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Day: December 17, 2025

Exploring Associations in R with AssociationExplorer

Published 2025-12-17 by Kevin Feasel

Antoine Soetewey announces a new tool:

I am pleased to announce the publication of our paper “AssociationExplorer: A user-friendly Shiny application for exploring associations and visual patterns” in the journal SoftwareX, together with the official release of the AssociationExplorer2 R package on CRAN.

Both the paper and the software are part of an open-science effort aimed at making exploratory data analysis more accessible to non-technical users.

Read on to learn more about the tool and how you can get it. H/T R-Bloggers.

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Expiring Old Postgres Backups with pgBackRest

Published 2025-12-17 by Kevin Feasel

Stefan Fercot demonstrates some new functionality in a tool:

A useful new feature was introduced on 11 December 2025: Allow expiration of the oldest full backup regardless of current retention. Details are available in commit bf2b276.

Before this change, it was awkward to expire only the oldest full backup while leaving the existing retention settings untouched. Users had to temporarily adjust retention (or write a script) to achieve the same result. Expiring the oldest full backup is particularly helpful when your backup repository is running low on disk space.

Let’s see how this works in practice with a simple example.

Click through for the example.

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Optional Parameter Plan Optimization in SQL Server 2025

Published 2025-12-17 by Kevin Feasel

Tomaz Kastrun continues looking at new functionality in SQL Server 2025:

Part of new features in IQP (Intelligent query processing) is also OPPO – Optional parameter plan optimization – which refers to a specific variation of the parameter-sensitive plan (PSP) or Parameter Sensitive Plan Optimization (PSPO) problem in which the sensitive, parameter value that exists during query execution, controls whether we need to perform a seek into or scan a table. It is part of mitigating the parameter sniffing problem.

Read on for more information, as well as a demonstration of how it works.

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