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Curated SQL Posts

False Alarms in Highly Available Postgres Clusters

Published 2023-05-12 by Kevin Feasel

Umair Shahid pulls the alarm:

False alarms can be a significant problem in highly available clusters of PostgreSQL. They can cause unnecessary downtime and disruptions that can impact the performance of the nodes. In this blog post, we will explore the causes, prevention, and resolution of false alarms in PostgreSQL clusters.

It’s a good idea to sit back and think about how complex the problem of high availability is, even if the service (SQL Server, Postgres, or whatever) offers capabilities to simplify a lot of it. The trick is that you want your service to fail over if and only if it needs to, but what tells you if it “needs to” is noisy signal.

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Integrating VBA and R Code

Published 2023-05-11 by Kevin Feasel

Steven Sanderson has become Dr. Moreau. Part 1 shows how to call R code from VBA:

This line defines a subroutine called “CallRnorm”. A subroutine is a block of code that can be executed repeatedly from any part of the code, and it starts with the “Sub” keyword followed by the subroutine name and any arguments in parentheses.

Part 2, as you might expect, covers the obverse:

Yesterday I posted on using VBA to execute R code that is written inside of the VBA script. So today, I will go over a simple example on executing an R script from VBA. So let’s get into the code and what it does.

First, let’s look at the Function called “Run_R_Script”. This function takes four arguments, where the first two are mandatory, and the last two are optional.

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Fixing ORA-26086 in Azure Data Factory Pipelines

Published 2023-05-11 by Kevin Feasel

Emanuele Meazzo fixes a problem:

Turns out, ADF is rightfully trying to insert the rows in bulk, but Oracle doesn’t like it when the sink table has triggers, falling back to row by row insertion seems it’s too much to ask, so you end up with the error.
Searching on the good ‘ol wide web you’ll encounter this solution, that basically tells you to disable bulkload for the whole Oracle connection by setting EnableBulkLoad=0 in the connection string.
That wouldn’t work for me, because I’m bulk loading just fine everywhere else, so either I had to suffer slower performance on all the other inserts by disabling the bulk insert, or I had to create an additional and separate Linked Service to Oracle with the bulk insert disabled: doable but adding maintenance overhead when things change (two secrets to manage instead of one).

My solution? Super dumb.

Read on for a copy of the error message and Emanuele’s solution. There are two philosophies with regard to dumb solutions:

  • If a solution is dumb and it works, it isn’t dumb.
  • If a solution is dumb and it works, it’s still a dumb solution and you just got lucky this time.

I’m not quite sure under which category this falls.

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Calculating Reservation-Based Savings in Azure

Published 2023-05-11 by Kevin Feasel

Saira Shaik reserves some instances:

I have created this dashboard to display the savings made due to the purchase of Reservations or Savings Plans or by signing the agreement with Microsoft to get Azure Commitment Discounts (ACD).
This dashboard is helpful for Customers who:

  • Purchased Reservations or
  • Purchased Savings Plan or
  • Signed Monthly Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC) and got a special discounted price.


Customers can view their savings by uploading the Amortized files into this Power BI file.

Click through to se what the dashboard includes and how it all works. Then, check out Saira’s GitHub repo for the template.

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An Overview of Azure Synapse Analytics

Published 2023-05-11 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Chant offers a primer on Azure Synapse Analytics:

In reality, there are a lot of features within Azure Synapse Analytics where your SQL Server background can prove to be useful.

By the end of this post, you will have a good overview of Azure Synapse Analytics. In addition, where your SQL Server background can prove to be useful. Plus, there are plenty of links included in this post.

This is not the slimmest of primers, which makes sense given how broad Synapse is.

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Which Backups are in a File?

Published 2023-05-11 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones didn’t keep ’em separated:

I had a question on multiple backups in a file and had to check my syntax. This post shows how to see which backups are in a file.

Note: Don’t do this. Put backups in separate files.

Still, if you didn’t follow Steve’s good advice here (or you have an edge case situation where you, for some reason, need to store multiple backups in the same file), there’s a way to check what’s in a file.

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Formatting Visuals in Power BI Desktop

Published 2023-05-11 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad shows off the new visual formatter in Power BI Desktop:

Where is the Format visual option in the new Power BI Desktop? There is a simple answer to this question, which I explained in this blog and video. This change applied from March 2023 version of Power BI Desktop, and by the time you read this article, it might be at general availability and the only way to format a visual in the Power BI Desktop.

I do hope they also keep the old way of formatting visuals, as there appear to be fewer clicks involved.

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An Introduction to Polyglot Notebooks

Published 2023-05-10 by Kevin Feasel

Matt Eland walks us through a sample:

Polyglot Notebooks allows you to create notebooks composed of multiple cells. These cells can be either markdown cells for documentation or code cells containing code in either C#, F#, PowerShell, SQL, KQL, HTML, JavaScript, or mermaid markdown for diagramming.

This allows you to mix together rich documentation supported by little pieces of code that progressively expand upon an idea, tell a story, or otherwise provide insight or information to you as a developer.

Click through for the example. The thing I hadn’t realized—because I don’t really do this in Jupyter—is that you can share variables between languages. That’s a fairly useful feature when you want to do most of your work in one language but just happen to need a library using a different language.

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An Overview of Google BigQuery Pricing Changes

Published 2023-05-10 by Kevin Feasel

Jeremy Pries gets out the checkbook:

Google has announced that a new tiered pricing model for Google BigQuery will come into effect in July. If your organization is already a BigQuery customer or you’re considering it as a data warehouse option, here’s what you need to know about the new pricing structure.

As of July 5, 2023, BigQuery will come with three pricing tiers: Standard, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus. Customers will have the ability to mix and match these editions to suit various workloads.

Read on for what this means and ways you can hope to save some money as a result of the licensing changes. I’m slightly pessimistic about it—only slightly because I’m quite ignorant of BigQuery pricing to begin with, but more than zero pessimism because companies often don’t change licensing terms with the intent of users paying them less.

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