Press "Enter" to skip to content

Curated SQL Posts

(Possible) Shifts in Zero Downtime Mentality

Published 2023-03-27 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones notices a trend:

The last year, however, has had more people looking to implement database DevOps and speed up their development, but not a lot of questions or demands for zero downtime during these deployments. I find that interesting as the world depends more and more on computer systems, and the customer base for many organizations may demand access to the systems at any hour of the day or night.

However, it doesn’t seem that as many people are concerned about small moments of downtime.

My ego would like to tell people that it’s probably because everybody read my post about how zero downtime isn’t really a thing.

Ego aside, it is pretty interesting that Steve’s not finding as much push for minimal downtime. Steve does include a few conjectures as to why it may be so.

Comments closed

Troubleshooting and Fixing Grafana Performance Problems

Published 2023-03-27 by Kevin Feasel

Cameron Kerr tracks down dashboard problems:

Is your Prometheus performance causing your Grafana experience to suffer? Could you explain which of your tens of Grafana dashboards or users are causing performance problems in Prometheus? Let me show you how we unlocked insight into the performance of Grafana and Prometheus, allowing us to answer import service management questions such as:

  • Which dashboards are actually being used?
  • Who is actually using the dashboards?
  • Who has been issuing poorly-performing queries?
  • And which dashboard activity is causing my Prometheus instance(s) to perform poorly?
  • Is it slow because someone has a dashboard showing a year’s worth of data that auto-refreshes every 30 seconds?

Click through for a thorough article on finding performance bottlenecks in a platform which typically helps you find performance bottlenecks in other platforms.

2 Comments

Landing Zone Layouts for Modern Data Warehouses

Published 2023-03-27 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Hernandez builds out a landing zone for a warehouse:

In this article I want to discuss some different layout options for a landing zone in a modern cloud data warehouse architecture. With landing zone, I mean a storage account where raw data lands directly from its source system (not to be confused with a landing zone to move a system or application into the cloud).

One of the things I appreciate a lot about this post is that it covers the history, showing us how we got to where we are. Paul’s well-versed in each step along the way and lays things out clearly.

Comments closed

Troubleshooting HADR_SYNC_COMMIT Waits

Published 2023-03-27 by Kevin Feasel

Jose Manuel Jurado Diaz reviews a wait stat:

Today, I worked on a service request that our customer faced a performance issue in their business critical service tier database. Their main suspect was that the syncronization with the secondary replica has a delay. 

During their troubleshooting process they found that they got many request with the wait type is HADR_SYNC_COMMIT.

Read on to learn more about this wait, including what can cause it. There’s also a bit of information about it in the SQLskills wait state compendium.

Comments closed

Working with Powershell Objects

Published 2023-03-27 by Kevin Feasel

Max Trinidad familiarizes us with objects in Powershell:

Working with PSObjects is essential to anyone using PowerShell. Especially, when there’s a need to extend the object to provide useful information.

Remember, the best way to get familiar with the PowerShell object(‘s)… (AKA PSOBject, .NET Object) is to use the ‘Get-Member’ Cmdlet.

Click through for several tips on how to add custom properties and learn more about what’s available on objects along the way.

Comments closed

When Power Query Might Fold

Published 2023-03-27 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb explains an ambiguity:

This query connects to the TripPin OData feed (which is public, so you’ll be able to try this yourself) and filters the People table so it only gets the rows where the FirstName column equals “Angel”. If you paste this query into the Advanced Editor in Power Query Online to create a dataflow, you’ll see that the filter shows the “Might Fold” step indicator:

Read on to see what that indicator looks like, as well as an explanation of how Power Query doesn’t always know whether or not something is foldable.

Comments closed

Testing Message Ordering in Kafka

Published 2023-03-24 by Kevin Feasel

Francesco Tisiot puts a claim to the test:

One of Apache Kafka®’s most known mantras is “it preserves the message ordering per topic-partition”, but is it always true? In this blog post we’ll analyze a few real scenarios where accepting the dogma without questioning it could result in unexpected, and erroneous, sequences of messages.

There’s a lot more to this than I realized, and Francesco does a great job of explaining it.

Comments closed

Alt Text in R

Published 2023-03-24 by Kevin Feasel

Nicola Rennie looks at different ways to incorporate alt text in R-based images:

Alt text (short for alternative text) is text that describes the appearance and purpose of an image. Alt text has multiple purposes, the main one being that it aids visually impaired users to better understand your content when the alt text is read aloud by screen readers. Alt text is also used in place of an image if it fails to load, which means that users with poor internet connection are more likely to be able to engage with your content.

The ggplot2 example was an interesting one, as I hadn’t ever added alt text to an image there.

Comments closed

Model Deployment using Azure Functions

Published 2023-03-24 by Kevin Feasel

Alexander Billington needs to get that new model out:

Deploying machine learning (ML) models into production can be challenging, as it requires careful consideration of various factors such as scalability, reliability, and maintainability. While developing an ML model is an exciting process, deploying it into production can be a daunting task. The challenges faced in productionising data science projects can range from infrastructure to version control, model monitoring to integration with other systems. This blog will take a look at how Azure Functions can simplify the deployment process, getting models into production quickly and robustly to maximise their value.

I like this approach and find it interesting, as most of the time, the MLOps model Microsoft recommends has you scheduling Azure DevOps pipelines / GitHub Actions periodically or when new training data hits a specific folder. If you have some non-standard trigger for an action, this is a good way to get you going.

Comments closed

Enabling Powershell Constrained Mode

Published 2023-03-24 by Kevin Feasel

Patrick Gruenauer slips on the straightjacket:

In this blog post I am going to show you how to enable the PowerShell Constrained Mode. What is the Constrained Mode? Microsoft explains this as follows:

Click through for that definition, as well as a demonstration and bit more explanation. It seems that there’s a specific use case for constrained mode, and it’s not one most of us are likely to work with.

Comments closed