A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Jennifer Cooper shows how you can use R to scrape data from a text-based PDF:
Here’s a diagram of the workflow I used:
1. Start with PDF
2. Usetabulizerto extract tables
3. Clean up data into “tidy” format usingtidyverse(mainlydplyr)
4. Visualize trends withggplot2
Read on for more detail on each step in the process. H/T R-Bloggers.
Comments closedAbhinav Choudhary walks us through k-means clustering using scikit-learn:
K Means Clustering tries to cluster your data into clusters based on their similarity. In this algorithm, we have to specify the number of clusters (which is a hyperparameter) we want the data to be grouped into. Hyperparameters are the variables whose value need to be set before applying value to the dataset. Hyperparameters are adjustable parameters you choose to train a model that carries out the training process itself.
Read on for a demo.
Comments closedHasan Savran takes us through spatial data types in SQL Server:
In this post, I want to show you how easy it is to draw a spatial line by using spatial points. To make the following demo to work, you must have SQL Server 2017 or later. The reason is, I will use the new system functions STRING_AGG and CONCAT_WS. There are not Spatial functions and you can draw a spatial line by using spatial points. They will make this process easy. You can read about these new function in my older post here.
I downloaded Hurricane data from NOAA for free. Dataset has the location of the hurricane eyes in latitude and longitude. By knowing the location, its pretty easy to display these points as Spatial data (geography). I wanted to connect these points to each other and create a line, by doing that I could add a buffer around the line and make a spatial range search and find if I have any customer under this line.
I think spatial data types are probably one of the lesser-utilized data types with respect to how useful they can be.
Comments closedDave Bland takes us through one nice feature of Azure Data Studio:
Azure Data Studio has many great features and even more if you add all the extensions that are available. Many extensions are very useful now, even though they are still in preview. These features are naturally compared to SQL Server Management Studio. One feature I like that sort of exists I SSMS is the auto save feature. This feature will automatically save your files when you close Azure Data Studio and will be there the next time you use ADS. SSMS has the auto recovery option, but is works a bit differently so it isn’t quite the same. ADS has a setting named “Files: Hot Exit”.
Read on to see how it works.
Comments closedIf you’ve read about the Accelerated Database Recovery feature in SQL Server 2019 you could be forgiven for thinking it’s just about speeding up database recovery time in case of a server failure.
In fact, enabling it also means that where you have a long running transaction that fails or is cancelled the rollback is almost instantaneous. This is great news for DBAs who have to sometimes kill a long-running blocking transaction but worry that it may take a long time to rollback – continuing to block all that time.
Read on for an example. I hadn’t thought about this, but it’s pretty cool.
Comments closedDave Mason continues a quest for documentation:
The output is a tabular result showing each SSIS package, their Names and Descriptions, and the top-level task Names and Descriptions of each subplan. (In addition to the “DailyETLMain” package, we see metadata for some other plans related to the Management Data Warehouse Data Collector.) Note the 16 rows of metadata for the “DailyETLMain” package correspond to the 16 top-level objects of the package–the query doesn’t recurse into containers to obtain their object metadata. I decided not to attempt that–it seemed like overkill for documentation purposes. Another caveat: the results order may not match the order that’s mandated by Precedence Constraints in the Visual Studio designer.
Click through for the full example.
Comments closed