A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Josephine Bush is good enough:
This month, I prompted bloggers to discuss whether good enough is perfect. Thank you to all who posted on this topic!
Here are the highlights of the posts (in alphabetical order by last name):
Read on for posts from four contributors.
Leave a CommentThe French philosopher Montesquieu wrote, “Le mieux est le mortel ennemi du bien”, which means, “The best is the mortal enemy of the good.” Montesquieu was an interesting man who lived in the 18th century, and influenced many of the political structures around the world. His book “The Spirit of Law” from 1748 described ways to avoid absolute power, established concepts like “innocent until proven guilty”, and campaigned against slavery. I guess some countries adopted those ideas more than others.
I mentioned it because Josephine Bush has invited us to write about the topic of “Good enough is perfect“. And while I realise that the two statements are not identical, I consider that they are essentially the same. If we always strive for perfect then we can all too easily miss the mark of being able to deliver anything worthwhile. As a consultant I have to understand that the ideal solution for my customers is not the one where everything is completely perfect if achieving that means that the cost is too high. Instead, I need to find the point where good enough really is good enough.
Understanding value at the margin is a vital skill.
Leave a CommentTim Mitchell hires some data detectives:
Earlier this month, I hosted the monthly T-SQL Tuesday invitation in which I asked, “What’s in your data detective toolkit?” We got some great responses which I’ll recap here, and I’ll share a few thoughts of my own at the end.
Click through this month’s responses, as well as Tim’s answer to the question.
Comments closedAndy Yun wants you to use your earholes:
The All Powerful…
… Question. That is what I now believe is the most important tool for a Data Detective.
Asking Questions Effectively
This nuance involves HOW you ask a question. Some of this involves knowing your audience. Is this the right place or the right time? Sometimes there comes a point where asking questions is just counter-productive because your audience has no interest in answering. And it also means you need to make sure you’re asking the correct audience in the first place.
Asking questions is difficult, so instead, I just strawman my way to success.
Comments closedHappy T-SQL Tuesday! I wasn’t really sure I’d be able to crank something out for this one but somehow I managed to squeeze it in. Tim Mitchell ( b ) is hosting and he has a great topic for us: What’s in our Data Detective toolkit?
I love this topic for so many reasons. Partly because I feel like I’m asked to look at so many projects where I’m dropped in and asked to figure things out, usually performance related but occasionally new functionality or features. But as I’m asked to do this fairly often, I may have to see if Data Detective can be my new title… hmm…
Being a Data Detective in a film noir. On the one hand, that sounds like a really neat idea. On the other hand, things usually don’t turn out so well for the detective.
Comments closedRichard Swinbank troubleshoots an issue:
I’m using a stream watermark to handle late arriving data – basically1) my watermark enables the stream to accept data arriving up to 10 seconds late …and that’s where the problem shows up.
When I run this streaming query – in Azure Databricks I can do this simply with
display(df_pivot)– I receive the error:AnalysisException: Detected pattern of possible ‘correctness’ issue due to global watermark. The query contains stateful operation which can emit rows older than the current watermark plus allowed late record delay, which are “late rows” in downstream stateful operations and these rows can be discarded. Please refer the programming guide doc for more details. If you understand the possible risk of correctness issue and still need to run the query, you can disable this check by setting the config `spark.sql.streaming.statefulOperator.checkCorrectness.enabled` to false.
Read on to learn more about the scenario, the issue, and the solution.
Comments closedHugo Kornelis describes an issue:
I was hired by a customer who had a very annoying issue with the daily data load of their data warehouse. The volume of data to be loaded is high and they were already struggling to finish the load before business opens. But that was not their biggest issue. The biggest problem, the real pain point that they hired me for, is that at unpredictable moments, the load would run much longer than normal, pushing it well into business hours. They wanted me to find out what caused those irregular delays, and find a way to stop them from happening.
Read on to learn more about the issue itself, as well as a discrepancy in what Query Store showed. Hugo also points out that the quick-and-easy solution may not be the right solution.
Comments closedMala Mahadevan gives us the low-down on database code management:
I was privileged to host yet another T-SQL Tuesday, for the month of August, 2024. My topic was on Managing database code. I was worried about getting responses, given that most of the community is no longer on X/Twitter and my invite didn’t seem to get much attention. I was wrong. People seem to keep track of this by other means and the response was excellent. Summary as below.
Read on for 11 takes on the topic.
Comments closedLouis Davidson asks for advice:
There was a lot of great advice, and I really wonder how much of this I would have listened to myself back in the day. In no order other than the order I found them in my comments and then XTwitter.
Click through for a bevy of responses.
Comments closedIt’s time to celebrate and confess.
I was honored to host the June 2024 edition of T-SQL Tuesday – #175! That’s the celebration.
Confession: I had GoDaddy add a firewall back in February and it worked well. Too well, in fact! A friend reached out to let me know comments on the blog post – titled T-SQL Tuesday #175: Old Tech, New Tech, Bold Tech, Blue Tech – was returning a nasty ACCESS DENIED message:
It was a bit of a short month in terms of turnout, but click through for Andy’s summary.
Comments closed