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Curated SQL Posts

The Cloud DBA

Published 2017-02-24 by Kevin Feasel

Kendra Little thinks about the evolution of the DBA role:

Lots of things have been reported to kill the DBA over the years

SQL Server 2005 was said to be “self-tuning”! Who needs a DBA when the instance tunes itself? (Apparently everyone.)

Outsourcing: All the DBA jobs are going to X location, then Y location, then Z location. Then back to X. DBA jobs have become more global, but “outsourcing” hasn’t gotten rid of DBA jobs in the United States. It has been part of the trend to make working remotely more normal and easy, which is generally good for DBAs.

DevOps! All the developers will manage everything. And somehow know to do so.  I love Dev Ops, and I have seen it wipe out some QA departments, but I haven’t seen it wipe out DBAs. I think it’s fun to be a DBA working with a Dev Ops team.

Consider this in contrast to Dave Mason’s concern.  My perspective is a lot closer to Kendra’s, but both posts make the good point that IT roles are ever-shifting.

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Analyzing Flight Data With Sparklyr

Published 2017-02-24 by Kevin Feasel

Aki Ariga continues his sparklyr series with some analysis of US flight data:

In this post, we will show you a visualization and build a predictive model of US flights with sparklyr. Flight visualization code is based on this article.

This post assumes you already have the following tables:

You should make these tables available through Apache Hive or Apache Impala (incubating) with Hue.

There’s some setup work to get this going, but getting a handle on sparklyr looks to be a good idea if you’re in the analytics space.

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Azure Container Service Supports Kubernetes

Published 2017-02-24 by Kevin Feasel

Serdar Yegulalp reports that Azure Container Service now supports the Kubernetes container management system:

Microsoft emphasized “choice” when it originally introduced Azure Container Service. Although it launched without Kubernetes, Azure initially supported Mesosphere DC/OS and Docker Swarm because the majority of Microsoft’s customers used them and the company believed they would be well served by the support.

Since then, Kubernetes has emerged as a clear leader among container orchestration solutions. It is used as an underpinning for deep learning frameworks and the basis for an open source serverless/“lambda” app framework, as well as offered as a managed on-premise service by one company.

Kubernetes on Azure is strictly focused on running Kubernetes within Azure, not providing it as a service elsewhere. But the GA release includes additions meant to appeal to a broad audience of both Linux and Windows Server users, such as support for the latest version of DC/OS (1.8.8).

It’s an interesting world out there.

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RTVS RC1

Published 2017-02-24 by Kevin Feasel

David Smith alerts us that R Tools for Visual Studio Release Candidate 1 is available:

We’ll cover the features in detail with the general availability release of RTVS 1.0, but in summary the new features include:

  • Remote Execution: type R code in your local RTVS instance, but have the computations performed on a remote R server. You can also switch between local and remote workspaces at will.

  • SQL Server Integration: work with database connections and SQL queries, and create stored procedures with embedded R code.

  • Enhanced R Graphics Support: multiple floating and dockable plot windows, each with plot history.

I’ve been using RTVS more frequently lately and it’s definitely growing on me.

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Hadoop 3.0.0-alpha2

Published 2017-02-23 by Kevin Feasel

Andrew Wang and Ray Chaing note that a new Hadoop 3 alpha is now available:

YARN introduces the notion of opportunistic containers in addition to the current guaranteed containers. An opportunistic container is queued at the NodeManager waiting for resources to become available, and run opportunistically so long as resources are available. They are preempted, if and when needed, to make room for guaranteed containers. Running opportunistic containers between the completion of a guaranteed container and the allocation of a new one should improve cluster utilization.

There are a couple other new features, including support for Azure Data Lake Store.

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Using popt To Switch Tabs In Powershell ISE

Published 2017-02-23 by Kevin Feasel

Jana Sattainathan shows how to open a specific Powershell ISE tab without moving your hands off the keyboard:

This is a function that activates a tab based on a partial search string that you type in the CLI portion of the ISE. Among the numerous tabs you have open in the ISE, to activate a tab that has the word “register”, you would just type in

1
popt register

That’s it. The tab that has the word “register” will become active.

Why “popt” instead of a standard name?

“popt” is the alias you can create for the real “search and activate function” Pop-FileInISETab. It stands for “poptab”. You don’t want to trade one problem with another by having to type that long name, so, there is functionality to optionally create an alias named “popt” for the function.

At first I said to myself, “Why would anybody have this many tabs open?”  Then I looked at my instance of SQL Server Management Studio.  Then I decided I wanted this for SSMS.

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SQL Server Error Handling Scenarios

Published 2017-02-23 by Kevin Feasel

Dan Guzman goes into some detail about error handling in SQL Server:

T-SQL and ADO.NET data access code must work in concert with one another to ensure SQL errors are detected in application code. The T-SQL constructs used in multi-statement batches can affect if and how when errors are reported by ADO.NET during batch execution. I’ll start by citing core T-SQL error handling objectives, which can be summarized as:

1) Ensure a multi-statement T-SQL batch doesn’t continue after an error occurs.
2) Rollback transaction after errors.
3) Raise error so that the client application is aware a problem occurred.

Read the whole thing.

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Thinking About Contexts

Published 2017-02-23 by Kevin Feasel

Ewald Cress has started a new series on system internals:

Per-processor partitioning of certain thread management functions makes perfect sense, since we’d aim to minimise the amount of global state. Thus each processor would have its own dispatcher state, its own timer list… And hang on, this is familiar territory we know from SQLOS! The only difference is that SQLOS operates on the premise of virtualising a CPU in the form of a Scheduler, whereas the OS kernel deals with physical CPUs, or at least what it honestly believes to be physical CPUs even in the face of CPU virtualisation.

This is a start to a very interesting series.

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Python + knitr

Published 2017-02-23 by Kevin Feasel

Steph Locke shows how to integrate Python code into knitr:

One of the nifty things about using R is that you can use it for many different purposes and even other languages!

If you want to use Python in your knitr docs or the newish RStudio R notebook functionality, you might encounter some fiddliness getting all the moving parts running on Windows. This is a quick knitr Python Windows setup checklist to make sure you don’t miss any important steps.

Between knitr, Zeppelin, and Jupyter, you should be able to find a cross-compatible notebook which works for you.

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