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Day: August 11, 2025

Modeling Uncertainty Early

Published 2025-08-11 by Kevin Feasel

John Mount isn’t quite sure:

Recently here at Win Vector LLC we have been delivering good client outcomes using the Stan MCMC sampler. It has allowed us to infer deep business factors, instead of being limited surface KPIs (key performance indicators). Modeling uncertainty requires stronger optimizers to solve our problems, but it leads to better anti-fragile business solutions.

A fun part of this is it really improves how visible uncertainty is. Let’s show this in a quick simplified example.

Click through for an explanation of classic optimization versus a more sophisticated approach that deals with uncertainty early and factors that into the optimization problem.

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Building 9’s with PostgreSQL High Availability Features

Published 2025-08-11 by Kevin Feasel

Semab Tariq explains some of our options:

When you are running mission-critical applications, like online banking, healthcare systems, or global e-commerce platforms, every second of downtime can cost millions and damage your business reputation. That’s why many customers aim for four-nines (99.99%) or five-nines (99.999%) availability for their applications

In this post, we will walk through what those nines really mean and, more importantly, which PostgreSQL cluster setup will get you there.

Read on to see what you can do to get to each 9, as well as some unexpected risks to keep in mind along the way. And, of course, each rung up move up the ladder will generally cost you more money and administrative effort.

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ABORT_QUERY_EXECUTION in SQL Server 2025

Published 2025-08-11 by Kevin Feasel

Joey D’Antoni pulls out the big guns:

However, SQL Server 2025 gives us a bigger hammer (DBAs love hammers). Building on top of the query store hints feature that was added in SQL Server 2022, ABORT_QUERY_EXECUTION simply blocks the exection of known problematic queries.

Read on to see how this works. Note that it will prevent the query from running at all, ever. As a result, if your main concern is “Hey, don’t run this during the busiest hours of the data for this database,” this particular hint is overkill.

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Thoughts on Shrinking Databases

Published 2025-08-11 by Kevin Feasel

Chad Callihan lays out some thoughts:

Unlike your lawn, which benefits from a regular mowing to stay healthy and looking nice, a database isn’t meant to be regularly shrunk just to keep its size under control.

Read on for Chad’s take, which is one I agree with wholeheartedly. There are specific circumstances that merit shrinking a database. The main use case is when you have a significant level change: you’ve archived or deleted a bunch of data. There are very few other valid use cases, especially when you consider that databases typically have positive growth.

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