Kusto: Creating an IfExists function to check if a table exists

One of the things I find lacking in Kusto is an explicit way to test for the existence of a table: in both Azure SQL and Azure Data Lake, the ifexists function and exists compiler directive, respectively served this purpose.

Kusto doesn’t seem to have an explicit statement supporting this, but you can roll your own using the isfuzzy union argument. The isfuzzy argument basically says that a union should run as long as at least one table exists.

So here’s how to create your own “ifexists” function for kusto.

Write a function that takes a table name as a string input. Within the function itself, create a datatable with a single row named Exists with a value of 0.

Then union that datatable with the function input using the table operator like so and do a count of rows alias with the name Exists. I’d limit this to a single row, so you minimize execution.

Finally, sum up the Exists column result of your union so that you have only a single row. If the tablename from the input exists and has at least one row, your function will return 1. If it doesn’t exist or is empty, your function will return 0.

When using this, you convert the table output of the function to a scalar value using the toscalar function, like so. That’s it.

Of course, you don’t have to use this as a distinct function: you could simply have a fuzzy union in your code.

There is another way to do this if you’re writing an ETL function that acts differently depending on whether the table exists. We do this with very large telemetry sets when we just want to pull new values rather than pulling months’ worth of data and overwriting.

When we’re actively developing such a function, we may need to change the schema or do a compete reload. So if the table doesn’t exist, we want to pull a much larger set of data rather than just the past day or so.

Here’s the trick: once a function is compiled, it will run regardless of whether the tables upon which it relies exist. When you aggregate a non-existent table to a single row and convert the output to a scalar—say, the most recent datetime—Kusto returns a null value without any error. We check if that value isempty, and if it is, we grab several months’ worth of data, rather than just the new rows.

Kusto: Creating Dimensions with the datatable operator

I’m Mike O’Neill and I’m a data nerd who uses Azure Data Explorer, or Kusto, every day to glean insights into Azure’s developer and code-to-customers operations.

In my last video, I talked about how to assess a new data source to identify potential simple dimensions.

Kusto presents a singular problem for creating simple dimensions, especially when you’re used to storing dimensions as a table. You can’t create a little table as you would in Azure SQL and just insert and update values as you please. You also can’t repeatedly overwrite a stream as I used to do in Azure Data Lake.

In fact, you can’t really update anything in Kusto, nor can you overwrite a table that easily either. But Kusto does have an interesting workaround: you can write a list of comma-delimited values, use the datatable operator to make it into a table, and embed that into a function. Need to make changes? Just edit the text.

Let me give you a real example I wrote last week. One of the things I need to track for Azure’s engineering pipeline work is the name of the datacenter to which we’re deploy. Now, there’s nothing secret about this dimension: I pulled the info from these two public webpages.

Instead of creating a table like I would in Azure SQL, I just format all the values as a CSV, and then wrap it with the datatable operator. That operator requires three things: the operator itself, the schema immediately after it, and then a pair of square brackets around the CSV values.

Create that as a function, et voila, you’ve got a dimension. Anytime I need to update the values, I just update the function.

It’s not a perfect solution, however: because you’re just working with text, you’ve got none of the referential integrity capabilities of Azure SQL. Nor can you easily rebuild the dimension programmatically so that you don’t make silly mistakes.

I made that mistake last week, though it was with a mapping function with about 300 values rather than a pure, simple dimension. My colleague left a comment on my pull request, asking me to “find Waldo.” It was a friendly tease because I hadn’t bothered to do a simple check for duplicates.

If you use this method, you’ll need to be extra careful to maintain and run regular unit tests every time you alter the function.

And since early March, all of us in the State of Washington have been living through social distancing for the novel corona virus, my colleague teased me a little bit more, with this new version of “where’s Waldo.”

Stay healthy.

Kusto & Data quality: identifying potential dimensions

I’m Mike O’Neill and I’m a data nerd who uses Azure Data Explorer, or Kusto, every day to glean insights into Azure’s developer and code-to-customers operations.

A data engineering lead I work with recently asked me what his team should do to deliver high quality data. I’ve lucky enough to spend most of my career in organizations with a data-driven culture, so it’s the first time I’ve been in a position to teach rather than learn.

And so I didn’t have an easy answer. Data quality isn’t something I’ve classified in any way, it’s just something I’ve learned how to do through trial and many, many, many errors. I discussed it with my boss and she tossed down the metaphorical gauntlet: “Michael, list out the different data quality tests you think are necessary.”

My first reaction was that the most important thing for exceptional data quality is to have as many people look at the data as possible. It’s a bit of a dodge, I’ll admit. Linus’ Law really does apply here: “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” But there are never enough eyeballs.

So here goes. There are a lot of things to look for, and I’ll create a video for each one. If you’ve been in the data engineering space for a while, you should probably skip this series.

Identifying potential dimensions is one of my top tasks, and for this video, I’m just looking at simple dimensions with a handful of values, maybe a few hundred at the extreme. I’m not looking at complex dimensions such as product catalogs which could have tens of thousands of values.

All I do is examine every column that might be a dimension of some sort. Generally, I ignore datetimes and real numbers, but short strings and bytes are good candidates. Then I aggregate, getting a count of rows for each potential value.

At this point, it becomes art rather than science, but a histogram can help push the scales a bit more into science.

Take a look at this histogram: we’re looking at how different teams at Microsoft name Azure’s data center regions. I get 168 values from this query, but I know that Azure has 56 regions. Different service teams are naming the regions differently.

Now look at the shape of that data: while I have a long tail of values, the bulk of my data looks like it falls within a small set. In fact, just 23 of 168 account for 80% of the values. To me, that feels like a decent candidate for a dimension.

In contrast, look at deployment actions—these values represent all the complexity of delivering new features to Azure. And I’m not using the word complexity lightly. There are over 9,000 different actions here. I can’t even generate a histogram in Kusto: it’s got a max of 5,000 values.

Excel doesn’t have that 5k limitation, but… even then, you can’t even see the histogram there: the long tail of values is so long, it’s basically meaningless. This is not a good candidate for a simple dimension.

Of course, this is art, not science. Azure Regions feels like a good candidate for a simple dimension, but deployment actions doesn’t.

Still, with 168 values for 56 regions, I also have to make a call about how to handle that. Short-term, it’s easy to manually go through the list and normalize those values down to 56 regions. For example, japaneast, jpe and eastjp are clearly all the same thing. That solves my problem in the short-term, but what do I do if a team decides to add a new value such as ejp or japane?

Again, we come to art. I really only have two choices about how to handle this long term. My first option is to create a job that monitors values in this dimension and alerts me whenever a new value appears so I can normalize it. My second option is to go to the team that owns this tool and insist that their users not have the choice to enter in whatever value they want.

The second option, in this particular case, is the right choice. As of March 2020, we have 56 data centers, and there’s no legitimate reason for one service team to have a different set of characters to represent the japan east region than all the other Azure service teams.

To put it another way, there’s a moral hazard here. If I go about cleansing that data once, the team owning that telemetry won’t have to. And I’ll keep having to cleaning it again and again and again.

But that’s not always the right answer. There’s not always a moral hazard.

Setting up an alert to manually handle the new value may be the right choice. For example, I was once responsible for providing data to Surface marketers. And every year, two or three months before Black Friday, I saw a brand-new Surface model name pop up in Windows telemetry. Now, I wasn’t supposed to know about that new device until October, but I considered my job to make sure that the data engineers, analysts, marketers and data scientists that used the data my team produced didn’t know about those new Surface models via the data my team produced.

We made the investment to monitor for new Surface model names, and when we found them, not only did we alert the people who were in the know, but we made sure those new model names didn’t appear in our data until it was time to execute marketing campaigns promoting them.

Kusto: outliers and Tukey fences

One of the challenges I face is handling outliers in the data emitted by the engineering pipeline tools that thousands of Azure developers use. For example, our tools all have queues, and a top priority is that queue times are brief.

This is the shape of data you’d expect to see for a queue. A quick peak after a few seconds, and then this long tail.

What queue times should look like

But that’s not what our actual distribution of queue times looks like. The long tail is so long, it looks like a right angle.

What they actually look like

So what’s happening? Well, the mean queue time is 197 seconds, but if I remove the outliers, it’s just 18 seconds. Why the huge difference in averages? My max queue time is almost ten days, but when I exclude outliers, the max is just 81 seconds.

Six percent of my queue time values are outliers, ranging from minutes to days. I asked the team that manages this tool, and several things could be happening, from teams pausing a job while it’s in the queue, to misconfigurations by users. In short, none of these values represent valid queue times.

So how do I exclude those extreme values? I could pick an arbitrary line: everyone here in Azure loves the 95th percentile, because everyone remembers that’s two standard deviations from the mean in a Normal distribution. The problem is that the 95th percentile isn’t relevant for this type of distribution: it’s just luck that in this case, the 95th percentile is 106 seconds. It could just as easily be thirty minutes.

The better way to do this is to identify outliers based on the data. In fact, that’s the definition of an outlier: a data point that differs significantly from other observations. One common method of doing is called Tukey’s fences. I don’t have a Ph.D. in statistics, so I’m not going to explain how it works. In fact, that’s not what this channel. It’s about showing how to do powerful things in Kusto without a lot of effort, and Kusto’s series_outliers operator is just that.

Here’s how you do it.

Step 1: pack all the QueueTime values into a list using the make_list operator.

Step 2: feed that list into the series_outliers operator.

Step 3: unpack it all with mv-expand.

Step 4: is the one bit that Kusto doesn’t do automatically for you. The values in the Outliers column aren’t self-explanatory, but they represent how far the measurement is from the bulk of your data. Anything greater than 1.5 or less than -1.5 is an outlier, and beyond plus-minus three, the values are really, really out there.

You can’t have negative queue time, so I just look at values below 1.5 and I’m set.

Kusto: Seasonality and Holidays

I’m Mike O’Neill and I’m a data nerd who uses Azure Data Explorer, or Kusto, every day to glean insights into Azure’s developer and code-to-customers operations.

One of the challenges I face is handling seasonality and outliers. For example, large numbers of Microsoft employees take vacation three weeks every year: Thanksgiving week, Christmas and New Year’s.

I analyze what thousands of developers do and those weeks always have low activity, so I have to figure out how to gracefully handle that seasonality.

In this video, I’m going to show you how I used two built-in features of Kusto: startofweek and range, to develop a little function that finds those holiday weeks no matter what year we’re looking at, and making it easier for those engineering managers to do it as well at the same time.

Here’s a visualization of a certain type of developer activity related to bringing new features to production. Those dips are the weekends. Yeah, sometimes we work weekends, but Microsoft prides itself on work/life balance, and so the bulk of activity happens Monday through Friday.

Step one is to group the data to match the activity I’m measuring: by week, not by day. The startofweek function does this nicely, and… while it is a simple function, it’s also really powerful because of that simplicity. There’s no need to decide whether Sunday or Monday is the first day of the week, and those engineering managers can pick it up in seconds and use without being reminded. Puts us all on the same page.

Startofweek smooths things out quite nicely, doesn’t it? But now you can see my problem: those six sharp downward spikes: that’s U.S. Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s. Whether I exclude them or replace the values with an average, I need to identify them dynamically.

But I can’t just exclude the 24th and 25th of December, for example: I have to exclude the entire work week, and each year, those holidays either fall on different days of the week, or on a particular Thursday in November.

Let’s tackle Christmas and New Year’s first:

Step 1: Create a little data table with numbers for month and day.

Step 2: we use the range operator, which lets you create a list of numbers or dates in series. It’s created as a blob of structured text in a new column.

Step 3: we need to explode that blob of text out so that I have a row for each date, like it was a cross join. For that, we use the mv-expand operator.

Step 4: is the easy part. I restrict the rowset to only dates where the month and day match my list of holidays, and then…

Step 5: use startofweek again.

This pretty much works. Except when Christmas and New Year’s fall on a weekend or on Monday. Look at 2016 for example: both these holidays fall on the first day of the week, meaning that New Year’s week ends on January 7th. That was a regular work and school week. To fix that, all I need to do is switch my holidays to Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve.

What about Thanksgiving? In the U.S., that’s the Thursday in the fourth week of November.

Step 1: Again, I start with a little datatable, but in this case, instead of the numbered day of the month, I need the week for that month, and the day of the week. Kusto uses a timespan of 4 day to represent Thursday, rather than an integer.

Step 2: Again, use the range operator to generate a set of date and…

Step 3: Use the mv-expand operator to explode this out in a cross join.

Step 4: is where things change from the previous example. I grab only Thursdays from the month in question, November.

Step 5: I order the data. This is critical: kusto won’t order things for you. You might think the range operator would land things in order, but it may not.

Step 6: use the row_number operator so that you know which is the fourth Thursday in November.

Step 7: Use startofweek to find the Sunday before Thanksgiving.

That’s it. Now, all I need to do is train my engineering execs to use startofweek, and then do a left anti-join to remove data from those weeks.

Here’s the full code for the function

.create-or-alter function with (folder = @'') SeasonalityWeeks
(
rangeStart:datetime = datetime("2016-01-01")
,rangeEnd:datetime = datetime("2022-01-01")
)
{
let _rangeStart = iif(rangeStart > rangeEnd,rangeEnd,rangeStart);
let _rangeEnd = iif(rangeEnd < rangeStart,rangeStart,rangeEnd);
let _majorFixedHolidays =
datatable(Month:int,Day:int,Name:string)
[
12,24,"Christmas",
12,31,"New Year",
];
let _majorVariableHolidays =
datatable(Month:int,DayOfWeek:timespan ,WeekOfMonth:int,Name:string)
[
11,timespan(4d),4,"US Thanksgiving",
];
_majorVariableHolidays
| extend Date = range(_rangeStart,_rangeEnd,1d)
| mv-expand Date to typeof(datetime)
| where Month == datetime_part('Month',Date)
| extend Weekday = dayofweek(Date)
,Year = datetime_part('Year',Date)
| where Weekday == DayOfWeek
| order by Year asc, Date asc
| extend RowNum = row_number(1,prev(Year) != Year)
| where RowNum == WeekOfMonth
| project HolidayWeek = startofweek(Date)
, Name
| union kind = outer
(
_majorFixedHolidays
| extend Date = range(_rangeStart,_rangeEnd,1d)
| mv-expand Date to typeof(datetime)
| where Month == datetime_part('Month',Date)
and Day == datetime_part('Day',Date)
| project HolidayWeek = startofweek(Date)
, Name
)
| project Name
, HolidayWeekStart = HolidayWeek
, HolidayWeekEnd = datetime_add('Day',6,HolidayWeek)
}