Shop Talk: 2024-05-20

The Recording

The Panelists

  • Kevin Feasel
  • Mike Chrestensen

Notes: Questions and Topics

SQL Saturday Richmond Recap

Our first topic was a quick recap of SQL Saturday Richmond. It was good to see the RTP area turnout, as well as some people we don’t get to see very often, like Anders. I also talked about how the SQL Saturday Richmond people gave me 2 hours and 15 minutes to talk about normalization and I still went long. It’s a mad world.

GPT-4o Released and Azure Regions

Our next topic was OpenAI’s release of GPT-4o, a cheaper, faster, multi-modal model. It’s also available in Azure OpenAI, though only two regions as of right now (East US and West US 3). That got us on a winding discussion of Azure regions, including a discussion of what Azure OpenAI resources are available in which region, how Sweden Central gets all the nice stuff, and then a dive into Azure regions as a whole. I brought up several references, including an article on Azure regions.

From there, I had to show the Nuke map, which gives you an idea of the effective zone of a nuclear explosion. Marshall brought up the Mars Bluff atomic weapon blast that affected his grandparents.

Back on Azure regions, I showed one of my favorite sites for pricing; CloudPrice.NET. This started as a discussion of relative region prices and then went into discussion of specific VM costs. Searching across regions is a great way to save money, assuming you have isolated resources and aren’t sending a whole lot of data cross-region.

LLMs and Data-Control Path Insecurity

Bruce Schneier named a security issue I’ve always had some challenge describing: data and control path admixture. This is a real challenge with LLMs today, though it is a solvable problem. It may just take some time to solve.

We also dug into a linked article on prompt injection and had a bit of fun with other topics tangentially related, as happens from time to time (by which I mean “every time”) on Shop Talk.

Shop Talk: 2024-05-06

The Recording

The Panelists

  • Kevin Feasel
  • Mala Mahadevan
  • Mike Chrestensen

Notes: Questions and Topics

Happy Birthday, Happy Graduation Day

First up, we wished Tracy Boggiano a happy birthday, as one does. After that, Mala announced that she’s graduating from a Master’s program in a couple of weeks, so we wished her an early happy graduation day.

T-SQL Tuesday

I gave a sneak preview of this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, which I am hosting. The theme is, what is your favorite job interview question? I talked at some length about questions as the interviewee or candidate, because asking good questions is something a lot of candidates don’t think to do. You’re interviewing the company just as much as the company is interviewing you, after all.

Azure SQL Database Copilot

Mala brought up for discussion an article about the private preview for Azure SQL Database Copilot. Anders mentioned that his company is in the private preview and he was pretty happy with how it worked.

The Unfortunately-Named SUQL

Mala also shared a link to this article on the Structured and Unstructured Query Language, otherwise known as SUQL. I had far too much fun mocking the acronym. As an idea? I dunno, maybe it’ll work out great. But as a name? No, no, no, please talk to the marketing department first.

Anders Has a Song

Anders used Suno to generate a song for the DBA, lyrics, chords, and all. You can and should enjoy it for what it is.

Shop Talk: 2024-04-22

The Recording

The Panelists

  • Kevin Feasel
  • Mala Mahadevan
  • Mike Chrestensen

Notes: Questions and Topics

The EU AI Act

Our first topic came from Mala, covering the EU’s new Artificial Intelligence Act. We covered a press release on the topic and I engaged maximum cynical overdrive on this one. We also walked through a fairly recent article about the EU AI Act’s timeline, and I spent an inordinate amount of time talking about how Germans use passive voice far too often for my taste.

Upcoming Events

There are a few upcoming events that we highlighted:

GitHub Comments as a Malware Vector

Our final article of the night came from Bleeping Computer, where Lawrence Abrams wrote about an interesting malware distribution vector. The way this works is really tricky because GitHub repo owners won’t know about file uploads associated with their repositories. The attacker isn’t actually messing with repo code or anything of the like, but rather uploading files as part of comments, and the file upload happens even if the attacker doesn’t post the comment. From there, the attacker rides on the reputation of the GitHub repo or account owner to try to sneak one over on people.

Shop Talk: 2024-04-08

The Recording

The Panelists

  • Kevin Feasel
  • Mala Mahadevan

Notes: Questions and Topics

Happy Disappearing Sun Day

There was an eclipse, though the Research Triangle area didn’t have a good view of it, so Mala and I riffed on it a little bit.

Hype Versus Reality: Direct Lake

Our first real topic was a great article by Marco Russo, with input from Kurt Buhler, on Direct Lake and where it actually fits in the Power BI world. I think it’s perfectly fair to talk up Direct Lake as a very nice capability, while still recognizing that it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution or a total replacement for anything currently in place.

How to Create a Legendarily Bad Database

Mala gave us the heads up on our other topic of the night, an article by David Tate on how to create a legendarily bad database. I was concerned that the advice would create a merely bad database, but I think David does a good job of taking it the extra mile and making me want to nuke the setup from orbit, because it’s the only way to be sure.

Shop Talk: 2024-03-25

The Recording

The Panelists

  • Kevin Feasel
  • Mike Chrestensen
  • Mala Mahadevan
  • Special Guest Star Bart Vernaillen

Notes: Questions and Topics

Bart Talks Performance

Our first topic was a bit of an interview, one that Mala put together with Bart Vernaillen, a Belgian consultant who has developed a couple tools around shredding execution plans, finding good index candidates, and so on. He showed off a bit of his work and talked about potential future plans. If you want to learn more about his tools, reach out to him on LinkedIn and say TriPASS sent you.

Regex Support in Azure SQL DB

Microsoft has introduced a private preview of regular expression support in Azure SQL Database. Anders and I went back and forth a bit on the value of this, with Anders being strongly opposed and me being generally in favor.

Mike Likes Azure Data Studio

We wrapped the show up with a quick discussion of why Mike really like Azure Data Studio. If you haven’t used Azure Data Studio in the past, the discussion may be of interest to you. The product isn’t for everybody—if you’re a classic DBA, you’re going to find the product more limiting than SQL Server Management Studio. But for developers or people with hybrid roles, Azure Data Studio has matured into a good tool.

Shop Talk: 2024-02-26

The Recording

The Panelists

  • Kevin Feasel
  • Mike Chrestensen

Notes: Questions and Topics

Performance Tuning Large Execution Plans

Our first topic comes from Mike and is all about how to tune queries that result in large execution plans. I went through a couple of techniques but mostly focused on using Solarwinds Plan Explorer. This free tool is fantastic for analyzing SQL Server queries and I talk about some of its coolest functionality. I used an old Brent Ozar post as an example of a, uh, large execution plan.

Anders mentioned a pair of Grant Fritchey books that are also quite helpful. SQL Server 2022 Query Performance Tuning is a powerhouse of a book and I highly recommend it. And his SQL Server Execution Plans book is free from Red Gate, so grab a copy of that for free.

A Book Review

After that, I talked about a book review of Peter Carter’s book 100 SQL Server Mistakes and How to Avoid Them. I have a lengthier blog post that covers my full thoughts so check that out. Short version: I recommend buying the book, even though I don’t agree with everything in it.

ORDER BY Not in SELECT

Our next topic involved a bit of trivia: in SQL Server, you can have columns in your ORDER BY clause that do not appear in your SELECT clause. For a long time, this was not possible in Oracle, as Mike points out, but by Oracle 19C, you now have that ability, too.

Terminology Time

The final topic we hit was a bit of terminology, where I helped explain to Mike the difference between a few terms. As I noted on the video, I’m definitely not the poster child for terminological exactitude, but I did have the answers for this one. My answers are:

  • Clause — A primary part of a SQL statement or query. Examples include SELECT, FROM, WHERE, GROUP BY, HAVING, ORDER BY, etc.
  • Statement — An operation that does not return a value. For example, I can run an UPDATE statement. It updates my table but does not return anything. In T-SQL, CASE is not a statement because it returns something. In F#, case is not a statement because it returns something. In C#, case is a statement because does not return anything.
  • Expression — An operation that returns a value of a particular type. In T-SQL, CASE is an expression because you have to return something: that’s the THEN part of a CASE expression, as in, CASE WHEN <predicate> THEN <thing to return> END. Speaking of predicates:
  • Predicate — An expression that returns TRUE, FALSE, or (in T-SQL) UNKNOWN. The contents of your WHERE clause is a predicate, but so is each bit within your WHERE clause: T1.Col1 > 3 is a predicate, because, for each row, T1.Col1 is either greater than 3, less than 3, or NULL. And the combination of T1.COL1 > 3 AND T2.Col2 < 17 is a predicate: the whole returns one of true, false, or unknown. Butt so do each of the parts making up the whole predicate.

Shop Talk: 2024-02-12

The Recording

The Panelists

  • Kevin Feasel
  • Mike Chrestensen

Notes: Questions and Topics

HYCU and Azure Backup

Our first topic was a viewer request from the prior show and was about HYCU and Azure Backup. I wasn’t familiar with HYCU and so I spent a little bit of time looking at their Azure offering and their data protection documentation. I still haven’t tried it out but that didn’t stop me from talking about it!

OpenPilot

This was a departure from the normal data platform fare, but I’ve been using Openpilot and the Comma 3X a lot for assisted driving. Behaviors are a lot smoother than my stock driver assist options, especially when I’m not on highways. It’s definitely not perfect for me, especially in how it tries (and fails) to make smooth turns, but a surprisingly large percentage of my driving involves driving approximately in a straight line, and this does a fantastic job of that.

Shop Talk: 2024-01-29

The Recording

The Panelists

  • Kevin Feasel
  • Mike Chrestensen

Notes: Questions and Topics

Live! 360 Call for Speakers Open

We opened up with a note that the Live! 360 call for speakers is currently open. I’ve had the fortune to be able to speak there several years now and I think it’s an excellent conference covering a wide variety of tech tracks.

The Modern Data Stack

Friend of the show Chris Voss chimed in with the major theme for the night: the modern data stack.

Summarizing Chris’s question in my own words:

  • What, exactly, is the modern data stack? Many companies are selling it as cloud-native (or at least cloud-first) services, consolidating data lakes and data warehouses together.
  • Is this concept just a bunch of marketing hype or is there something real to it?

We spent a lot of time talking about Microsoft Fabric, data lakes and lakehouses, and a variety of other topics in and around the “modern data stack” idea.

Shop Talk: 2024-01-15

The Recording

The Panelists

  • Kevin Feasel

Notes: Questions and Topics

Hugo Kornelis on MERGE

The main topic of the night was reviewing a great blog post by Hugo Kornelis on the current status of the MERGE operator in T-SQL. Hugo builds this on top of work that Aaron Bertrand pioneered and Michael J. Swart walked through a couple years back.

I have no problem with any of Hugo’s conclusions and appreciate the level of effort he went through. In fact, after reading the blog post, I’ve changed my mind on MERGE. Early on, I was gung-ho about it because I knew about Oracle’s UPSERT and wanted an equivalent for SQL Server. But once all the bugs and horror stories came out about MERGE, I stopped using it altogether. Now, it’s good to know that most of the problems have been fixed. There are still some cases in which you don’t want to use MERGE and Hugo highlights those instances, but for the rest of the time, it’s just as safe as having separate operations for insert, update, and delete operations.

F# and the CLR

Our other topic was around a ticket I’ve been watching for a few years to support F# in the SQL Server CLR. I got a rush of excitement when it was closed as fixed, but after a bit of confusion, the ticket was re-opened and it’s still awaiting work. Hopefully this will make its way out to the world someday. It would have been a great addition 15 years ago, when the CLR was still novel, as F# is an excellent language for the small types of functions that work well as CLR functions. But still, better late than never.

Shop Talk: 2024-01-01

The Recording

The Panelists

  • Kevin Feasel
  • Mala Mahadevan

Notes: Questions and Topics

TriPASS Election Results

Our first topic of the night was TriPASS election results. With a resounding percentage of the vote, Tracy Boggiano and Mike Chrestensen are still stuck doing work for me TriPASS board members. I congratulate them and am glad to have them (as well as all of the board members) aboard.

Is SQL Server Old and Not Exciting?

Mala brought up the first real topic of the night, in which we talked a bit about how exciting SQL Server is. My belief is that yes, it’s not exciting for most people, but that’s okay: it works and it works well. That said, even within that answer, I’d still say that there are plenty of things in the product which do excite me. Of course, I’ve also focused a large portion of my career around SQL Server, so you’d hope that it would interest me.

I have a longer answer in the segment but basically, relational databases aren’t exciting and that’s generally a good thing. Exciting data platform technologies tend to lose your important data, even if they’re web-scale.

Skepticism of Low-Code Solutions

The other article was an interesting blog post from Nick Scialli on low-code products. I agree with the crux of the article and we spent a good amount of time talking about it, reminiscing about FoxPro, doing the opposite of reminiscing about PowerBuilder, and plenty more.