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Curated SQL Posts

Building a URL Redirect Service in Azure

Published 2023-03-07 by Kevin Feasel

Bob Pusateri spams the 302 response code:

In WordPress, I used a plugin called Redirection, which enabled me to create URLs that would redirect to other websites. They can come in handy, especially when presenting. I’ll often create a custom redirect link for each presentation I give that will point my attendees toward my resources for that topic. For example, if I were giving a talk about isolation levels, I might direct attendees to visit https://sqlbob.com/isolation, which would redirect them to my GitHub repo with links to slides, demo code, and other materials.

But a HTML file really can’t redirect you to another page. To be fair, you can do it via a <meta> tag, but it’s not guaranteed to work in all browsers. I’m told there’s also a way to do it in JavaScript, but I really wanted a seamless experience for users like the Redirection plugin offered. I also was in need of a little project over the winter months.

Click through for Bob’s solution to the problem.

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Trying Azure SQL DB Hyperscale Serverless

Published 2023-03-07 by Kevin Feasel

Reitse Eskens ran out of money on our behalf:

In one of my last blogs, I wrote about my first encounter with the Azure Hyperscale Serverless offering. Now it’s time to dig a bit deeper and what it’s up to.

Disclaimer. Azure Hyperscale Serverless is in preview and one of the things that isn’t active yet, is the auto shutdown. This means that it will stay online 24/7. And bill you for every second it’s online. In my case, this meant that my Visual Studio credits ran out and I couldn’t use my Azure subscription anymore. Keep it in mind when testing this out, especially if your credit card is connected to said subscription.

Click through to see what Reitse was able to do in the meantime, before those Azure credits ran out for the month.

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Tips for People Moving to Postgres

Published 2023-03-06 by Kevin Feasel

Ryan Booz shares a few bits of advice about people learning about Postgres:

I was much further in my SQL Server career than I should have been before I understood the usefulness of APPLY in T-SQL. I didn’t realize that APPLY isn’t a SQL standard and so when I started using PostgreSQL and needed similar functionality, I was perplexed trying to find the equivalent. Fortunately, I wasn’t the only one searching.

My recollection here is that Microsoft introduced the APPLY operator before there was an ANSI standard, so as long as my memory isn’t faulty here, this wasn’t a case of a vendor just deciding to name something differently for the sake of it.

Regardless, Ryan has a lot of good advice for learners of PL/SQL.

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Removing SQL Server Native Client 2012

Published 2023-03-06 by Kevin Feasel

Sean Gallardy answers a question:

I see many questions, and have been on the receiving end of many myself, about out of support items and removing them from their SQL Server servers. One of these items is the SQL Server Native Client, aka SNAC, aka SQLNCLI, and I’m sure many others. I remember investigating the connections a very long time ago when availability groups first came around (2012) and haven’t looked at it since that time. A question on the database administrators stack exchange asked the question about if SNAC could be removed on a SQL Server 2019 instance used in high availability and my gut reaction was, “nope.” Gut reactions are great but not always correct, so I did a little testing.

Click through for the results of Sean’s testing.

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SqlPackage Support for the Serverless SQL Pool

Published 2023-03-06 by Kevin Feasel

Rui Cunha announces an update to SqlPackage.exe:

SqlPackage release 161.8089.0, dated February 13, 2023, brings a new feature: support for Synapse serverless SQL pools. According to the release notes, you can use SqlPackage to extract and publish both external and internal objects from serverless SQL pools. This includes the T-SQL surface area of serverless SQL pools is limited by design to external tables, external views, stored procedures, functions, statistics, and credentials. 

The following features are included in support for serverless SQL pools:

  • delta external file format
  • openrowset provider CosmosDB with PROVIDER, CONNECTION, OBJECT, and CREDENTIAL or SERVER_CREDENTIAL specified
  • openrowset format SStream
  • with () clause on openrowset

Rui also includes a quick demonstration of this new functionality.

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Text Search Performance Optimization in Power BI

Published 2023-03-06 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb provides advice about a relatively new feature:

In the blog post for the October 2022 release of Power BI Desktop there’s a brief description of a new optimisation in Power BI for filters that perform searches in text columns. In this blog post I’m going to share more details about this optimisation and how you can make sure your reports can benefit from it.

Read on to learn a bit more about how it works, as well as a few tips on ensuring that you’re able to take full advantage of this optimization.

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Visualizing PyTorch Models

Published 2023-03-03 by Kevin Feasel

Adrian Tam describes a model:

PyTorch is a deep learning library. You can build very sophisticated deep learning models with PyTorch. However, there are times you want to have a graphical representation of your model architecture. In this post, you will learn:

  • How to save your PyTorch model in an exchange format
  • How to use Netron to create a graphical representation.

Click through for the article, which is mostly about training the PyTorch model. Visualizing it turns out to be pretty easy with the right tool.

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Understanding the Fold Function

Published 2023-03-03 by Kevin Feasel

Prakhar takes us through the fold function in functional programming, using Scala as the language of choice:

“fold” is a common operation in programming languages including Scala where we essentially use it to “reduce” (note that “reduce” is also an operation in programming languages and has a special meaning in Scala as well). In this blog, we will learn how to use the fold function, understand different types of fold operations (including foldLeft and foldRight), and try to understand how it all works. Although fold operation can be applied on Option, Future, Try, etc.. but here we will understand it through List

Fold is extremely useful for things like “I want to calculate a sum but it’s got to be a conditional sum” or when you have more complex mathematical operations to combine elements together. It can take a while to get comfortable with the syntax, but once you do, it opens mental doors.

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