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Day: March 25, 2025

Apache Kafka 4.0 Now Available

Published 2025-03-25 by Kevin Feasel

David Jacot announces a milestone release for Apache Kafka:

Apache Kafka 4.0 is a significant milestone, marking the first major release to operate entirely without Apache ZooKeeper™️. By running in KRaft mode by default, Kafka simplifies deployment and management, eliminating the complexity of maintaining a separate ZooKeeper ensemble. This change significantly reduces operational overhead, enhances scalability, and streamlines administrative tasks. We want to take this as an opportunity to express our gratitude to the ZooKeeper community and say thank you! ZooKeeper was the backbone of Kafka for more than 10 years, and it did serve Kafka very well. Kafka would most likely not be what it is today without it. We don’t take this for granted, and highly appreciate all of the hard work the community invested to build ZooKeeper. Thank you!

There are some other big items in Kafka 4.0 and you can see more in the post’s changelog.

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Building a Package in R

Published 2025-03-25 by Kevin Feasel

Ken Koon Wong builds a package:

Made a hilariously redundant R package for a simple OpenAI calls, but the real win was finally learning how to build an R package! Is it efficient? Absolutely not! Was it worth the time and experience? Yes! Will I do it again? Yes! Will it break? Yes! 

Package management in R is a bit of a challenge, but well worth it, even if the only consumers of your code will be in your own company. H/T R-Bloggers.

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Generative AI Assistance in Building Power BI Custom Visuals

Published 2025-03-25 by Kevin Feasel

Kurt Buhler discusses a process:

In Power BI, advanced report creators often need to use custom visuals to fulfill their requirements or create certain designs. In previous articles that we published at SQLBI, we discussed the options available to make custom visuals, such as SVG visuals that you can make by using DAX. We also gave examples of when you might choose one approach over another, for example, if you want to make a bullet chart. However, creating custom visuals in Power BI is complex, and requires technical skills that most Power BI report creators do not have. In this article, we examine how you can use AI assistance to help you plan and create custom visuals.

A high-level overview of the process we will take and the desired result is below. It is important to emphasize that this article focuses on the general process, and not specific steps to obtain the result.

Click through for a long-form article on the subject. I’m generally fairly sour on relying too much on generative AI solutions for, well, much of anything. That’s part of why you see so few posts on the topic here. My main problem is that it works best in situations where you already know enough to separate wheat from chaff, or good code from broken/insecure/buggy code. I think Kurt strikes a good tone in this article and it’s well worth the read.

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Finding Why a SQL Server Plan Failed to Go Parallel

Published 2025-03-25 by Kevin Feasel

Grant Fritchey looks for an answer:

Let’s face it, most of the time, you probably don’t want your SQL Server execution plans to go parallel. After all, that’s why, instead of adjusting the Cost Threshold for Parallelism (as you should have), you’ve set the Max Degree of Parallelism to 1 (I see you out there). However, some of you recognize that, in fact, some queries need to run in Parallel.

Yet, sometimes, a query you think should run in parallel doesn’t. Can you tell why a plan didn’t go parallel?

Read on to learn how.

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Low-Code Tradeoffs and an Example of SFTP

Published 2025-03-25 by Kevin Feasel

Meagan Longoria talks trade-offs:

Low-code solutions often accelerate development and make tasks accessible to people who can’t or don’t want to write their own code. But it’s important to remember that it’s a trade-off. You are often trading decreased development and maintenance time for limited configuration options and minimal monitoring capabilities. Low-code solutions are great…until they aren’t.

This kind of thing can pop up in code-based libraries or APIs as well, though there’s typically another viable solution. With low-code solutions, veering from the happy path often lands you in a world of frustration.

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