Interesting Stuff - Week 37

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.

SQL Server

SQL Server Execution Plans, 3rd Edition. The third edition of Grant Fritchey’s excellent book about SQL Server Query Plans. If you are a developer or a DBA, you need to get this book (and read it).

Distributed Computing

Complex Event Flows in Distributed Systems. This is an InfoQ presentation how lightweight and highly-scalable state machines ease the handling of complex logic and flows in distributed systems.

Azure

Real-time data analytics and Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2. Microsoft recently announced Azure Data Lake Storage Gen 2 (ADLS2), and this blog post looks at how ADLS2 can be used for real-time analytics. ADLS2 is at the moment in preview. I certainly hope that MS releases it soon.

Streaming

Keystone Real-time Stream Processing Platform. This is a blog post about Keystone; Netflix’s data backbone. It is an essential piece of infrastructure focusing on data analytics. I found this post very interesting, and if you are interested in stream processing, you should really read this post.
Streams and Tables: Two Sides of the Same Coin. This blog post announces the availability of the white-paper Streams and Tables: Two Sides of the Same Coin. The paper introduces the Dual Streaming Model, which is used to reason about physical and logical order in data stream processing. This is a MUST read!
Hands on: Building a Streaming Application with KSQL. In this blog post, we see how we can build a demo streaming application with KSQL, the streaming SQL engine for Apache Kafka. The application continuously computes, in real time, top music charts based on a stream of song play events.

SQL Saturday

So the SQL Saturday “season” is over for me for this year. I did one talk in Johannesburg, two in Cape Town ( this and this), and one in Durban.

In addition to the conference talks I also did a full-day workshop in Cape Town and Durban about SQL Server Machine Learning Services: A Day of SQL Server Machine Learning Services with Niels Berglund.

When we talk about SQL Saturdays I want to thank the organisers in the various cities:

Michael Johnson and team in Johannesburg.
Jody Roberts and Jeanne Combrink and their team in Cape Town.
Jodi Craig and team in Durban.

They are doing a fantastic work, entirely voluntarily. A HUGE, HUGE THANK YOU to all of you!

SQL Server Machine Learning Services

Now when SQL Saturday is over, I plan to get back to write about SQL Server Machine Learning Services. I am working right now on the third post in the Install R Packages in SQL Server ML Services series. I hope to be able to publish it in a week or two.

~ Finally

That’s all for this week. I hope you enjoy what I did put together. If you have ideas for what to cover, please comment on this post or ping me.