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Curated SQL Posts

Amazon Redshift 2022 in Review

Published 2023-01-24 by Kevin Feasel

Manan Goel lists what’s been going on with Amazon Redshift:

In 2021, we launched Amazon Redshift Query Editor V2, which is a free web-based tool for data analysts, data scientists, and developers to explore, analyze, and collaborate on data in Amazon Redshift data warehouses and data lakes. In 2022, Query Editor V2 got additional enhancements such as notebook support for improved collaboration to author, organize, and annotate queries; user access through identity provider (IdP) credentials for single sign-on; and the ability to run multiple queries concurrently to improve developer productivity.

Read on for the rest of the highlights.

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Top-nested in KQL

Published 2023-01-24 by Kevin Feasel

Robert Cain continues a series on KQL:

Back in June of 2022 I covered the top operator in my Fun With KQL – Top post. We showed how to create your own top 10 lists, for example what were the top 5 computers ranked by free disk space.

What if you needed your top results in a nested hierarchy? For example, you wanted to know which three objects in the Perf table had the most entries? But, for each one of those, what were the three counters with the most entires?

That’s where the top-nested operator comes in. It allows you to create top lists in nested, also called hierarchical levels.

Click through for the normal slew of examples on how to use this operator.

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Consistency Levels in Cassandra

Published 2023-01-24 by Kevin Feasel

Dmytro Kostenko enumerates some options:

In Cassandra, a consistency level is the number of replicas responding before returning a reply to a user. Consistency in Cassandra is tunable, meaning that each client can consider what level of consistency and availability to choose. Moreover, it is assigned at the query level and can be configured for different service components. Users can choose different consistency levels for each operation, both for reads and writes. While choosing the consistency level for your operation, you should understand each level’s tradeoff between consistency and availability. Cassandra’s consistency can be strong or weak, depending on your chosen level.

Read on to learn more about strong vs weak consistency in the context of Cassandra, as well as the consistency level options available to us.

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SQLCMD Variables in Database Projects

Published 2023-01-24 by Kevin Feasel

Olivier Van Steenlandt can’t live in this static world:

When I started to explore and use Database Projects, I ran into a specific situation quite fast where I was required to use SQLCMD variables. In this blog post, I will describe what they are, how you can use SQLCMD variables in Database Projects and where this might become very useful for you.

Click through for a scenario, a primer on using SQLCMD variables, and some basic details on how to use them in database projects.

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Use Cases for Multiple Data Lakes

Published 2023-01-24 by Kevin Feasel

James Serra explains why you might want multiple data lakes in an organization:

A question I get asked frequently from customers when discussing Data lake architecture is “Should I use one data lake for all my data, or multiple lakes?”. Ideally, you would use just one data lake, but I have seen many valid use cases where customers are using multiple data lakes. Here are some of those reasons:

I’d quibble with a couple of these (and given James’s intro, I’m not sure he’s fully on board with all of the reasons) but this is a good list of reasons why you might see several data lakes in an organization.

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“No Healthy Upstream” Error in vCenter

Published 2023-01-24 by Kevin Feasel

Denny Cherry diagnoses a problem:

Over the weekend, I was configuring our new VMware servers. I was happily working around when all of a sudden, vCenter started showing the hated “no healthy upstream” message on the vCenter website.

Thankfully, this was not the first time I’d seen this happen, and it usually occurs randomly (at least in my experience). The solution is easier than most people would think.

Click through to learn what you should do if you see that error.

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Building a Shiny App in R and Python

Published 2023-01-23 by Kevin Feasel

Nicola Rennie does a language throw-down:

Shiny is an R package that makes it easier to build interactive web apps straight from R. Back in July 2022 at rstudio::conf(2022), Posit (formerly RStudio) announced the release of Shiny for Python. As someone who knows Python but hasn’t written any Python code for quite a long time, I wanted to see how the two compared. So I did the only logical thing and built a Shiny app – twice!

After building (almost) identical Shiny apps, with one built solely in R and the other solely in Python, I’ve written this blog post to take you through some of the things that are the same, and a few things that are slightly different.

Note: at the time of writing Shiny for Python is still in alpha, so if you’re reading this blog quite a while after it was first published, some things may have changed.

The code, as you’d expect, looks quite similar. I also learned about plotnine, something I’ll need to keep in mind. H/T R-Bloggers.

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Q&A on Data Engineering

Published 2023-01-23 by Kevin Feasel

Dustin Vannoy talks to the mirror:

An aspiring data engineer recently reached out to me for some guidance on pivoting into the field from a software development background. The questions they asked are similar to what others have asked me in the past, so I decided to capture my responses here. I link to prior posts and other resources when possible to try and keep the responses brief. These are informal thoughts of mine, not something I have sat down to rethink and research for new ideas beyond what is already in my head.

Dustin is one of the best people to talk to about data engineering. Click through for his advice.

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Well-Architected Framework for Oracle in Azure

Published 2023-01-23 by Kevin Feasel

Kellyn Pot’vin-Gorman has a new tool for us:

This invaluable framework provides clear guidance on the recommended practices to assess, architect and migrate Oracle workloads to the Azure cloud.  This should be the first place for answers to success for Oracle on Azure!

A special thanks to my teammate, Jessica Haessler for working so hard to help me get this to the finish line, as I would have never been able to get this done on my own!  

Click through for a link to the guide. There isn’t a Well-Architected Framework assessment for this yet but the WAF articles themselves have quite a bit of detail to them.

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