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Curated SQL Posts

Simplifying a Complex Multi-Visual Chart

Published 2022-04-20 by Kevin Feasel

Amy Esselman re-designs a mess of a chart:

When faced with any unfamiliar but complicated graph, it can be helpful to think about it piece by piece to gain a better understanding of what’s being communicated. That way, we’ll have a better handle on how we can improve the overall visual. 

The goal of this chart is to allow managers to compare their store’s performance against its forecasted range and the actual performance of other stores in the region. 

Click through for the full process.

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Iteratively Tuning Graph Neural Networks

Published 2022-04-20 by Kevin Feasel

Luis Bermudez takes us through the process of tuning one flavor of neural network:

We made our own implementations of OGB leaderboard entries for two popular GNN frameworks: GraphSAGE and a Relational Graph Convolutional Network (RGCN). We then designed and executed an iterative experimentation approach for hyperparameter tuning where we seek a quality model that takes minimal time to train. We define quality by running an unconstrained performance tuning loop, and use the results to set thresholds in a constrained tuning loop that optimizes for training efficiency.

Read on to see how they did it.

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Consolidating Indexes

Published 2022-04-20 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Darling runs through an exercise:

The more columns you have in a table, the more potential column combinations there are for indexes. Much like columns, indexes tend to get added following the path of least resistance.

Very rarely does someone consider current indexes when deciding to add an index.

Erik’s process is a good one. The real pain comes when there are 40-50 indexes on a table (seriously…) and there are a lot of similar-but-not-quite-similar-enough indexes.

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Microsoft Purview

Published 2022-04-20 by Kevin Feasel

Wolfgang Strasser looks at Microsoft Purview:

I was ready for a nice relaxing evening today, when an email appeared in my inbox “Azure Purview is now Microsoft Purview!”

Initially I thought… yeah.. “just another Microsoft product name renaming” .. but when I read through it more in depth I found out, that this is NOT just a renaming.

Read on to understand what it includes.

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Installing Prometheus Exporter for Windows Clients

Published 2022-04-20 by Kevin Feasel

Jamie Wick exports some data:

Prometheus is an open-source monitoring solution that our Linux team has been using for several years. More recently, we began using it for our Windows-based servers too. (I’ll post a writeup about Prometheus in the future)

One of the obstacles to implementing Prometheus monitoring on our Windows servers was finding and installing an agent. We ultimately decided to use the windows_exporter agent available in the Prometheus Community on GitHub. The exporter is free to use under an MIT license and supports an extensive list of WMI metrics that are grouped into Collectors.

Read on for more info, including ways to avoid common errors.

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Imagining a SaaS Plane for Data Mesh in Azure

Published 2022-04-20 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Andrew shares some deep thoughts:

For part 7 of this series, I want to explore what else could be delivered in our Azure Data Mesh if we continue our established thinking around the planes of interaction for our data products. As with part 6, we are still missing good Azure Resources that can deployed for certain situations. However, I want to frontload some concepts now, so we are ready if/when a suitable technical answer arrives in the cloud.

Note that this is all speculative. It’s interesting speculation, though.

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Seeing Top N in Power BI

Published 2022-04-20 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad does some filtering:

I have previously written articles about how you can write a measure in DAX that helps with TOP N filtering. However, you may not need that calculation for many situations. If all you want is just simply to get the top 10 customers based on the sales amount, or bottom 5 products, etc, then you can simply use the visual-level filter GUI to perform this filtering. This is not a new functionality in Power BI, However, many users might not have yet seen it, so I’ll explain it in this short article and blog.

Read on to understand when you can use this and when you should go to TOPN() in DAX.

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Cross-Subscription Restore for Dedicated SQL Pools

Published 2022-04-20 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Howard announces some good news:

We are excited to announce the release of cross-subscription restore. This has been one of our top requested features from customers as it unlocks multiple scenarios from dev/test to simplified billing at the subscription level for restored data warehouses.

Click through to see how you can do this. There was a workaround in the past but this should be quite a bit faster.

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Currying and Partial Application

Published 2022-04-19 by Kevin Feasel

Prakhar explains the difference between currying and partial application:

Currying simply means converting a function taking more than one parameter can be into a series of functions with each taking one parameter. Example:

Click through for an example, as well as the difference between currying and partial application. As for why currying is important, this is how we tie together the concept of mathematical functions, which require exactly one parameter (a function being defined as, for every value of the domain, there is one and only one value of the range), with computer science functions, which may have multiple parameters. Currying allows us to bridge that gap without needing to write loads of intermediary functions.

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Azure Redis Tips

Published 2022-04-19 by Kevin Feasel

Arun Sirpal enumerates some advice:

My learnings on Redis thus far which you may find useful:

1. Location of Redis should be close to your app.

2. Data structures within Redis, larger key value sizes lead to fragmentation of memory space and these larger memory requirements means more network data transfer, Redis states to use 100KB maximum, this will affect the transfer time allocated from the app. It could time out if the data request is big.

Click through for the rest of Arun’s advice. My advice on the 100KB maximum is that it really should be closer to 100 bytes or 1KB max in practice, especially for storing data which differs by entity (user, customer, organization, whatever your domain uses).

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