A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Erik Darling makes a query purchase at the Query Store:
I’ve said quite a bit about missing index request utility generally in SQL Server, even as recently as last week!
But then I got a user question about using Query Store to do something similar, so here goes.
If you need a pre-2019 way to do this with Query Store, Kendra Little has a blog post about that here.
For the 2019 version, check out Erik’s query and then sp_QuickieStore to make it easier.
Comments closedRobert Cain continues to project:
In the previous post, Fun With KQL – Project, we took a dive into the
projectoperator and the ways it could be used. Theprojectoperator has several variants:project-away,project-rename,project-keep, andproject-reorder. This post will take a quick look at each.
Click through to check out each one of these.
Comments closedI’ve often told people that I spend my day in a PowerShell prompt. I run almost my entire day with PowerShell. I’ve shared many of the tools I use daily on Github. Today, I want to share another way I have PowerShell work the way I need it, with minimal effort. This specific task centers on files and folders.
As you might expect, I am constantly creating, editing, and managing files. I do all of this from a PowerShell prompt. I rarely use the start menu to find a program to launch. My challenge has always been finding the files and folders I’ve recently been using. Get-ChildItem is naturally the PowerShell tool of choice, but I’ve finally gotten around to making it work the way I need.
Not having done either of these before, I’m not sure which would be my preference, as I’d like to make sure it’s easy for me to remember later how I got to this non-standard state in case I need to replicate it elsewhere or if somebody else is at my keyboard. That’s one nice thing about the .bashrc file: it’s just there and well-known enough that people can look for changes there.
Comments closedKai Waehner compares two message exchange patterns:
How can I do request-response communication with Apache Kafka? That’s one of the most common questions I get regularly. This blog post explores when (not) to use this message exchange pattern, the differences between synchronous and asynchronous communication, the pros and cons compared to CQRS and event sourcing, and how to implement request-response within the data streaming infrastructure.
Read on to learn more.
Comments closedMarco Russo and Alberto Ferrari explain how the KEEPFILTERS function works:
KEEPFILTERS is a CALCULATE modifier used to change the way CALCULATE merges new filters with the outer filter context. Indeed, the default behavior of CALCULATE is to override existing filters. By using KEEPFILTERS you ask CALCULATE to add the new filter to the outer filter context, instead of overriding the outer filter.
Read on for the explanation and a demo.
Comments closedTeo Lachev looks at Power BI Datamarts:
As Microsoft announced here, Power BI datamarts are upon us. I can almost see an important enterprise client demanding “self-service datamarts me now or else… “, thus inspiring an opportunity for another premium feature, spearheaded with great vision and effort, but questionable practical value. In a nutshell, a Power BI datamart is a combo of Power BI Premium and a Microsoft-hosted Azure SQL Database aiming to simplify the implementation of a departmental datamart.
This take is a bit more negative than most of the others I’ve seen, so it’s worth a read in comparison to what others have written.
Comments closedTori Tompkins explains what MLOps is and why it’s valuable:
A ML project will typically begin in an ‘Explore Phase’ where a data scientist or team of data scientists will explore the data they currently have and experiment with models, algorithms, parameters and features. MLOps at this stage is responsible for supplying Data Scientists with environment they need to achieve this. One way this can be done is by leveraging Feature Store.
A feature store is a tool for storing commonly used features. As data scientists create new features then can log these into feature stores such as Feast and Databricks Feature Store, they can reuse these features across teams and projects. This will benefit teams in multiple ways by reducing compute times for both training and inference, provide consistency in common features and reducing effort for create complex logic.
Read on for information about all six phases.
Comments closedKevin Chant gives Synapse Link for SQL Server a try:
Azure Synapse Link for SQL Server 2022 allows you to replicate your data from a SQL Server 2022 database to an Azure Synapse Analytics dedicated SQL Pool.
It is one of the options for the new Azure Synapse Link for SQL feature that was announced during Microsoft Build. You can read more about this in the Microsoft post which also announced the Public Preview of Azure Synapse Link for SQL.
Click through to see what Kevin has found so far. I think by the time this rolls out GA, it should be pretty good.
Comments closedAnthony Watherston has an interesting script:
During a recent cost optimization workshop with a customer, they mentioned that although they had some tagging policies in place there was no consistency of tag names across the Azure environment. This post introduces a script to remediate this and remove some confusion from your tagging strategy.
The customer was trying to ensure that all resources were being tagged with a cost centre tag. Some of this was automatic and some was done manually by people. While there was a policy in place to control this in the future, they needed a way to remediate the existing resources.
This is really useful if you have enough information to create a to-and-from mapping. It won’t automatically understand anything, so you’ll need to do the digging but it will do the renaming.
Comments closedEitan Blumin plays duck-duck-goose:
A few years ago, I created a couple of T-SQL scripts that can be used for comparing instance-level and database-level properties between two HA/DR replicas. Originally, this supported comparing only two servers. But recently, following a fan request, I upgraded the script to support an unlimited number of servers that you can compare to each other.
So, I figured, if one person found this useful, there must be more out there that would need this, right?
Read on for the script itself, how to use it, and some limitations you’ll need to know about.
Comments closed