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Category: Tools

Data Management with Open Table Formats

Published 2024-03-07 by Kevin Feasel

Anandaganesh Balakrishnan covers a few open-source products and formats:

Apache Iceberg is an open-source table format designed for large-scale data lakes, aiming to improve data reliability, performance, and scalability. Its architecture introduces several key components and concepts that address the challenges commonly associated with big data processing and analytics, such as managing large datasets, schema evolution, efficient querying, and ensuring transactional integrity. Here’s a deep dive into the core components and architectural design of Apache Iceberg:

Click through for a review of Iceberg, Hudi, and the Delta Lake format.

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Recovering Deleted Oracle Connections in Visual Studio Code

Published 2024-03-06 by Kevin Feasel

Brendan Tierney goes on a search and rescue mission:

With the current early release, there is no way to organise your Database connections like you can in the full Oracle SQL Developer. We are told this will/might be possible in a future release but it might be later this year (or longer) before that feature will be available.

In a previous post, I showed how to import your connections from the full SQL Developer into SQL Dev VS Code. While this is a bit of a fudge, yet relatively straight forward to do, you may or may not want all those connections in your SQL Dev VS Code environment. Typically, you will use different tools, such as SQLcl, SQL*Plus, SQL Developer, etc to perform different tasks, and will only want those connections set up in one of those tools.

Click through to see what it takes to recover these.

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Oracle SQL Developer for Visual Studio Code

Published 2024-02-09 by Kevin Feasel

Brendan Tierney takes a look at a new extension for VS Code:

We now have a new/different tool for developers to access their Oracle Databases. Traditionally, developers have been using Oracle SQL Developer for maybe 20+ years (if you started using Project Raptor). SQL Developer has developed into a bit of a big beast of a tool, with it trying to be everything to everyone including developers, DBAs, and others. But it does seem like SQL Developer might be coming to an end of life, although that could be for some years to come as it is so wildly used. There have been many challenges with SQL Developer over the years and one of the main challenges is getting new developers to use it. From my experience, developers tell me they just didn’t like it, didn’t like the look and feel of it, it was difficult to use, etc., etc. The list would go on and on and most of those developers would prefer to use other tools (for example DBeaver). For those that are terminal/command line only person, you have SQL*Plus and the modern version called SQLCl (SQL Command Line).

Read on for a review of how the extension is today, with the promise of regular improvements from Oracle over time.

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Buy that Keyboard

Published 2024-01-31 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Levy shares some good advice:

The holidays have passed and it’s a new year. You probably have a gift card or two and haven’t decided how to use it yet. Allow me to help:

Buy that fancy keyboard you’ve been coveting. Yes, the $100+ model. And get the good mouse/trackball while you’re at it. Just do it.

Back in my formative days, I would often get the cheapest keyboard and mouse to add a little “budget” flair to my custom PC builds. But nowadays, I highly recommend against that approach for the same reasons Andy does. A $100 keyboard isn’t guaranteed to be better than a $50 keyboard, but they’re both typically going to be better than a $10 keyboard. And if you have a nice enough computer store around, go try some of these out and see what fits best. I love mechanical keyboards—especially when I had the chance to annoy the people around me with a buckling spring keyboard—and there are a variety of types with different required levels of pressure. Do a little digging and find the keyboard and mouse that work best for you.

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Useful Operations in dbatools

Published 2024-01-04 by Kevin Feasel

Rod Edwards shows off some nice functionality in dbatools:

I often build solutions around the dbatools functions, the below is just some of my Operational favourites. With some I’ve included the output pipe that I use most frequently, but obviously, you can view and use the output however you choose to. Clearly, DBATools has many functions to add/remove/update SQL as well, but i’m just folking on the ‘gets’ here.

Naturally, as mentioned…its powershell, you can programmatically use this for any of your automation needs. Marvellous.

The ever growing list of commands can be found here: command index – dbatools . This can prove daunting to new users of the toolset, so here’s a starter for 10.

Click through for those 10.

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Tokenizing SQL Queries

Published 2023-12-20 by Kevin Feasel

Phil Factor has a new script:

Imagine this: you have several directories full of SQL script files, and you need to know where a certain table is used. You’d rather like the context too, so you can check the whole SQL Expression and work out why it is running so slowly. Maybe, from that same daunting set of several directories, you need to search for a comment, either end of line, or block comment, perhaps structured. It could be that you just need to execute each query or statement in turn to check performance.

It’s not unusual to want to search just within strings. Although simple searches can be effective, you will at some point need a tool that is able to recognise and return a collection of strings representing the SQL code, divided up into the respective components of the SQL language.

For this article, we’ll use a PowerShell cmdlet, called Tokenize-SQLString, which is in my GitHub repository.

Read on for examples of how it works and the types of things you can do with it.

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