Like any good homelabber, I sometimes get the urge to ājust try somethingā late at night. This time, that āsomethingā was AdGuard Home, a DNS-level ad blocker and filtering service. My plan was simple: spin up AdGuard in Docker, point pfSense at it, and bask in an ad-free, privacy-respecting LAN.…
Snowflake has quickly become one of the most popular cloud data platforms ā and for good reason. Its separation of storage and compute, pay-as-you-go scalability, and unique features like zero-copy cloning and time travel make it a powerful tool for modern data teams. But for many engineers, the challenge isnāt…
Given that I can seemingly never just leave well enough alone, I recently decided to pick up a used 8-core/16-thread Intel Core i9-9900K CPU off eBay to āupgradeā my NAS (which was running a humble 6-core i5-9500T). The idea was simple: 16 threads would let me dedicate 8 to…
After something of a homelab hiatus, Iām back at it in full force. Although Iāve had the hardware for a while, Iād been putting off migrating my Plex/Arr stack (and its ever-growing media library) from my Dell R730 Proxmox server to my DIY Unraid NAS. The…
While it's probably not the best thing to admit, I've been neglecting my homelab for some time now. Gotify had been giving me errors for a at least a month and eventually seemed to stop working entirely. So it wasn't a complete surprise when…
Weāve covered everything from architecture to performance and cost management in Azure Synapse. Now, letās close out the series with a practical guide to monitoring, troubleshooting, and applying best practices to keep your data warehouse running smoothly. Even the best-designed pipelines need visibility and tuningāthis is where…
In previous posts, weāve talked about designing tables, distributing data, and writing efficient queries. Now letās turn our attention to resource managementāa crucial area for both performance and cost control in Azure Synapse Dedicated SQL Pools. Synapse gives you tools to scale compute, manage concurrency, and minimize…
Once youāve designed your tables and chosen the right distribution strategy, the next big lever for performance is query optimization. In Azure Synapse Dedicated SQL Pools, this means writing efficient SQL, minimizing data movement, and ensuring the engine has the information it needs to generate the best query plan.…