Software Engineering Tag

Out at Shine's various client sites, our teams often meet to discuss the pros and cons of various technical solutions. And in the past, there was one particular Shine manager who, if he was in attendance, would regularly pipe up and ask the question: what's the problem we're actually trying to solve?

08 January, 2020 /

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Shine’s TEL group was established in 2011, like the date is important. We publicise the great technical work that Shine does, and raise the company’s profile as a technical thought-leader in the community through blogs, local meetup talks, conference presentations, and tattooing our logo on drunk developers. We curate all the noteworthy things that Shiners have been doing and publish a newsletter that nobody reads. Join us for a slightly festive edition. After all, nobody does Christmas better than corporate blogs.
21 December, 2018 /

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Shine’s TEL group was established in 2011, initially as a three-piece old-school-bebop Jazz combo but expanded to include a horn section during our worldwide tour of Iceland. We publicise the great technical work that Shine does, and raise the company’s profile as a technical thought-leader in the community through blogs, local meetup talks, conference presentations, and driving around shouting out of car windows. We curate all the noteworthy things that Shiners have been up to and publish a newsletter that nobody reads.
11 October, 2018 /

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Shine’s TEL group was established in 2011, initially to share jam-making recipes. We publicise the great technical work that Shine does, and raise the company’s profile as a technical thought-leader in the community through blogs, local meetup talks, and conference presentations. We curate all the noteworthy things that Shiners have been up to and publish a newsletter, this very one that you're reading right now. Hey, when you read this, whose voice do you hear in your head? Is it mine? Or yours? Everything I read is in Frank Walker from National Tiles' voice, please help me. Read on for this edition.
08 August, 2018 /

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Shine’s TEL group was established in 2011, initially as a money-laundering operation. We publicise the great technical work that Shine does, and raise the company’s profile as a technical thought-leader in the community through blogs, local meetup talks, and conference presentations. We curate all the noteworthy things that Shiners have been up to and publish a newsletter, in accordance with a mystical schedule that you wouldn't understand. Read on for this edition.
01 June, 2018 /

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Some background

When we started using Google BigQuery - almost five years ago now - it didn't have any partitioning functionality built into it.  Heck, queries cost $20 p/TB back then too for goodness' sake!  To compensate for this lack of functionality and to save costs, we had to manually shard our tables using the well known _YYYYMMDD suffix pattern just like everyone else.  This works fine, but it's quite cumbersome, has some hard limits, and your SQL can quickly becomes unruly. Then about a year ago, the BigQuery team released ingestion time partitioning.  This allowed users to partition tables based on the load/arrival time of the data, or by explicitly stating the partition to load the data into (using the $ syntax).  By using the _PARTITIONTIME pseudo-column, users were more easily able to craft their SQL, and save costs by only addressing the necessary partition(s).  It was a major milestone for the BigQuery engineering team, and we were quick to adopt it into our data pipelines.  We rejoiced and gave each other a lot of high-fives.
09 April, 2018 /

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Shine’s TEL group was established in 2011 with the aim of publicising the great technical work that Shine does, and to raise the company’s profile as a technical thought-leader in the community through blogs, local meet up talks, and conference presentations. Every now and then (it started off as being monthly, but that was too much work), we curate all the noteworthy things that Shiners have been up to, and publish a newsletter. Read on for this month's edition.
16 February, 2018 /

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Shine's good friend Felipe Hoffa from Google was in Melbourne recently, and he took the time to catch up with our resident Google Developer Expert, Graham Polley. But, instead of just sitting down over a boring old coffee, they decided to take an iconic tram ride...

25 January, 2018 /

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Intro

Post update: My good friend Lak over at Google has come up with a fifth option! He suggests using Cloud Dataprep to achieve the same. You can read his blog post about that over here. I had thought about using Dataprep, but because it actually spins up a Dataflow job under-the-hood, I decided to omit it from my list. That's because it will take a lot longer to run (the cluster needs to spin up and it issues export and import commands to BigQuery), rather than issuing a query job directly to the BigQuery API. Also, there are extra costs involved with this approach (the query itself, the Dataflow job, and a Dataprep surcharge - ouch!). But, as Lak pointed out, this would be a good solution if you want to transform your data, instead of issuing a pure SQL request. However, I'd argue that can be done directly in SQL too ;-) Not so long ago, I wrote a blog post about how you can use Google Apps Script to schedule BigQuery jobs. You can find that post right here. Go have a read of it now. I promise you'll enjoy it. The post got quite a bit of attention, and I was actually surprised that people actually take the time out to read my drivel. It's clear that BigQuery's popularity is growing fast. I'm seeing more content popping up in my feeds than ever before (mostly from me because that's all I really blog about). However, as awesome as BigQuery is, one glaring gap in its arsenal of weapons is the lack of a built-in job scheduler, or an easy way to do it outside of BigQuery. That said however, I'm pretty sure that the boffins over in Googley-woogley-world are currently working on remedying that - by either adding schedulers to Cloud Functions, or by baking something directly into the BigQuery API itself. Or maybe both? Who knows!
21 January, 2018 /

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