI developers (and honestly, I don’t think you need to be that advanced to get value out of it) it makes certain editing tasks for semantic models much simpler, and while I won’t be abandoning the main Power BI Desktop UI completely or stopping using external tools like Tabular Editor it is something I see myself using on a regular basis from now on.

Click through to see one thing you can do with it.

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An Overview on Spinlocks in SQL Server

Published 2025-01-20 by Kevin Feasel

Stephen Planck talks spinlocks:

High concurrency can expose subtle performance bottlenecks in SQL Server, particularly those stemming from spinlocks and latch contention. Both mechanisms exist to synchronize access to shared data structures, yet they operate differently and require distinct troubleshooting approaches. By recognizing how they work and knowing what causes them to overload a system, DBAs can reduce CPU spikes, timeouts, and overall application slowdowns.

Read on to more about spinlocks and latch contention. My experiential bias is that spinlocks are the actual problem approximately 5% of the number of times that DBAs believe spinlocks are the actual problem.

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CPU and Memory Configuration for MySQL

Published 2025-01-20 by Kevin Feasel

Chisom Kanu continues a series on MySQL:

In the first part of the series article, we introduced MySQL Shell as a tool for managing and optimizing MySQL configurations. We discussed how to install the Shell, connect to the MySQL server, and modify basic configuration parameters. Now, we’re into performance optimization, focusing specifically on memory and CPU configurations. These two components are important because they directly impact how efficiently your database processes queries, handles connections, and stores data in memory. In this article, we will look at techniques using MySQL Shell to help you optimize both memory and CPU usage to ensure smooth and fast database performance.

Read on to learn more.

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Understanding the SQL Server Version Store

Published 2025-01-20 by Kevin Feasel

Haripriya Naidu digs into tempdb:

This article discusses when version store starts generating rows, when cleanup takes place, and how TempDB space gets occupied due to this activity.

I’ve hardly used PerfMon much in the past, nor was I a fan of it, just like many of you. But, when I used it a few times to determine how many data files needed to be added to TempDB while resolving contention, it helped me make a clear decision on the number of files needed. Since then, I’ve become a fan of PerfMon.
Although I don’t use it daily, I don’t hesitate to turn to it when I think it might help me understand things better.

Coming back to our topic of version store in this article, I resorted to PerfMon counters because visually watching the lines go up and down when an update is performed on a table helped me better understand how the version generation and cleanup works.

Click through for a demonstration of the process, including relevant PerfMon counters and the type of information you can get directly from SQL Server.

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