6 ms·

Things that we pay for. SQL Server: it's not cheap, but it's genuinely good. Live query plans, clustered columnstore indices, linked servers, rich SQL features

by wenc 6y ago

Things that we pay for. SQL Server: it's not cheap, but it's genuinely good. Live query plans, clustered columnstore indices, linked servers, rich SQL features. Tableau: more than a dashboarding tool, it's actually a really good multivariate exploratory data analysis (EDA) tool. You can use it to visualize multidimensional data easily. I do use Jupyter (seaborn, plotly) and R (ggplot2) which are good, but Tableau lets you touch your data and move stuff around in a more fluid fashion. The UI lets you really interact deeply with your data. I find that on a new dataset, I can get usable results out of Tableau faster than if were to muck around with ggplot2's syntax, even though I'm familiar with the latter. There is a learning curve for Tableau though, especially around how to structure your data for visualization (you have to think in SQL-like operations). It's not just dragging-and-dropping -- a certain mindset is required. Active Directory: it's just there. It's pretty decent. Visual Studio: I don't use this every day, but I do maintain a complex C# codebase from time to time (among other things), and Visual Studio (not VS Code! though I like VS Code too) is genuinely a pleasant IDE. I'm a big fan of the C# language and the integration with dev tooling is unparalleled e.g. solid refactoring, peeks, referencing, Intellisense, etc. The IDE supplies a ton of guards to help avoid human errors. Splunk: it's good. Not the cheapest though.

milani 6y ago
Why is Splunk among the bests for you? What is the cheaper alternative?
- wenc 6y ago
  For an on-prem general purpose logging server, it's fast and easy to maintain. The query engine supports fairly complex queries. Did I mention it's fast? Plus it's an industry standard so it's an easier sell in the enterprise. It's also actually not that expensive at low data volumes -- prices are comparable to Sumologic. Cheaper alternatives? You can roll your own logging server with fluentd and a database. Some folks will recommend elasticsearch, but we tried it and it was challenging to set up just right.
  - mrweasel 6y ago
    The minute you say “on-prem” a surprising number of sales people stop talking and just looks terrified. Running and managing an ELK stack is just a hassle and a managing nightmare conpared to Splunk. Humio is a great alternative, if you need something cheaper, but you have to give up a lot of features.
    - haram_masala 6y ago
      Seconding this. If you want to do anything sophisticated in the ELK stack, you’ll eventually have to write some scripted indexes, and it’s a very bad joke how hard it is to do that.
    - user5994461 6y ago
      I've managed a full elastic search + graylog cluster. It was very easy to setup and maintain. https://thehftguy.com/2016/09/12/250-gbday-of-logs-with-graylog-lessons-learned/ https://thehftguy.com/2016/09/12/250-gbday-of-logs-with-gray... By far elasticsearch is the easiest distributed database to setup and scale.
  - gregimba 6y ago
    At what scale is your on premise Splunk? As a member of a team maintaining very large on-prem Splunk service I haven't found maintaining Splunk to be an easy undertaking.
    - wenc 6y ago
      1 server install of Splunk Enterprise. Less than 150mb a day ingest. We installed it over a year ago and haven’t touched it since, aside from updates.
      - user5994461 6y ago
        A typical small deployment is more like 150 GB a day. No wonder you have no issues at that incredibly small scale.
- sandermvanvliet 6y ago
  LogzIO is a hosted ELK stack and does a proper job for us.
- vyrotek 6y ago
  There's www.humio.com
- rorykoehler 6y ago
  Try Graylog
- user5994461 6y ago
  I've used all of Splunk, ELK and Graylog. Should write a longer blog post on the differences. Splunk is miles ahead when it comes to search and visualizations. You can just do things and join that the other tools don't support at all. The only downside is speed, Splunk can only find a few hundreds thousands results a second so it's slow as hell when there are lots of matches. (Kibana doesn't give more than the first 500 results so it's totally cheating on that aspect). ElasticSearch and everything built on top of it has catastrophic issues with typing. Every field is typed, say integer or string, and sending/having data in the wrong type will prevent to do operations (smaller than, greater than, sum, additional) and can crash the database. It's wild whereas Splunk can ingest and aggregate mixed data just fine.
  - dublin 6y ago
    FWIW, Awk and a good SyslogNG catcher is a really good old-school alternative to all these fancy expensive tools, and there is pretty much nothing that you can't do with them...
    - user5994461 6y ago
      I'd certainly recommend syslog-ng rather than logstash, to forward logs to graylog/splunk/kibana. However there is no alternative to these when it comes to search and accessibility. SSH somewhere and awk is not a real option.
BoysenberryPi 6y ago
I definitely am on the opposite side when it comes to Tableau. After you get over the initial learning curve you start to realize that everything in Tableau when working with calculated fields is a workaround. If your data doesn't already look amazing going into Tableau you're in for a bad time.
- Twisell 6y ago
  Was a big fan of tableau and we use it in production. It's a wonderfully exploratory tool. But the real pain start when you have 50+ workbooks and the underlying data model MUST introduce breaking change for whatever reason. There is to my knowledge no way to automate edition of workbooks. You are in for GUI repetitive soul sucking task. Bonus pain if "workaround" are involved. (Just have a look at the support forum... well not the good time they just revamped it... many answer involve 10+ manuals GUI steps) I still use it, overall still pretty good at what it does best. But I'm actively seeking alternative.
  - lazyasciiart 6y ago
    There's this API for limited automation https://www.theinformationlab.co.uk/2016/11/23/tableaus-document-api-python-part-l/ https://www.theinformationlab.co.uk/2016/11/23/tableaus-docu...
  - flatfilefan 6y ago
    Take a look at Qlik (view/sense)
  - Twisell 6y ago
    Also forgot to mention it can't seem to work with array without ugliest hack.
  - kfk 6y ago
    Have you checked Vega? Not as easy to build charts but it’s al done via json which can in theory be changed programmatically
    - 6y ago
Smaug123 6y ago
I'll pick a nit: Visual Studio is not unparalleled; in fact I think Rider is better. (Rider doesn't choke on large solutions to anywhere near the same extent, in my experience.)
- JamesBarney 6y ago
  I haven't used rider but this seems so strange to me because resharper(made by the same people as rider) will cause my $2600 2019 desktop to grind to a screaming hault on small solutions. And as long as I don't install resharper I've found visual studio to be pretty snappier even up to a million loc solutions.
  - Smaug123 6y ago
    Oh, I'm pretty sure we all uninstall Resharper as the first thing we do on a new machine at $WORK :P but VS really does grind to a halt even with ~120 projects in a solution, let alone ~400, whereas the latest EAP Rider is good to go in within minutes. Maybe we have an unusually dense dependency graph or something.
  - taberiand 6y ago
    My understanding is that is largely due to limitations of Visual Studio extensions, not due to performance issues with Reshaper specifically. I have both VS 2019 and Rider installed, Rider is my main IDE and VS I use pretty much only for SQL Server projects. Riders ability to seamlessly handle git branch changes vs Visual Studio choking horribly on the same is worth the (very affordable) price alone.
  - GordonS 6y ago
    I was a VS+R# user for many years, but switched to Rider a few years back - I absolutely love it! I was really sick of the constant slow-downs and occasional crashes in VS. Rider absolutely flies by comparison, and has been rock solid - I've only ever had a crash while testing out an EAP version. Oh, and edit-and-continue just works, whereas it's always been really flakey and slow in VS - that alone was a big productivity boost. Another thing is that JetBrains actually listen to what people want, and are constantly adding useful features that people ask for - by comparison, the VS feedback site feels utterly pointless, as Microsoft apparently ignore it, and instead only focus on adding more Azure integration (which BTW is also excellent in Rider!). The styling takes a bit of getting used to if you've been using Visual Studio for a while, but try a different theme and give it a little time. Rider is one of my favourite ever bits of software.
ta17711771 6y ago
Do you know any way to build .MSI installers from VS Code?

by wenc 6y ago

milani 6y ago

Why is Splunk among the bests for you? What is the cheaper alternative?

wenc 6y ago
For an on-prem general purpose logging server, it's fast and easy to maintain. The query engine supports fairly complex queries. Did I mention it's fast? Plus it's an industry standard so it's an easier sell in the enterprise. It's also actually not that expensive at low data volumes -- prices are comparable to Sumologic. Cheaper alternatives? You can roll your own logging server with fluentd and a database. Some folks will recommend elasticsearch, but we tried it and it was challenging to set up just right.
- mrweasel 6y ago
  The minute you say “on-prem” a surprising number of sales people stop talking and just looks terrified. Running and managing an ELK stack is just a hassle and a managing nightmare conpared to Splunk. Humio is a great alternative, if you need something cheaper, but you have to give up a lot of features.
  - haram_masala 6y ago
    Seconding this. If you want to do anything sophisticated in the ELK stack, you’ll eventually have to write some scripted indexes, and it’s a very bad joke how hard it is to do that.
  - user5994461 6y ago
    I've managed a full elastic search + graylog cluster. It was very easy to setup and maintain. https://thehftguy.com/2016/09/12/250-gbday-of-logs-with-graylog-lessons-learned/ https://thehftguy.com/2016/09/12/250-gbday-of-logs-with-gray... By far elasticsearch is the easiest distributed database to setup and scale.
- gregimba 6y ago
  At what scale is your on premise Splunk? As a member of a team maintaining very large on-prem Splunk service I haven't found maintaining Splunk to be an easy undertaking.
  - wenc 6y ago
    1 server install of Splunk Enterprise. Less than 150mb a day ingest. We installed it over a year ago and haven’t touched it since, aside from updates.
    - user5994461 6y ago
      A typical small deployment is more like 150 GB a day. No wonder you have no issues at that incredibly small scale.
sandermvanvliet 6y ago
LogzIO is a hosted ELK stack and does a proper job for us.
vyrotek 6y ago
There's www.humio.com
rorykoehler 6y ago
Try Graylog
user5994461 6y ago
I've used all of Splunk, ELK and Graylog. Should write a longer blog post on the differences. Splunk is miles ahead when it comes to search and visualizations. You can just do things and join that the other tools don't support at all. The only downside is speed, Splunk can only find a few hundreds thousands results a second so it's slow as hell when there are lots of matches. (Kibana doesn't give more than the first 500 results so it's totally cheating on that aspect). ElasticSearch and everything built on top of it has catastrophic issues with typing. Every field is typed, say integer or string, and sending/having data in the wrong type will prevent to do operations (smaller than, greater than, sum, additional) and can crash the database. It's wild whereas Splunk can ingest and aggregate mixed data just fine.
- dublin 6y ago
  FWIW, Awk and a good SyslogNG catcher is a really good old-school alternative to all these fancy expensive tools, and there is pretty much nothing that you can't do with them...
  - user5994461 6y ago
    I'd certainly recommend syslog-ng rather than logstash, to forward logs to graylog/splunk/kibana. However there is no alternative to these when it comes to search and accessibility. SSH somewhere and awk is not a real option.

BoysenberryPi 6y ago

I definitely am on the opposite side when it comes to Tableau. After you get over the initial learning curve you start to realize that everything in Tableau when working with calculated fields is a workaround. If your data doesn't already look amazing going into Tableau you're in for a bad time.

Twisell 6y ago
Was a big fan of tableau and we use it in production. It's a wonderfully exploratory tool. But the real pain start when you have 50+ workbooks and the underlying data model MUST introduce breaking change for whatever reason. There is to my knowledge no way to automate edition of workbooks. You are in for GUI repetitive soul sucking task. Bonus pain if "workaround" are involved. (Just have a look at the support forum... well not the good time they just revamped it... many answer involve 10+ manuals GUI steps) I still use it, overall still pretty good at what it does best. But I'm actively seeking alternative.
- lazyasciiart 6y ago
  There's this API for limited automation https://www.theinformationlab.co.uk/2016/11/23/tableaus-document-api-python-part-l/ https://www.theinformationlab.co.uk/2016/11/23/tableaus-docu...
- flatfilefan 6y ago
  Take a look at Qlik (view/sense)
- Twisell 6y ago
  Also forgot to mention it can't seem to work with array without ugliest hack.
- kfk 6y ago
  Have you checked Vega? Not as easy to build charts but it’s al done via json which can in theory be changed programmatically
  - 6y ago

Smaug123 6y ago

I'll pick a nit: Visual Studio is not unparalleled; in fact I think Rider is better. (Rider doesn't choke on large solutions to anywhere near the same extent, in my experience.)

JamesBarney 6y ago
I haven't used rider but this seems so strange to me because resharper(made by the same people as rider) will cause my $2600 2019 desktop to grind to a screaming hault on small solutions. And as long as I don't install resharper I've found visual studio to be pretty snappier even up to a million loc solutions.
- Smaug123 6y ago
  Oh, I'm pretty sure we all uninstall Resharper as the first thing we do on a new machine at $WORK :P but VS really does grind to a halt even with ~120 projects in a solution, let alone ~400, whereas the latest EAP Rider is good to go in within minutes. Maybe we have an unusually dense dependency graph or something.
- taberiand 6y ago
  My understanding is that is largely due to limitations of Visual Studio extensions, not due to performance issues with Reshaper specifically. I have both VS 2019 and Rider installed, Rider is my main IDE and VS I use pretty much only for SQL Server projects. Riders ability to seamlessly handle git branch changes vs Visual Studio choking horribly on the same is worth the (very affordable) price alone.
- GordonS 6y ago
  I was a VS+R# user for many years, but switched to Rider a few years back - I absolutely love it! I was really sick of the constant slow-downs and occasional crashes in VS. Rider absolutely flies by comparison, and has been rock solid - I've only ever had a crash while testing out an EAP version. Oh, and edit-and-continue just works, whereas it's always been really flakey and slow in VS - that alone was a big productivity boost. Another thing is that JetBrains actually listen to what people want, and are constantly adding useful features that people ask for - by comparison, the VS feedback site feels utterly pointless, as Microsoft apparently ignore it, and instead only focus on adding more Azure integration (which BTW is also excellent in Rider!). The styling takes a bit of getting used to if you've been using Visual Studio for a while, but try a different theme and give it a little time. Rider is one of my favourite ever bits of software.

ta17711771 6y ago

Do you know any way to build .MSI installers from VS Code?