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Author: Kevin Feasel

Real-Time Streaming ETL With Kafka Streams

Published 2017-06-27 by Kevin Feasel

Yeva Byzek has a tutorial using Kafka and Kafka Streams to perform real-time ETL:

Let’s consider an application that does some real-time stateful stream processing with the Kafka Streams API. We’ll run through a specific example of the end-to-end reference architecture and show you how to:

  • Run a Kafka source connector to read data from another system (a SQLite3 database), then modify the data in-flight using Single Message Transforms (SMTs) before writing it to the Kafka cluster

  • Process and enrich the data from a Java application using the Kafka Streams API (e.g. count and sum)

  • Run a Kafka sink connector to write data from the Kafka cluster to another system (AWS S3)

Read the whole thing.

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PoshBot

Published 2017-06-27 by Kevin Feasel

Warren Frame shows off ChatOps with PoshBot:

We’re going to cover the basics to get up and running with PoshBot:

  • Create a Slack bot
  • Create a PoshBot configuration
  • Run PoshBot as a service
  • Write a PoshBot plugin
  • Use PoshBot

This might seem like a lot of work, but the configuration and service are a one time thing – Writing plugins is just like writing PowerShell functions and modules!

One of my mad scientist co-workers has put together a similar bot and it tells our DBA team how servers are doing.  It’s quite useful for system reconnaissance, particularly when all you have is a phone and a trouble ticket.

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Basics Of Neural Nets

Published 2017-06-27 by Kevin Feasel

Leila Etaati has a new series on neural nets in R:

in Neural Network, we have some hidden Nodes that do the main job ! they found the best value for the output, they are using some function that we call that functions as “Activation function” for instance in below picture, Node C is a hidden node that take the values from node A and B. as you can see the weight (the better path) related to Node B as shown in tick line that means Node B may lead to get better results so Node C get input values from Node B not Node A.

If you have time, also check out the linked YouTube videos.

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Envisioning Neural Nets As Org Charts

Published 2017-06-27 by Kevin Feasel

Maiia Bakhova describes the layout of a neural net as similar to a chain of command within an organization:

We can observe a lot of in common with a corporation chain of command. As we see middle managers are hidden layers which do the balk of the job.  We have the similar information flow and processing which is analogous to forward propagation and backward propagation.
What is left now is to explain that  dealing with sigmoid function at each node is too costly so it mostly reserved for CEO level.

That’s a metaphor I hadn’t heard before.

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Wiggle Room Files

Published 2017-06-27 by Kevin Feasel

David Klee shows one tactic for running out of disk space, in this case on an ESXi host:

Sometimes this task is harder than it sounds. If your SAN is out of space, or the SAN management tools are out of your control, you could be stuck.

But… follow a simple trick to give yourself that last little bit of wiggle room in the event that a snapshot fills a datastore.

Add a large text file to the root of the datastore that you can delete if you need headroom! I know it sounds too simple… but it’s simple and effective.

Filed under “old but good.”

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Formula.Firewall In Power Query

Published 2017-06-27 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb explains when you might get a Formula.Firewall error in Power BI or Power Query:

The important difference here is that there is now one step in this query instead of two: the query and the filtering take place in the same step. Even more importantly, regardless of the data privacy settings, the query fails with the error:

Formula.Firewall: Query ‘DimDate With Native Query Single Step Fails’ (step ‘Source’) references other queries or steps, so it may not directly access a data source. Please rebuild this data combination.

The problem here is that the Power Query engine is not allowed to access two different data sources originating from different queries in the same step – as far as I understand it this is because it makes it too hard for the engine to work out whether a step connects to a data source or not, and so which data privacy rules should be applied.

This is an interesting downside to putting in complex data privacy rules.

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Using AWS Database Migration Service

Published 2017-06-27 by Kevin Feasel

Derik Hammer shows how to move a SQL Server instance into AWS Relational Database Services (RDS):

Like most wizards in the world, this one begins with a welcome page. One important piece of information that is provided, however, is the tip about using the AWS Schema Conversion Tool. The conversion tool is most useful for heterogeneous migrations, such as Oracle to RDS Microsoft SQL Server. This demonstration is using homogeneous data platforms; therefore, it is not needed.

It does seem pretty easy to do.

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Biml Global Directives

Published 2017-06-27 by Kevin Feasel

Ben Weissman discusses a new directive in Biml:

One of the awesome new features in Biml is a new directive called “global”! It does exactly, what you would expect it to do: it allows you to add code to all or some of your Biml files at once.

Here is an example: This file with only 2 lines will make VB your default language across your entire solution!

I’d prefer an F# global directive, myself…  But this looks like a very useful addition to Biml.

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Polybase In Azure SQL Data Warehouse

Published 2017-06-27 by Kevin Feasel

Simon Whiteley loves Polybase as much as I do:

“Polybase is by far the fastest way to import/export data from SQLDW. If you’re loading any reasonably sized data volume, you should be using Polybase”

That’s not a quote – I just thought it would be more impactful looking like one!

For those of a traditional “Big Data” background, Polybase is essentially the same as an external Hive table, embedded into a traditional relational database.

For everyone else – Polybase is a special kind of SQL table. It looks like a table, it has columns and you can run normal T-SQL on it. However, instead of holding any data locally, your query is converted into map-reduce jobs against flat files – even those in sub-folders. For me, this is mind-bogglingly cool – you can query thousands of files at once by typing “select * from dbo.myexternaltable”.

Simon also covers limitations in Polybase:

Push-down predicates

This one is a biggie – if you’re querying over a whole range of flat files that are organised into [YEAR]/[MONTH] folders, for example, you should be able to write a query like the following:

SELECT * FROM dbo.MyExternalTable WHERE [YEAR] > 2016

This filter would be pushed down to the polybase engine and tell it to ignore any files that have been vertically partitioned outside of our chosen range. Instead, all files are read and returned to the SQL Server engine and the filtering is done in-memory on the returned dataset. This is obviously hugely inefficient in some cases – especially when you’re using Polybase as a data loading mechanism. This feature is available in HIVE tables and you can do it in U-SQL – hopefully it’s only a matter of time before a similar feature is implemented here.

It’s an interesting look at Polybase, focusing on Azure SQL Data Warehouse.

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Fun With Temp Tables

Published 2017-06-27 by Kevin Feasel

Kenneth Fisher answers a Brent Ozar pop quiz regarding temp tables:

Go ahead and give it a shot .. I’ll wait.

So? What do you think? Did you get it right? I did, but I wasn’t 100% certain, nor did I initially think through all of the implications. The question actually has more depth to it than you might think on the surface. So I thought it would be fun to go through what I was thinking before I made my decision, what actually happens, and what I realized afterward.

Read on for the answers.  For bonus fun, check out Brent’s comment to the post.

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