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Day: March 24, 2020

Faster Package Installation in R

Published 2020-03-24 by Kevin Feasel

Colin Gillespie has a few tips for making package installation in R a bit faster:

The bigger picture is that package installation time is starting to become more of an issue for a number of reasons. For example, packages are getting larger and more complex (tidyverse and friends), so installation just takes longer. Or we are using more continuous integration strategies such as Travis or GitLab-CI, and want quick feedback. Or we are simply updating a large number of packages via update.packages(). This is a problem we often solve for our clients – optimising their CI/CD pipelines.

The purpose of this blog post is to pull together a few different methods for tackling this problem.

Click through for the guidance.

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Creating Powershell Functions which Accept Pipeline Input

Published 2020-03-24 by Kevin Feasel

Patrick Gruenauer shows how to make your Powershell functions pipeline-capable:

You probably have already created your first function in PowerShell and now you want that your function is capable of pipeline input. Right? Ok, you’ve come to the right place. In this blog post I will carry out creating a sample function that accepts pipeline input by value.

Patrick also shows us one of the earlier hang-ups of pipeline development if you don’t have the correct process blocks.

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Options for SQL Server in Azure

Published 2020-03-24 by Kevin Feasel

Josh Darnell looks at the options for running SQL Server in Azure:

Things are always changing the cloud, but as it stands in early 2020, these are the main options for SQL Server in Azure:

– SQL Virtual Machines
– Managed Instances
– Databases (this one really has a number of sub-options, like serverless, hyperscale, and elastic pools)

I’m going to touch on each of these options, why you might choose them, and some of my personal takeaways from the talk as well.

Read on for the summary of each. Each one fills a different set of needs and has a different set of available options.

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Coding Tips for a Younger Self

Published 2020-03-24 by Kevin Feasel

Parvinder Nijjar has some good tips for less-experienced developers:

Always break a big problem into a series of small problems. Sometimes a big problem can feel daunting and be more difficult than it seems. Break the problem down into smaller blocks and then solve each block one at a time. It’s okay to skip a block and return to a previous block as it may give you clues to fixing the skipped block. In all honesty whilst coding the parts you can do a piece of divine inspiration will enable you to problem you couldn’t solve or you will enough code to show one of your more capable colleagues that you had tried to fix the issue and now this rubbish was there problem to fix.

I am basically at the point of self-parody in my love of functional programming languages, but this is one of those things FP really reinforces: bottom-up development and chaining together lots of little pieces to create big pieces. But there is good advice in here no matter what language you use.

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Fun with Python: Calculating Pi

Published 2020-03-24 by Kevin Feasel

Jon Fletcher implements a method of estimating the value of Pi:

This series converges to Pi, the more terms that are added to the series, the closer the value is to Pi.
For the proof on why this series converges to Pi – https://proofwiki.org/wiki/Leibniz’s_Formula_for_Pi
There are several points to note about the series:

– It’s infinite, we need to find a way to continue adding term after term.
– The denominator of the fraction increases by 2 every term.
– The terms alternate between positive and negative.

Click through for the implementation of the formula in Python. And what you should do if you really need to reference Pi in your Python code.

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Azure Data Studio March 2020 Release

Published 2020-03-24 by Kevin Feasel

Alan Yu announces the March 2020 release of Azure Data Studio:

Now you can add visualizations using a T-SQL query. In addition, as the gif illustrates, you can also customize your visualization whether it is a scatter or time series graph.

You can also copy your visualization or save the image so that you can quickly add this in an email or report to other team members.

We will continue to bring improvements to charting over the next few months.

They’ve put a lot of time and effort into notebooks. They’re still missing some of the quality of life improvements I want to see before moving to them full-time, but they’re consistently getting better.

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Improving Queries at the Margin

Published 2020-03-24 by Kevin Feasel

Jared Poche has a story about improving a query which is already pretty fast:

In my last post, I spoke about optimizing a procedure that was being executed hundreds of millions of times per day, and yes, that is expected behavior.

The difficult thing about trying to optimize this procedure is that it only takes 2.5ms on average to run. Tuning this isn’t a matter of changing a scan to a seek; we’ll have to look hard to find the opportunities here. A one millisecond Improvement on a procedure running 100 million times a day would save 100,000 seconds every day.

Well, I’ve found a few more options since my last post, and wanted to share my findings.

Read on to see how Jared tries to tackle one specific case.

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