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Month: December 2020

Data Professional Salary Survey

Published 2020-12-11 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar has another year of the Data Professional Salary Survey:

Take the Data Professional Salary Survey now.

The anonymous survey closes Friday, Jan 1, 2021. The results are completely open source, and shared with the community for your analysis. (You can analyze ’em now mid-flight, but I’d wait until the final results come in. I’ll combine them into a single spreadsheet with the past results.)

I’ve had fun analyzing it over the years. If you wouldn’t mind, please fill it out and add some more data points.

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Setting up Azure Purview for Power BI

Published 2020-12-10 by Kevin Feasel

Soheil Bakhshi has a great step-by-step walkthrough for setting up Azure Purview:

Microsoft newly announced a piece of very exciting news that Azure Purview now supports Power BI. This is massive news from a data governance point of view. Azure Purview is the next generation of Azure Data Catalog with more metadata discovery power and the ability to use sensitivity labels. After reading the news, I immediately decided to set up my test environment and give it a go. I followed the steps mentioned in this article on the Microsoft documentation website but I faced some difficulties to get it to work. And here we are, another blog post to help you to set up the Azure Purview for Power BI.

Click through for a detailed walkthrough.

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All About Dot Plots

Published 2020-12-10 by Kevin Feasel

Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic talks about one of my favorite plot types:

The term “dot plot” can be used for any graph that is encoding data in a dot or small circle. There are a few common types that I’ll focus on here. If you’ve ever asked yourself—What is a dot plot? How do I interpret a dot plot? When should I use a dot plot? or What are pros and cons of dot plots?—you’ll find the answers in this post. I’ll also share some tips on creating them and where to find examples that will inform and inspire.

Read the whole thing.

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A Primer on Locking and Deadlocks

Published 2020-12-10 by Kevin Feasel

John McCormack explains locks and deadlocks:

Blocking is the real world impact of locks being taken on resources and other lock types being requested which are incompatible with the existing lock. You need to have locks in order to have blocking. In the scenario where a row is being updated, the lock type of IX or X means that a simultaneous read operation will be blocked until the data modification lock has been released. Similarly, data being read blocks data from being modified. Again, there are exceptions to these based on the isolation level used.

Blocking then is a perfectly natural occurrence within SQL Server. In fact, it is vital to maintain ACID transactions. On a well optimised system, it can be hard to notice and doesn’t cause problems.

All things in moderation, even blocking.

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Creating Property Names in Powershell

Published 2020-12-10 by Kevin Feasel

Jeffrey Hicks shares some Powershell API design tips:

When you build a PowerShell tool, you want the output to be easy to use. To me, this means having clearly defined property names. Dave has a command in the module to get a Twitter user account. Here’s what it currently writes to the pipeline.

For the sake of demonstration, assume that the Get-TwitterUser command is your code that is invoking a REST API and returning a custom object to the pipeline.

The property names are mostly clear, although not very PowerShell friendly. How many native PowerShell commands do you run that have properties that look like this? Let’s fix this.

Read on to see those properties and how you can make them more Powershell-friendly.

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Troubleshooting an Error: Insufficient System Memory

Published 2020-12-10 by Kevin Feasel

Lee Markup walks us through an issue:

In my own local SQL Server I ran across a problem starting the SQL instance. I went to SQL Server configuration Manager and manually started the SQL Server instance. The UI showed the instance had started. I opened SSMS and tried to connect. And I waited, waited and waited some more until it didn’t connect and threw an error.

Read on to see how Lee was able to find and correct the issue without actually being able to start up SQL Server.

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Thoughts on R’s New Pipe

Published 2020-12-09 by Kevin Feasel

John Mount has thoughts on the upcoming pipe operator in R:

There is a current active discussion on this prototype and some interesting points come up. Note the current proposal appears to disallow a |> f -> f(a), a currently popular transform.

1. This is a language feature presented as a soon-to-be-user-visible prototype, not an RFC.
2. Some are objecting to the term “pipe.”
3. Some call this sort of pipe function composition.
4. It is noticed that this sort of substitution is generally thought of as a “macro.”
5. There is a claim the proposed pipe seems to violate the beta-reduction rule of the lambda calculus: variables should be substitutable for values.

Read on for John’s take on this. I particularly appreciate his response to point number 2: other functional languages have pipes (in fact, |> is the F# pipe operator). Pipes are not unique to UNIX. John has a lot of interesting comments, so check them out.

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Creating an app with Suave and F#

Published 2020-12-09 by Kevin Feasel

Diogo Souza shows off the Suave framework:

F# is the go-to language if you’re seeking functional programming within the .NET world. It is multi-paradigm, flexible, and provides smooth interoperability with C#, which brings even more power to your development stack, but did you know that you can build APIs with F#? Not common, I know, but it’s possible due to the existence of frameworks like Suave.io.

Suave is a lightweight, non-blocking web server. Since it is non-blocking, it means you can create scalable applications that perform way faster than the ordinary APIs. The whole framework was built as a non-blocking organism.

I will shout from the rooftops that data platform developers should learn functional programming. In the .NET space, that’s F#.

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