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Category: Architecture

Where Azure Analysis Services Fits

Published 2017-01-03 by Kevin Feasel

Melissa Coates explains where Azure Analysis Services fits in common BI architectures:

(2) Data Sources

  • From a single source such as a data warehouse. This is the most traditional path for BI development, and still has a very valid place in many BI/analytics deployments. This scenario puts the work of data integration on the ETL process into the data warehouse, which is the most appropriate place.

  • Directly from various systems.  This can be done, but works well only in specific cases – it definitely won’t work well if there are a lot of highly normalized tables, or if there’s not a straightforward way to relate the disparate data together. Trying to go directly to the source systems & skip an intermediary data warehouse puts the “integration” burden on the data source view in Analysis Services, so plan for plenty of time testing if you’re going to try this route (i.e., it can be much harder, not easier). Note that this option only makes sense if the data is stored in Analysis Services because it needs to be related together somehow (i.e., DirectQuery mode, discussed next in #3, with > 1 data source won’t work if a user tries to combine data sources because the data is not inherently related).

If you’re thinking about Azure Analysis Services, this post is a good one.

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Understanding HTAP

Published 2016-12-16 by Kevin Feasel

James Serra explains what Hybrid Transactional and Analytical Processing means:

HTAP is used to describe the capability of a single database that can perform both online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) for the purpose of real-time operational intelligence processing.  The term was created by Gartner in 2014.

In the SQL Server world you can think of it as: In-memory analytics (columnstore) + in-memory OLTP = real-time operational analytics.  Microsoft supports this in SQL Server 2016 (see SQL Server 2016 real-time operational analytics).

I’m not completely sold on HTAP yet, particularly once you get to high-scale OLTP systems doing hundreds of thousands of transactions per second.  That said, there’s always more and more pressure to get data available for analytics faster and faster.

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SQL As A Declarative Language

Published 2016-12-15 by Kevin Feasel

Lukas Eder discusses one benefit to a declarative language like SQL:

It’s simple. Both the set-builder notation, and the SQL language (and in principle, other languages’ for comprehensions) are declarative. They are expressions, which can be composed to other, more complex expressions, without necessarily executing them.

Remember the imperative approach? We tell the machine exactly what to do:

  • Start counting from this particular minimal integer value
  • Stop counting at this particular maximal integer value
  • Store all even integers in between in this particular intermediate collection

What if we don’t actually need negative integers? What if we just wanted to have a utility that calculates even integers and then reuse that to list all positive integers? Or, all positive integers less than 100? Etc.

It may be my innate contrarian curmudgeonliness, but I am moving more and more toward the idea that the easiest way to deal with data is a combination of SQL and functional programming languages, leaving OO out of the picture.

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SQLite With Powershell

Published 2016-11-04 by Kevin Feasel

Phil Factor combines SQLLite, Powershell, and SQL Server:

 Although I dearly love using SQL Server, I wouldn’t use it in every circumstance; there are times, for example, when just isn’t necessary to use a Server-based RDBMS for a data-driven application. The open-source SQLite is arguably the most popular and well-tried-and-tested database ever. It is probably in your phone, and used by your browser. Your iTunes will use it. Most single-user applications that need to handle data will use SQLite because it is so reliable and easy to install.

It is specifically designed as a zero-configuration, embedded, relational database with full ACID compliance, and a good simple dialect of SQL92. The SQLite library accesses its storage files directly, using a single library, written in C, which contains the entire database system. Creating a SQLite database instance is as easy as opening a simple cross-platform file that contains the entire database instance. It requires no administration.

There’s a lot going on in this interesting article; I recommend giving it a read.

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Optimizing Large Documents For Space

Published 2016-11-04 by Kevin Feasel

Raul Gonzalez drops a 2 TB table’s size in half:

So at work, I’d say space matters, and in order to optimize our storage requirements it’s very important to know about SQL Server internals, specially the Storage Engine, which happens to be one of my favorite topics of study.

In my quest to release some space I got to this database, just one table which is 165M of XML documents stored as NVARCHAR(MAX).

It was interesting walking through the process.  Some part of me wonders if it’s a bit complex for the next maintainer to handle, but saving a terabyte of disk space is worth a few extra pages of documentation…

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OLAP On Hadoop

Published 2016-11-03 by Kevin Feasel

Tim Spann discusses OLAP options on the Hadoop stack:

Apache Kylin

For an introduction to this interesting Hadoop project, check out this article.   Apache Kylin originally from eBay, is a Distributed Analytics Engine that provides SQL and OLAP access to Hadoop datasets utilizing Hive and HBase.   It can use called through SparkSQL as well making for a very useful project.   This project let’s you work with PowerBI, Tableau and Excel with more tool support coming soon.    You can doMOLAP cubes and support many users with fast queries over billions of rows.   Apache Kylin provides JDBC and ODBC drivers.

There are a few interesting options here.

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Synchronicity

Published 2016-10-25 by Kevin Feasel

Kenneth Fisher discusses synchronous versus asynchronous in programming terms:

Synchronous – Code that runs one one line at a time. Each line of code is completed before the next one starts. If an external call is made then it is completed before the next line of code runs.

Asynchronous – Code that is launched and runs separately from the initial code. If a SQL job is launched from inside a batch of code (using sp_start_job for example) then the job is running in parallel (at the same time as) to the remainder of the batch of code.

Understanding which operations are synchronous versus asynchronous, and which operations are blocking versus non-blocking versus semi-blocking, will do wonders for improving application performance.

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Foresight

Published 2016-10-12 by Kevin Feasel

Anders Pedersen shares an easily-avoidable tale of woe:

ETL.  Spec said only Address Line 1 is needed to be loaded, so the developers only bring that line in (plus name, city etc.).  Fast forward 8 years, I get a request on my desk: “Please add Address Line 2 to import, and all tables.  Oh, and we need historical data for previously loaded files.  And for all address types”.

Groan.
No normalization in this database (which is just one of about 40 databases with SIMILAR structure, but not identical).

Read on for the damage done, as well as another example of foresight saving the day.

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(Re-)Design For Today’s Needs

Published 2016-10-12 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Levy sees common problems when dealing with brownfield applications:

The primary system I deal with on a daily basis was originally developed as a DOS application and several of the above examples are drawn from it. Looking at the core tables and columns, it’s easy to identify those that began life in those early days – they all have 8-character names. Time moved on and the system grew and evolved. DOS to Windows. Windows to the web. But the database, and the practices and patterns used in the database, haven’t come along for the ride.

Data schema conversions can be hard and disruptive – you need to update your application, your stored procedures, and provide customers/users with a clean migration path. Code changes require testing. Complexity and cost grows every time you introduce changes. I get that.

There’s a lot of effort in Andy’s advice, but it’s well worth it.

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Sequentially Increasing Indexes

Published 2016-10-10 by Kevin Feasel

Joe Chang discusses benchmarking and looks at a particular scenario around maximizing insert performance:

The test environment here is a single socket Xeon E3 v3, quad-core, hyper-threading enabled. Turbo-boost is disabled for consistency. The software stack is Windows Server 2016 TP5, and SQL Server 2016 cu2 (build 2164). Some tests were conducted on a single socket Xeon E5 v4 with 10 cores, but most are on the E3 system. In the past, I used to maintain two-socket systems for investigating issues, but only up to the Core2 processor, which were not NUMA.

The test table has 8 fixed length not null columns, 4 bigint, 2 guids, 1 int, and a 3-byte date. This adds up to 70 bytes. With file and row pointer overhead, this works out to 100 rows per page at 100% fill-factor.

Both heap and clustered index organized tables were tested. The indexes tested were 1) single column key sequentially increasing and 2) two column key leading with a grouping value followed by a sequentially increasing value. The grouping value was chosen so that inserts go to many different pages.

The test was for a client to insert a single row per call. Note that the recommended practice is to consolidate multiple SQL statements into a single RPC, aka network roundtrip, and if appropriate, bracket multiple Insert, Update and Delete statements with a BEGIN and COMMIT TRAN. This test was contrived to determine the worst case insert scenario.

With that setup in mind, click through to learn his results.

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