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Category: Administration

Optimizing Shared Buffers in Postgres

Published 2023-11-03 by Kevin Feasel

Salman Ahmed explains how shared buffers work in Postgres:

PostgreSQL is known for its robustness and performance right out of the box. However, different applications and different scales of data demand fine-tuning of various parameters to achieve optimum performance. One such significant parameter is shared_buffers, which, when configured correctly, can notably enhance the performance of your PostgreSQL database.

Read on to see what shared buffers are, why they are so important to Postgres, and how to figure out the right value to use.

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Moving VMs and Disks between Azure Tenants

Published 2023-11-02 by Kevin Feasel

Dennes Torres makes a move:

Move objects on Azure is not simple. Move between Tenants is extremely difficult or not possible. I faced the challenge to move a virtual machine and disks between tenants recently and found the solution.

Some Years ago, I wrote an article about the Azure Resource Mover when it was still being created. Today the resource mover is integrated with the entire azure portal, although there are already many limitations in relation to moving resources. Anyway, this will not affect us on this blog post.

Click through for the step-by-step, as well as a few gotchas you might run into along the way.

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Automating SQL Dump Analysis

Published 2023-10-27 by Kevin Feasel

Sean Gallardy has been busy:

One of the things that is lacking in the community is for some simple dump analysis for SQL Server, well no longer!

Introducing the Beta version of SQL Dump Analysis… sure it’s not super pretty, sure it’s not 100% yet… but it’ll give you the basic goods and get you on your way.

This is a website you upload SQL dumps to, rather than an executable you’d download. Still, check it out.

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Postgres Performance Tuning via work_mem

Published 2023-10-23 by Kevin Feasel

Salman Ahmed explains what working memory is in Postgres and the effects of changing the work_mem value:

PostgreSQL, by default, is configured to run everywhere with minimum resource utilization. To achieve maximum performance under specific scenarios, PostgreSQL’s parameters can be tuned to enhance performance. One such parameter that can impact performance in PostgreSQL is work_mem.

In this blog we will discuss how work_mem can be used to optimize performance in PostgreSQL.

Click through for that discussion.

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Capturing a TCP Dump in an Azure Databricks Notebook

Published 2023-10-20 by Kevin Feasel

Stithi Panigrahi does some troubleshooting:

Due to the potential impact on performance and storage costs, Azure Databricks clusters don’t capture networking logs by default. Follow the below instructions if you need to capture tcpdump to investigate multiple networking issues related to the cluster. These steps will capture a TCP dump on each cluster node–both driver and workers during the entire lifetime of the cluster.

Click through for an initiation script, which generates the actual script, which itself generates the TCP dumps.

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Setting up Ola’s Index Maintenance with Azure Runbooks and Terraform

Published 2023-10-20 by Kevin Feasel

Josephine Bush builds on prior work:

Yes, you still need to do some work to maintain indexes in Azure SQL Database. This post will walk you through setting up statistic updates and index maintenance using Terraform.

Thanks to Tracy Boggiano for her directions for setting up the runbooks. If you want to do this manually instead of with Terraform, Tracy’s post walks you through it step by step. I only modified the role assignment so it had read to the entire subscription level to loop through every DB in the subscription.

Thanks to Kendra for blogging about index maintenance in Azure SQL. Her post helped me decide on index maintenance thresholds.

Click through for a link to Josephine’s GitHub repo and a walkthrough of how it all works.

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Taking over a Personal Power BI Workspace

Published 2023-10-20 by Kevin Feasel

Olivier Van Steenlandt performs a hostile takeover:

The end user can save a Power BI report created in the Power BI Service in their own Personal Workspace but then they have no way to share it with their team. It remains a personal report/analysis.

When executing the analysis in Excel, they can distribute the Excel-file as they see fit.

The pitfall of personal workspaces in Power BI, from my point of view, is that if someone leaves the company, there isn’t a straight forward way for other end users to  take-over previously created analysis.

This is where the Power BI Administrator can be of importance.

Read on to see how a Power BI Administrator can gain access to a personal workspace and migrate reports out of it.

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Finding the ACTIVE_TRANSACTION Culprits

Published 2023-10-17 by Kevin Feasel

Thamires Lemes digs into high transaction log utilization:

The transaction log in SQL Server records all changes made to a database, allowing for data recovery and consistency. When a transaction is initiated, it acquires space in the transaction log to record its activities. Long running transactions have the potential to hold the transaction log, and, depending on database write activity, cause errors and disruptions in the SQL Server environment.

It is important to point out that the transaction that is holding the transaction log might not be performing any write activities to consume additional log space, but subsequent transactions that writes to the transaction log will cause its utilization to increase, even if they are fast. The log space won’t be released until the oldest transaction concludes its execution.

Click through for a few queries on the topic. I’d also highly recommend sp_whoisactive for this kind of work.

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Killing a Running Apache Spark Application

Published 2023-10-13 by Kevin Feasel

The Big Data in Real World team pulls the plug on an application:

Apache Spark is a powerful open-source distributed computing system used for big data processing. However, sometimes you may need to kill a running Spark application for various reasons, such as if the application is stuck, consuming too many resources, or taking too long to complete. In this post, we will discuss how to kill a running Spark application.

Click through to see how you can do this.

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