Erik Darling walks through something that can slow down your temp table loads. The video covers a scenario in which a user creates a temp table, loads some data from it, and also wants to include an identity integer. Erik shows how this can lead to sub-optimal performance, as well as one alternative if you really do need a monotonically increasing value on your temp table.
Comments closedCurated SQL Posts
Randolph West clears up a few misconceptions about SQL Server Management Studio 21’s installer:
There’s been some confusion lately about the SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) installation process for version 21.
Before Microsoft released SSMS 21, you had to download an installer file for each release (ever since SSMS was released as a standalone product with v16). This file eventually grew to be over 1GB, which is a significant download, especially in the case of a minor update.
With SSMS 21, Microsoft changed SSMS to use the Visual Studio installer.
Read on to learn more about the ramifications of this decision. And there is still a way to install SSMS 21 in a secure environment without outbound internet access, although it does require a few more steps in addition to “download executable and then deploy executable to other machines.”
Comments closedMercy Bassey grabs a certificate:
Running Postgres in Docker is great for a quick test but what if you want it to behave like a proper, production-style setup with SSL encryption, certificate-based authentication, persistent volumes, and custom configurations? In this article, we’ll find out how, tackling the various tasks involved such as:
- Generating and using self-signed SSL certificates with Postgres.
- Setting up a PostgreSQL Docker container that uses those certs for encrypted client connections.
- Configuring authentication for both automated services and human users.
- Controling the behavior of your Postgres instance using mounted config files.
Read on to see how.
Comments closedJosephine Bush deploys some resources:
I realized I never created a post to show how to deploy Terraform from VS Code. I haven’t done that in a while because I don’t do it at work. We have Azure DevOps pipelines to handle that, but I like to test my code on the side in my personal environment because I don’t have a pipeline set up to push the code. I don’t need a pipeline in my personal environment.
Now, I feel rusty on Terraform commands and how to run them from VS Code, so I’m writing this blog post so my future self can thank me. I could look it up on someone else’s website or ask an AI, but I would rather document this for myself.
Click through for a primer on those commands.
Comments closedHugo Kornelis dives into the arcane:
But what you probably don’t know is how that hash table is structured. How is the data stored? Where are new rows added, how is the table accessed?
To be fair, none of this is useful knowledge, unless you work for the engine team at Microsoft. And if you do, then you have access to source code and documentation, so you won’t need me to explain this structure to you. So why do I even take the trouble to investigate and describe this structure? Because I am a geek, and geeks love to dig into technical stuff and uncover things they were never meant to uncover.
“Because I can” is a perfectly valid reason to dig into a topic.
Comments closedPhil Yang lays out how to make a migration:
Apache Kafka has made a landmark shift in KIP-500 with the introduction of Kafka Raft (KRaft) mode, eliminating the dependency on Apache ZooKeeper for metadata management. With KRaft, the Kafka nodes themselves can be configured as KRaft controllers – which allow for metadata management and leader elections to work all within just Kafka, resulting in significant performance improvements. This cemented KRaft’s status as the metadata management protocol for Kafka moving forward.
This blog will guide you through the importance of this transition, what migrating from ZooKeeper to KRaft entails, and how we, at NetApp Instaclustr, make this seamless with our automated, streamlined process that is built into our platform.
Click through to see how you can update your own clusters, whether you’re using the Instaclustr service or not.
Comments closedIvan Palomares Carrascosa takes us through a simple natural language processing problem and solution:
It’s no secret that decision tree-based models excel at a wide range of classification and regression tasks, often based on structured, tabular data. However, when combined with the right tools, decision trees also become powerful predictive tools for unstructured data, such as text or images, and even time series data.
This article demonstrates how to build decision trees for text data. Specifically, we will incorporate text representation techniques like TF-IDF and embeddings in decision trees trained for spam email classification, evaluating their performance and comparing the results with another text classification model — all with the aid of Python’s
Scikit-learnlibrary.
Read on for the demos and to see how three different approaches work.
Comments closedMarco Russo and Alberto Ferrari’s example goes sideways:
DAX calculation items do not provide full recursion. However, a limited form of recursion is available, known as sideways recursion. We describe this complex topic through examples. Let us start by understanding what recursion is and why it is essential to discuss it. Recursion may occur when a calculation item refers to itself, resulting in an infinite loop within the application of calculation items (read the linked article in case you are not familiar with the concept of “application”, which is different from “execution”). Let us elaborate on this.
Read on for a demonstration of the principle. I haven’t dug into the topic, but I was curious because I’d never heard of “sideways recursion” before. It turns out that there’s some discussion of it in the DAX community and there was something known as Simpson’s sideways recursions from the 1980s, but I’m not sure if that’s the same thing.
Comments closedGilbert Quevauvilliers wants to download a report:
I am sure we have all had it where there is Power BI report in the service which has been working for a long time. Then there is a requirement to make a change, and NO ONE can find the original PBIX.
There now is an easy way to download the Power BI Report or the Power BI Semantic model from the Power BI Service, and I will show you how to do this!
Click through to see how. No Power BI Report Server jokes this time around, however, because that functionality has been around for a while as long as you have appropriate permissions on the reports themselves.
Comments closedAzCopy is a powerful and performant tool for copying data between Azure Storage and Microsoft OneLake, and is the preferred tool for large-scale data movement due to its ease of use and built-in performance optimizations. AzCopy now supports copying data from firewall-enabled Azure Storage accounts into OneLake using trusted workspace access. Now you can use AzCopy to load data from even network-protected storage accounts, letting you effortlessly load data into OneLake without compromising on security or performance.
Click through for an explanation of trusted workspace access, followed by the steps to try it out for yourself.
Comments closed