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Category: Tools

Comparing Fluentd to Logstash

Published 2021-05-21 by Kevin Feasel

Ajit Chelat compares two popular log agents:

Log collectors, or aggregators, are critical aspects of the log management infrastructure. They help collect logs from various systems and parse and groom them for ingestion into a monitoring or observability tool for further visualization and analysis. DevOps and SRE teams are quickly adding log collectors to their toolchain. With millions of users across domains, two log collectors have risen to the forefront of log collection—Fluentd and Logstash. 

This article compares the two and sees which one is the best for your log management and analysis initiatives—Fluentd vs. Logstash. 

Click through for the round-by-round comparison and see which one comes out on top in your scenario.

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sqltop — SQL Server Process Viewer

Published 2021-05-21 by Kevin Feasel

Mark Wilkinson has a big announcement:

Hey folks! I’m proud to announce the first open source release of my sqltop tool! sqltop is an interactive command-line based tool to view active sessions on a SQL Server instance. In this post I’ll talk about why I wrote the tool, why I chose to write it in PowerShell, and walk through some of the challenges I faced during development.

I’ve had a chance to see this in action and it’s really cool. I’m glad Mark was able to get this open-sourced, so go check it out.

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Building a Kafka Test Environment with Kafdrop

Published 2021-05-12 by Kevin Feasel

Diogo Souza walks us through an interesting project:

From a daily life standpoint, it’s challenging to manage Kafka brokers, partitions, topics, producers, and consumers all via command line. An interface would be quite helpful.

There is a ton of available options for managing your Kafka brokers for web UI applications. Perhaps Confluent’s version is one of the most complete, although it is part of a paid combo for mostly enterprise means.

Amongst the myriad of open-source options, Kafdrop stands out for being simple, fast, and easy to use. It is an open-source web project that allows you to view information from Kafka brokers as existing topics, consumers, and even the content of messages sent.

This article explores creating a more flexible test environment to work alongside the .NET app built in the previous article. This way, you’ll have more powerful tools to understand what’s happening with your topics.

Read on to learn how you can install and use Kafdrop.

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Bulk Copying Lots of Rows into SQL Server

Published 2021-04-12 by Kevin Feasel

Esat Erkec shows us how to use the Bulk Copy Program (BCP) to bulk load data into SQL Server:

If the installed version is older than the last version, we can download and install the latest version from the Microsoft website. The main capability of the SQL Server BCP is not much complex because it can only run with several arguments. The syntax of the BCP is like below:

bcp {table|view|”query”} {out|queryout|in|format} {data_file|nul} {[optional_argument]…}

For example, if we want to export any data of a table to a text file, we have to specify the table name, the out option, and the data file. The following command will export the Production table into the specified text file.

bcp AdventureWorks2017.Production.Product out C:\ExportedData\Product.txt -S localhost -T –w

I don’t know if I’m the only person for which this is true, but the data file format has always been a royal pain for me to get right, to the point where I’d happily build an SSIS package to perform bulk loading over having to use BCP myself.

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Power BI Exporter

Published 2021-04-07 by Kevin Feasel

Soheil Bakhshi announces a new community tool:

Apart from my website statistics showing many people want to export data from Power BI Desktop, some of my customers asked the same question. They wanted to export the curated data from their data model within Power BI Desktop to CSV format and make the curated data available for their other platforms. While all the methods mentioned in my previous blog posts are working, some users still find them complex. So I thought, we can make it better. We can make a straightforward tool that exports the data with only two clicks. So we started building the Power BI Exporter as a micro-project. We added some more ideas to the original idea of only exporting the data. We thought it is good to export the data along with the table names, column names and relationships. Having that information handy, we can quickly build the same data model as the one we exported its data but using the CSV files as the data sources. The other idea was to pack everything in a ZIP file on the fly, so we have a single ZIP file, including the tables, columns, and relationships. As a result, the first version of the Power BI Exporter is born. In this post I explain how it works.

Read on to see how to use it. Download is free, though you do have to provide them with an e-mail address.

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Load Testing using SqlQueryStress

Published 2021-03-19 by Kevin Feasel

Chad Callihan walks us through the SqlQueryStress program:

Do you have a new SQL server that you need to load test against? What about a new stored procedure that needs tested with various parameters? Maybe you’re just trying to punish your CPU? Whatever the reason, my favorite tool for these scenarios is Adam Machanic’s SqlQueryStress. Before we run through some examples, check out SqlQueryStress on GitHub or get SqlQueryStress from the Microsoft Store.

It’s a pretty simple program which I’ve used for well over a decade. Chad does a good job of walking us through the tool.

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Contrasting Redis and Memcached

Published 2021-03-04 by Kevin Feasel

Shane Ducksbury has a showdown:

Caching is an important step in increasing the performance of many applications. It can be difficult to determine which caching solution is the best for your use case. Two likely contenders that will often make an appearance in your search for the answer are Redis vs Memcached.

In the green corner is Memcached (est. 2003), the classic, high performance caching solution. In the red corner is Redis, a slightly newer (est. 2009) but very mature and feature-rich caching in-memory database. Below, we’ll take a look at the differences between the two to help you make the decision which to choose.

I’ve personally had better experiences with Redis; my experience is that both work well from low to high load, and both have a tendency fall over at really high load.

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Creating a Database Publish Profile in Visual Studio

Published 2021-03-03 by Kevin Feasel

Elizabeth Noble shows us how to create a database publish profile using Visual Studio:

One of our fears was always how to prevent losing data and critical data code. Here were publish profiles to our rescue. We also found that some of our database code had specific values depending on the environment or contained references to other databases. Once again, publish could solve these problems!

While I’d love to say that you could use ADS to manage your database projects, that just isn’t true right now. However, we have a way to help you get a publish profile created. If you don’t want to use Visual Studio yourself, you might want to ask your Developer friends real nice and see if they’d be willing to help you out.

Click through for a video and a sample of what a publish profile looks like.

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Azure Charts

Published 2021-03-02 by Kevin Feasel

This is an interesting site I just learned about this morning:

Project mission: Communicating Azure’s current state, structure and updates in a compact digestible way.

Concept: Cloud Charts Manifesto

Data sources: Public updates, RSS channels and web pages are used as primary data sources.


While developed by a Microsoft employee, Azure Charts is not a Microsoft service or product. This is a personal project, there are no implicit or explicit obligations related to it. If you want to receive updates about Azure Charts, feel free to follow or connect on LinkedIn.

It’s out of the norm for me to talk about a whole site like this, but I think it’s a really useful way of showing off these services in a non-confusing manner. It also gives some en passant insight on the relative interest in specific services based on industry.

If you do think this is interesting, please fill out a small form to make sure it stays public.

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Tips and Tricks for VS Code and Azure Data Studio

Published 2021-02-23 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones shares some advice:

I really like Visual Studio Code. The more I use it, the more I get comfortable in it, and the more I appreciate the design and flow of using the editor. I didn’t feel that way early on, preferring the comfort of Visual Studio, but now I most often use VS Code.

The other day I saw an article from one of the PMs for the product, with a number of tips and tricks. I like some of these, and have already found a few to be handy in my work. 

Click through for more info. Switching to a new IDE can be challenging, but searching out tips and tricks like this can smooth out the transition period bumpiness and potentially unlock efficiencies you wouldn’t even have known about.

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