Interesting Stuff - Week 28

Throughout the week, I read a lot of blog-posts, articles, and so forth, that has to do with things that interest me:

• data science
• data in general
• distributed computing
• SQL Server
• transactions (both db as well as non db)
• and other "stuff"

This blog-post is the "roundup" of the things that have been most interesting to me, for the week just ending.

Install Confluent Platform (Kafka) on Windows

You who follows my blog and have read my weekly roundups you know that I am quite (that is an understatement) interested in Apache Kafka and I am curious to find out what "cool" things one can do with it. For that, I want to be able to test "stuff" quickly. When I test and try out new things, I usually do it on my development box which contains everything I need: SQL Server, RabbitMQ, RStudio, Microsoft Machine Learning Server, Visual Studio and the list goes on.

So seeing that I have most of my "tools of the trade" on my machine I obviously also would like to have Kafka on the box. Herein lies a problem, I am a Windows dude and Kafka, and Windows do not gel. Yes, some people are running Kafka on Windows, but it is a chore. OK, so what to do? Sure, I could potentially run Kafka on a virtual machine, or in a Docker image, but it is not as transparent as I would like it to be (yeah, I am lazy).

Hmm, Microsoft did introduce the ability to run Linux binary executables (in ELF format) natively on Windows 10 in Windows 10 version 1607. The feature is called Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), and since I am now running version 1803, maybe I should try and install Kafka in WSL.

Interesting Stuff - Week 27

Throughout the week, I read a lot of blog-posts, articles, and so forth, that has to do with things that interest me:

• data science
• data in general
• distributed computing
• SQL Server
• transactions (both db as well as non db)
• and other "stuff"

This blog-post is the "roundup" of the things that have been most interesting to me, for the week just ending.

sp_execute_external_script and SQL Compute Context - II

I wrote the post sp_execute_external_script and SQL Compute Context - I about how the SQL Server Compute Context (SQLCC) works with sp_execute_external_script (SPEES), as I wanted to correct some mistakes I did in the Microsoft SQL Server R Services - sp_execute_external_script - III post. I initially thought one post would be enough, but quite soon I realised I was too optimistic, and at least one more post would be needed, if not more. So this is the first followup post about SPEES and SQLCC.

To see other posts (including this) in the series, go to sp_execute_external_script and SQL Server Compute Context.

One of the reasons for me realising that one post is not enough is that while I wrote and executed code for the first post, I noticed some fairly significant performance differences using SQLCC compared to not using SQLCC (SQLCC performed better :)). So that is part of what we look at in this post.

Interesting Stuff - Week 26

Geez, does time fly or what? We are already past the halfway mark of the year! Anyway, throughout the week, I read a lot of blog-posts, articles, and so forth, that has to do with things that interest me:

• data science
• data in general
• distributed computing
• SQL Server
• transactions (both db as well as non db)
• and other "stuff"

This blog-post is the "roundup" of the things that have been most interesting to me, for the week just ending.