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Author: Kevin Feasel

Advent of Code in Postgres

Published 2022-12-20 by Kevin Feasel

Ryan Booz has some videos for us:

As I go, I’ll upload my finished code to my repo and (hopefully) record a video for each day explaining my approach. I’ve finished through day 8 (as of December 14, 2022), but haven’t finished all of the videos yet. Again, my goal is to enjoy the challenge and learn, not try to be the first one done or get on a leaderboard somewhere. This also means it will probably take into January 2023 to finish the puzzles and record videos.

Enough explanation! Let’s talk about the first five puzzles, including links to the videos.

Read on for days 1-5 of the challenge.

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A Primer on Transparent Data Encryption

Published 2022-12-20 by Kevin Feasel

Matthew McGiffen continues a series on encryption in SQL Server:

TDE is referred to as a “transparent” form of encryption. What that means is that the process of encrypting and decrypting data is fully performed in the background. The queries we write to access data are unchanged whether TDE is enabled or not. So, enabling TDE has no impact on application functionality, does not require refactoring of code, and is therefore relatively easy to implement. TDE encrypts all the data in a database, so you don’t need to choose which data items to encrypt.

Read on to learn more about it, including specific items TDE does not cover.

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Azure SQL Database Performance Roundup

Published 2022-12-20 by Kevin Feasel

Reitse Eskens shares the goods:

In the past 9 blogs, I’ve shown you all sorts of Azure SQL database solutions and gave them a little run for their money. I’ve tested a lot and written about them. This blog will be about the summation of the data and my views on the combined graphs. At the end I’ll wrap it up with my way of working when a new project starts.

But before I kick off, a little Christmas present. What I didn’t do, until now, is give you access to more raw data. Now is the moment to give you more raw number to play around with for yourself and do your own analysis. Fun as it might be, I’d highly encourage you to use my sheets as a jumping point and adapt them for your own workloads. You can find the two Excel files via the link for the scripts.

This is a post I’d been waiting for, as it covers the comparisons between tiers directly, rather than inferring it from the various posts.

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An Overview of R7

Published 2022-12-19 by Kevin Feasel

Nicola Rennie explains the purpose of a new standard for object-oriented programming in R:

The two main OOP systems in R, S3 and S4, both have their advantages and their limitations. For example, in S3 there’s no systematic object validation to make sure an object’s class is correct. In S4, the syntax for defining classes is rather unusual and relies on side effects. Issues such as these mean that, unlike other programming languages, there isn’t a dominant approach to OOP in R.

Now imagine you could take the best bits of S3 and the best bits of S4. That’s where R7 comes in. 

Read on to learn more about how R7 compares to other object-oriented paradigms in R, such as S3, S4, and R6.

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Building Retry Logic for Database Calls

Published 2022-12-19 by Kevin Feasel

Jose Manuel Jurado Diaz tries and tries again:

Today, I worked on a case that our customer faced an execution command timeout “Msg -2, Level 11, State 0, Line 0 – Execution Timeout Expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding“

As this business process is running over the night and they need to ensure that the execution will be completed, they asked if there is possible to implement an Execution Retry Logic. 

In the similar way that we have for Retry-Logic for Transient Failure We could implement a similar mechanism to retry the operation, the only thing that we need is to change the commandTimeout parameter, for example, in .NET. 

Click through for an example of how you can implement this in code. I’d also recommend Polly, which is a library explicitly built for these sorts of issues.

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MLflow in Action and Responsible AI

Published 2022-12-19 by Kevin Feasel

Tomaz Kastrun continues an advent of Azure ML. Day 16 shows off MLflow:

Yesterday we have looked into how to start the MLflow configurations and today, let’s put this to the test.

We will create a new notebook and use Heart dataset (link to dataset) to toy around. We will also import xgboost classifier to asses the accuracy of the presence of heart disease in the patient. We will be using a categorical (integer) variable with values from 0 (no presence) to 4 (strong presence) and attempt to classify based on 15+ attributes (out of more than 70 attributes).

Day 17 pivots to using the responsible AI dashboard:

Azure ML has provided users with collection of model and data exploration with the Studio user interface. But it also provides compatible solutions with Azure ML and Python package responsibleai. With the help of widgets, we will create an sample of dashboard to explore the solution with assessing the responsible decisions and actions.

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Reducing Child Procedure Temp Table Plan Cache Pollution

Published 2022-12-19 by Kevin Feasel

Joe Obbish resolves a specific type of plan cache issue involving shared temp tables:

The problem can be observed with a simple repro script. The child stored procedure performs a series of updates on a temp table. The parent procedure creates the temp table, calls the child stored procedure, and returns data from the temp table.

Click through to see an example of the issue, as well as one technique to mitigate the problem.

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Reverse File Order and Rename via Powershell

Published 2022-12-19 by Kevin Feasel

Jana Sattainathan gets things backwards and then forwards:

In the case of this app, I just did “Select All” within the app and moved all the videos over to “Photos”. When I downloaded the content to my computer, I noticed that it downloaded the most recently downloaded video first and the oldest video last. This meant the file names given to the videos were in reverse order of chronological order.

Read on to see how you can use Powershell to sort this all out.

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Fixing Formula.Firewall Issues in Power Query

Published 2022-12-19 by Kevin Feasel

Imke Feldmann shorts out a firewall issue:

Formula.Firewall issues can hit you when designing your queries or even “out of the blue” when suddenly refreshes in the service are failing due to changes in the query evaluation.
You will find a lot of methods published on the internet which are good and cover different scenarios. But there is also a very quick fix method that I learned from Miguel Escobar that I want to demonstrate in this post. This will basically circumvent the data privacy level, so make sure that you understand the implications (risk of data leakage from one source to another). If not, please read Miguels article first!

After reading Miguel’s post, read on for a fix.

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Certifying Content in Power BI

Published 2022-12-19 by Kevin Feasel

Soheil Bakhshi certifies the quality of this Power BI content:

In the previous post, we discussed that a Power BI administrator must enable certification and grant sufficient rights to the security groups. Therefore, all members of the specified security group are authorised to certify the content. If you are a Power BI administrator, follow these steps to do so:

This post is a step-by-step guide to enabling content certification, as well as how to certify specific types of content.

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