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Month: November 2025

Accessing Home Assistant’s InfluxDB Instance from R

Published 2025-11-18 by Kevin Feasel

Martin Stingl looks for some data:

I’m running a HomeAssistant instance at home. I’ve configured it to log data into an InfluxDB database, so I can retrieve historical data for analysis later on. In default mode HomeAssistant would aggregate historical data for storage reasons.

So now I want to access the InfluxDB database from R to perform custom analyses. HomeAssistant is still using InfluxDB version 1. To connect to InfluxDB from R, I thought I can use the influxdbr package. But I got some errors because this package seems to be outdated.

Read on for the error message and how Martin was able to get around this. H/T R-Bloggers.

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Four Measures for Vector Search Quality

Published 2025-11-18 by Kevin Feasel

Joe Sack explains four important measures:

You type “3-bedroom townhouse near a good school” into a home search site. It shows 10 homes. Some perfect, some okay, some wrong. How do you know if it’s working?

Four numbers help with this: Precision (what proportion is relevant), Recall (what you missed), MRR (how far to the first relevant result), nDCG (best stuff first).

Read on to learn what each one means and how it applies to vector search.

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Import SSMS 21 Saved Connections into SSMS 22

Published 2025-11-18 by Kevin Feasel

Vlad Drumea digs in:

I wasn’t really planning on writing a blog post today, but I got curios if there’s anyway in which connections saved in SQL Server Management Studio 21 can be migrated in SSMS 22.

If you’ve installed SQL Server Management Studio 22 you may have noticed that the saved connection details weren’t migrated over from SSMS 21.

It’s documented in the list of known issues for SSMS 22 and marked as having no workaround.

Vlad builds a workaround, probably wearing a lab coat and fiddling with Bunsen burners and beakers full of oddly-colored liquids.

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Multiple Record Writeback for Translytical Task Flows

Published 2025-11-18 by Kevin Feasel

Jon Vöge wants to write multiple records at a time:

Having presented a few sessions on Translytical Task Flows at conferences in the past moths, there is one major recurring question:

How do you write-back multiple records at once?

If you ask me, the questions of bulk write-back/writing back multiple records at once can be understood as two separate user stories, which sound similar, but are technically different:

Click through for those two questions as well as the answer to the first.

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Creating Test Data in Python via Faker

Published 2025-11-18 by Kevin Feasel

Brendan Tierney generates some artificial data:

A some point everyone needs some test data for their database. There area a number of ways of doing this, and in this post I’ll walk through using the Python library Faker to create some dummy test data (that kind of looks real) in my Oracle Database. I’ll have another post using the GenAI in-database feature available in the Oracle Autonomous Database. So keep an eye out for that.

Faker is one of the available libraries in Python for creating dummy/test data that kind of looks realistic.

Brendan generates some demo customer data, including an example of credit rating that allows for assignment of probability for each class.

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Tying DAX Studio Queries to Workspace Monitoring

Published 2025-11-18 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb correlates some data:

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post about how you can now link event data from Workspace Monitoring to data in the Fabric Capacity Metrics App using OperationId values. In the latest (3.4.0) release of DAX Studio there’s a new feature that you might have missed that link queries run from there to Workspace Monitoring and the Capacity Metrics App in the same way.

Read on to see how it works.

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DACPAC Deployment Misleading Entra ID Error

Published 2025-11-17 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeeck troubleshoots an issue:

While deploying a DACPAC (from a SQL Server Data Tools Database Project) through Azure Devops, I got the following error message:

The user attempting to perform this operation does not have permission as it is currently logged in as a member of an Azure Active Directory (AAD) group but does not have an associated database user account. A user account is necessary when creating an object to assign ownership of that object. To resolve this error, either create an Azure AD user from external provider, or alter the AAD group to assign the DEFAULT_SCHEMA as dbo, then rerun the statement.

Read on to see what happened in Koen’s case. This is an example of a generic error message hiding relevant information from us.

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Using the OKVIZ Synoptic Panel for Ticket Sales Data

Published 2025-11-17 by Kevin Feasel

Victor Rivas visualizes some sales data:

This use case demonstrates the powerful capability of Synoptic Panel to analyze and visualize spatial data at large venues like The Sphere in Las Vegas, which seats 9,205 people. The study addresses the challenge of visualizing over 1 million ticket sales records from 200 events, including concerts and conferences, to gain insights into revenue and average occupancy percentage across different seating categories, sectors, and individual seats.

The objective is to demonstrate how spatial data visualization helps stakeholders understand revenue distribution and audience behavior related to seating arrangements, enabling more informed decision-making.

Click through for the case study. H/T Marco Russo.

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Refactoring Code Segments in SQL

Published 2025-11-17 by Kevin Feasel

Lee Asher performs refactoring:

Over time the term “refactoring” has expanded and is sometimes used to mean code quality improvement in general, but here we are using it with its original meaning: condensing and eliminating redundant segments of code. Like factoring a number in math, we break the code into smaller blocks, identify any repeated elements, then replace them with a single reference.

I appreciate that Lee is sticking to the original meaning of the term here. Interestingly, Lee doesn’t cover T-SQL functions at all. On net, that’s probably a good thing, especially scalar functions. It’s easy to find cases where converting a function to an inline call can speed up query performance by 3x or more.

The mechanisms Lee does use could have an impact on query performance, especially lateral join/APPLY. But for some of these, as long as you do not overuse the technique, performance will be pretty similar.

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