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Category: Versions

Schema Evolution in Kafka

Published 2020-01-14 by Kevin Feasel

The Hadoop in Real World group takes us through schema changes in Apache Kafka:

Meetup.com went live with this new way of distributing RSVPs – that is through Kafka. Both the producer and consumer agrees on the Schema and everything is great. It is silly to think that the schema would stay like that forever. Let’s say meetup.com didn’t feel the value in providing member_id field and removes it. What do you think will happen – will it affect consumers? 

member_id field doesn’t have a default value and it is considered a required column so this change will affect the consumers. When a producer removes a required field, the consumer will see an error something like below –

Caused by: org.apache.kafka.common.errors.SerializationException: Error deserializing Avro message for id 63
Caused by: org.apache.avro.AvroTypeException: found com.hirw.kafkaschemaregistry.producer.Rsvp,
expecting com.hirw.kafkaschemaregistry.producer.Rsvp, missing required field member_id

This is an interesting review of the schema registry in Kafka and what the different modes allow for.

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Powershell 7 Release Candidate

Published 2020-01-02 by Kevin Feasel

Max Trinidad has a nice update for us:

The moment everyone has been waiting for some time is here, PowerShell Release Candidate is available for download. This a “Go Live” release officially supported in production by Microsoft.

Everyone in the Microsoft PowerShell Team, with the help of the community, has done an excellent job with the evolution of this new version of PowerShell. Read all about it on the PowerShell DevBlogs recent post “Announcing the PowerShell 7.0 Release Candidate“.

Make sure to read all previous posts as they perfectly outlined under the “Why is PowerShell 7 so awesome?” section of the release candidate post.

Click through for more details. One of the nice things in this RC is a consistent Out-Gridview experience, so it’s not just for Windows anymore.

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SQL Undercover Inspector v2

Published 2019-12-04 by Kevin Feasel

Adrian Buckman announces version 2.0 of Undercover Inspector:

There is a new setting in the Settings table called ‘ReportDataDetailedSummary’ this setting is on or off (0 or 1) and will control the level of detail logged in the summary column. When set to a 1 you will get granular detail of Warning/Advisory counts per server per module, setting this setting to 0 will return it back to the original way of logging which was to summarize the entire report into Warning count and advisory count.

There are a lot of changes in here.

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Failing SQL Server 2019 Installation

Published 2019-11-27 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Randal walks through an installation error with SQL Server 2019:

I have a brand new Windows 10 laptop that I use solely for teaching, as the HDMI and SVGA connectors on my main laptop somehow have bad connections to the motherboard after a few years of traveling around the world. On the new laptop I have SQL Server 2017, and now that SQL Server 2019 RTM has shipped, and I’ve finished teaching for the year, I set out to install 2019 side-by-side with 2017 so I can move my teaching environment to 2019 and work on demos of the new features pertinent to what I teach.

Thinking this would be a smooth process, I kicked off the install wizard, went through it, hit go, and walked away. I came back half an hour later to see that all install steps had failed.

Read on for Paul’s solution.

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SQL Server 2019 Now Available

Published 2019-11-05 by Kevin Feasel

Asad Khan announces the general availability of SQL Server 2019:

As you saw from our launch announcement earlier today, over a year ago at Microsoft Ignite we announced our first preview of SQL Server 2019 and today our latest release is now generally available.

You have told us that in today’s demanding world of massive data, wide variety of data sources, and expectations of near real-time application and query performance you need more than just a database engine. You need a modern data platform.

If you’re an early adopter, note that there is a patch for it already.

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Bert’s SQL Server 2019 Magic Quadrant

Published 2019-11-01 by Kevin Feasel

Bert Wagner has gone all Gartner on us:

I decided to rank these features on two axes: Excitement and Priority

Excitement is easy to describe: how excited I am about using these features. In my case, excitement directly correlates with performance and developer usability improvements. That doesn’t mean “Low Excitement” features aren’t beneficial; on the contrary, many are great, they just don’t top my list (it wouldn’t be fun to have a quadrant with everything in the top right).

Priority is how quickly I’ll work on implementing or tuning these features. The truth is that some of these features will work automatically once a SQL Server instance is upgraded, while some will require extra work (ie. query rewriting, hardware config). Once again, “Low Priority” features aren’t bad, they just won’t be the features that I focus on first.

I might need to give him a PolyBase pep talk and bump that one up and to the right a little.

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What’s New with Standard Edition

Published 2019-10-28 by Kevin Feasel

Niko Neugebauer is jazzed about SQL Server 2019 Standard Edition:

The documentation has been released on the Editions & Features support in Sql Server 2019 and there are huge news that will get a good number of Standard Editions users excited.

The thing that should make every single user of the Sql Server 2019 Standard Edition jump is the presence of TDE (Transparent Database Encryption), the feature that

– every single responsible company would love to be able to use to secure their data
– that every single DBA, Developer & IT Professional kept asking Microsoft to include for so many years
– was already there since Azure SQL Database has it by default a couple of years even for the basic edition

I am beyond happy with this news. Grateful that Microsoft has listened to the common sense voice and made a security feature available for the paying customers, giving them a little bit more possibility to be conformant to such demanding norms as GDPR.

Aside from that, Niko looks at several new features which will be available in Standard Edition, as well as a few Enterprise-only features.

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Making the SQL Server 2019 Edition Cut

Published 2019-10-18 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar noticed an update to Microsoft’s “what’s in which edition” document:

The most important stuff:
– Standard Edition is still capped at 128GB RAM.
– Accelerated Database Recovery is in Standard Edition.
– Automatic tuning, batch mode for row store, adaptive memory grants, adaptive joins, and memory-optimized TempDB are Enterprise Edition only.

Click through for more of Brent’s thoughts. Of interest to me is that PolyBase control nodes may now run in Standard Edition. It makes me wonder if they’ll cap that feature somehow, where you get N nodes maximum in a Standard Edition scale-out group, or if it’s uncapped like Enterprise Edition.

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Disambiguating Azure SQL Database Classes

Published 2019-09-18 by Kevin Feasel

Arun Sirpal explains the different types of Azure SQL Database available to us:

I want to do a quick summary post of the many different types of Azure SQL Database available and I am not talking about elastic pools, VMs etc, more so the singleton type.

Azure SQL Database (I call normal mode) – A choice between the DTU model (Basic, Standard and Premium) and vCore (General Purpose and Business Critical). Within this space there are two different architecture types used by Microsoft under the covers.

As the product expands, we get more and more options, and Arun clarifies where each fits.

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