Press "Enter" to skip to content

Day: June 6, 2025

A Primer on Loss Functions

Published 2025-06-06 by Kevin Feasel

Kanwal Mehreen compares loss functions:

I must say, with the ongoing hype around machine learning, a lot of people jump straight to the application side without really understanding how things work behind the scenes. What’s our objective with any machine learning model, anyway? You might say, “To make accurate predictions.” Fair enough.

But how do you actually tell your model, “You’re close” or “You’re way off”? How does it know it made a mistake — and by how much?

That’s where loss functions come in.

Read on to learn what loss functions are, how they work, and when you might want to choose each.

Leave a Comment

Listing Items in a Fabric Workspace using Powershell

Published 2025-06-06 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Sewell continues a series on working with Microsoft Fabric assets via Powershell:

Having created a workspace, a lakehouse, a warehouse, a Fabric SQL database previously, it’s time to move onto something a little more interesting. I was getting bored writing the same post over and over again, so I thought I would show you how to list the items in a Fabric Workspace using PowerShell. This command was super useful for me today to answer the question “What do they have in this workspace?” and I hope it will be useful for you too.

Click through to see how you can accomplish this.

Leave a Comment

The Challenges of Benchmarking

Published 2025-06-06 by Kevin Feasel

Tomas Vondra digs into some metrics:

I do a fair number of benchmarks, not only to validate patches, but also to find interesting (suspicious) stuff to improve. It’s an important part of my development workflow. And it’s fun 😉 But we’re dealing with complex systems (hardware, OS, DB, application), and that brings challenges. Every now and then I run into something that I don’t quite understand.

Consider a read-only pgbench, the simplest workload there is, with a single SELECT doing lookup by PK. If you do this with a small data set on any machine, the expectation is near linear scaling up to the number of cores. It’s not perfect, CPUs have frequency scaling and power management, but it should be close.

Click through for a quick look at some odd behavior, followed by a lot of interesting digging into the weeds trying to find answers.

Leave a Comment

Setting the Optimal logical_decoding_work_mem in PostgreSQL

Published 2025-06-06 by Kevin Feasel

Ashutosh Bapat shares a tip with us:

Logical replication is a versatile feature offered in PostgreSQL. I have discussed the the theoretical background of this feature in detail in my POSETTE talk. At the end of the talk, I emphasize the need for monitoring logical replication setup. If you are using logical replication and have setup monitoring you will be familiar with pg_stat_replication_slots. In some cases this view shows high amount of spill_txns, spill_count and spill_bytes, which indicates that the WAL sender corresponding to that replication slot is using high amount of disk space. This increases load on the IO subsystem affecting the performance. It also means that there is less disk available for user data and regular transactions to operate. This is an indication that logical_decoding_work_mem has been configured too low. That’s the subject of this blog: how to decide the right configuration value for logical_decoding_work_mem. Let’s first discuss the purpose of this GUC. Blog might serve as a good background before reading further.

Read on to learn a bit more about how this value works and what you can do to set it correctly.

Leave a Comment

Purview Data Loss Prevention in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2025-06-06 by Kevin Feasel

Yael Biss doesn’t want people walking off with the data:

As data volume and complexity soar, protecting sensitive information has become non-negotiable. With the latest enhancements to Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP) Policies in Microsoft Fabric, organizations now have the power to proactively secure their data in Onelake.

Whether you’re just getting started or looking to take your data governance to the next level, following proven best practices will maximize your security, compliance, and productivity.

Click through for several tips on how to use Microsoft Purview DLP in Fabric. One of those tips ought to be “Get a side hustle so you can afford both Purview and Fabric.”

Leave a Comment