Press "Enter" to skip to content

Category: Tools

Debugging Code in R

Cosima Meyer explains how debugging works in R with RStudio:

Three basic commands in RStudio let you do the debugging: debug(function_name)browser(), and undebug(function_name).

With debug(function_name) you start the debugging of your function – it’s basically like a mole that digs in. When you’re in debug mode, you can also call the objects in your function.

Read the whole thing to learn the power of debugging beyond the print() statement. H/T R-Bloggers.

Comments closed

A Month of Community Tools

Erik Darling is no tool:

Over the past month (plus or minus a couple days), I’ve shown you in a series of quick posts how I use different SQL Server Community Tools that are free and open source to troubleshoot SQL Server issues.

There’s a lot of great content from Erik here; if you haven’t already been following along.

Comments closed

Troubleshooting High Non-SQL CPU Utilization

Ajay Dwivedi finds out it wasn’t the database:

Since SQL Server is not a cheap application and would cost a lot of money if we need to scale it horizontally. So it is not a good practice to allow any other resource-consuming processes to run alongside with SQL Server.

In this blog, we are going to troubleshoot a high CPU scenario when the CPU issue is caused by non-SQL Server process. Let’s say, I receive a call from the monitoring team where the application team is complaining about a “slow” SQL Server.

Ajay first uses SQLMonitor to perform this troubleshooting and then shows how to do this without SQLMonitor.

Comments closed

Using DaxDebugOutput when testing EvaluateAndLog()

Gilbert Quevauvilliers hooks us up:

I have seen a few great blog posts with regards to the new DAX function EvaluateAndLog which can be used to show/debug what happens with DAX Measures.

When I tried this out myself one of the challenges I had was where to download DaxDebugOutput, and then how to use it with Power BI Desktop.

In this blog post I will show you how I downloaded, installed, and used DaxDebugOutput application with Power BI Desktop.

Read on to see how the tool works, as well as where you can get it.

Comments closed

Search on Windows with Everything

Tom Zika reviews a product:

Not everything in the general sense, but a tool called Everything by voidtools (Download link). Usually, I have to make this distinction when googling.

No matter how great is my folder structure or naming conventions, there comes a time when I have trouble locating something.
Maybe the software has a default download location which I forgot (*cough* Teams *cough*), or I want to find an install folder, or I can’t locate a picture I’ve recently saved.

Read on to learn a bit more about the free tool. After Tom’s recommendation, I gave it a try and yeah, it’s fast.

Comments closed

dbops Powershell Module

Kevin Chant looks at a useful Powershell module:

Before covering the dbops PowerShell module I want to quickly cover DbUp.

DbUp is a .NET library that you can use to do migration-based deployments. It is open-source and is licensed under the MIT license, which you can read about in the DbUp license file.

According to the official list of supported databases, it allows you to do migration-based deployments to various databases. Such as SQL Server and MySQL. As you will discover later in this post it also works with a newer Azure service as well.

DbUp has been on my to-learn list for a little while, though I haven’t had a chance to dig into it yet.

Comments closed

Tracking Implicit Transactions with sp_whoisactive

Erik Darling is on the hunt:

But anyway, you should avoid implicit transactions as much as possible. They most often show up in the Microsoft JDBC driver queries that only people who hate you use.

When I first started to realize how bad they are, I wrote a bunch of checks into the Blitz scripts (I’ll cover those next week) that check for them.

I also opened an issue to add the check to sp_WhoIsActive, because it’s rather popular, I hear.

Click through to see how you can track them now. Also, Erik has been showcasing community procedures like sp_WhoIsActive, sp_PressureDetector, sp_QuickieStore, and sp_HumanEvents all month and he’s doing great work there.

Comments closed