Press "Enter" to skip to content

Day: December 15, 2020

Web Scraping in SQL Server Machine Learning Services

Rajendra Gupta shows us how we can use SQL Server Machine Learning Services and the R programming language to perform website scraping:

You can manually copy data from a website; however, if you regularly use it for your analysis, it requires automation. For this automation, usually, we depend on the developers to read the data from the website and insert it into SQL tables.

SQL Machine Learning language helps you in web scrapping with a small piece of code. In the previous articles for SQL Server R scripts, we explored the useful open-source libraries for adding new functionality in R.

Read on for a demo.

Comments closed

Coalesce in SQL and R

John MacKintosh gives us a primer on the COALESCE function in both SQL and R:

What does coalesce mean? In the English language, it is generally used to convey a coming together, or creating one whole body, mass or system. How does that help us when working with data? We spend a lot of time cleaning our data, surely the last thing we want to do is lump it all together?

Click through for detail on the nuances of COALESCE(). H/T R-Bloggers.

Comments closed

Using the Develop Hub in Azure Synapse Analytics

Charles Feddersen shows off one of the Azure Synapse Analytics hubs:

The Develop Hub in Azure Synapse Analytics enables you to write code and define business logic using a combination of notebooks, SQL scripts, and data flows. This gives us a development experience which provides the capability to query, analyze, and model data in multiple languages, along with giving us Intellisense support for these languages. This provides a rich interface for authoring code and in this post, we will see how we can use the Knowledge Center to jump-start our development experience.

Click through to see two demos, one of notebooks and one of SQL scripts.

Comments closed

The Merge Interval Operator

Hugo Kornelis looks at another execution plan operator:

The Merge Interval operator reads dynamic seek range specifications, checks to see if their specified ranges overlap, and if so combines the overlapping ranges into one new range.

One typical use case is for a query that uses multiple BETWEEN specifications, connected with OR. When these ranges overlap, they must be combined into a single range. This saves performance, but more important is that it prevents rows that satisfy both range specifications from being returned multiple times. When the boundaries of the BETWEEN are given as constants, the optimizer analyzes for overlaps and combines ranges if needed when compiling the query. But when the boundaries of the BETWEEN specifications are only known at run-time (variables, column references), the Merge Interval operator is used for this task.

Click through to see how it works.

Comments closed

Measure Your DBA Skills

Lee Markum has just wrapped up an interesting series:

Over the last 9 weeks I took you on a journey of skills and career topics related to being a SQL Server DBA. We looked at the Production DBA. We saw skills and career topics from the beginning to mid-career to Senior DBA. Then we looked at the Development DBA and their skills and career development needs. Finally there was a wrap up post.

To make it easier for everyone to get to these posts, I decided to bring them all together on a single page.

Click through to get a feeling for where you’re at on the DBA and database developer sides of the house.

Comments closed

New Azure Announcements

Eitan Blumin has a roundup of Azure-related announcements:

On the week of December 7th (especially on December 9th), Microsoft has sent us a whole bag of goodies, announcing the general availability of new features that were only in preview until now, and even newer features that have just entered public preview.

There’s quite a lot to cover here, so let’s try to break it down by categories and provide links for more details. 

Click through for the list.

Comments closed