Shop Talk: 2023-10-23

The Recording

The Panelists

  • Kevin Feasel
  • Mala Mahadevan
  • Special Guest Star Jared Poche

Notes: Questions and Topics

Nominations for Board Positions Open

There will be an election for two TriPASS board positions this year. Tracy Boggiano and Mike Chrestensen currently hold these positions and are re-running. If you are a TriPASS member in good standing (basically, you’ve signed up on Meetup and haven’t broken any of the bylaws), you can also throw your hat into the ring and run for office. If so, please let me know, either via e-mail (if you have it) or reaching out to me on Meetup.

Plan for the Year

The next order of business was a discussion of our plan for the rest of the year. Because of various holidays, TriPASS usually slows down in November and December, so here’s what you have to look forward to:

  • Rick Pack presented on Tuesday night (video available here), closing out our Data Science and Business Intelligence series for the year. We’ll be back next year with more talks on those topics.
  • There will be no advanced DBA meeting in November because that’s the same week as PASS Summit and Live! 360.
  • Mala Mahadevan will speak at the main meeting on November 21st.
  • Torsten Strauss will close out our Advanced DBA group on December 12th. We’ll be back in 2024 with more advanced DBA meetings as well.
  • Surbhi Pokhama will speak at our final main meeting for the year.
  • Shop Talk will continue every two weeks, though we might miss one in December, as well as the one scheduled for New Year’s Day 2024. Be on the lookout in Meetup closer to December to see if we’re hosting Shop Talk those days.

RCSI and ETL Processes

Mala wanted to talk about a nice article from Michael J. Swart about Read Committed Snapshot Isolation and one risk you can run into if you design ETL processes in a particular way. We talked about the nature of the problem and why it happens, as well as several workarounds. I definitely wouldn’t use this as a reason to avoid RCSI, but it is worth checking your ETL processes to see how they load data.

I also brought up a discussion of RCSI versus Snapshot isolation, using a great blog post from Kendra Little as a guide. I’ll admit that I’ve never actually used Snapshot isolation in a production environment, though I can understand the issue that Kendra mentions in the post.

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