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Day: October 14, 2021

Understanding Support Vector Machines

Published 2021-10-14 by Kevin Feasel

Luis Valencia takes us through the algorithm for support vector machines:

A support vector machine (SVM) is a supervised machine learning model that uses classification algorithms for two-group classification problem. Compared to newer algorithms like neural networks, they have two main advantages: higher speed and better performance with a limited number of samples (in the thousands).

Pepperidge Farms remembers when we used genetic algorithms to solve problems because support vector machines were too slow.

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Supporting 100 Languages with Microsoft Translator

Published 2021-10-14 by Kevin Feasel

Krishna Doss Mohan and Jann Skotdal take us through the evolution of Microsoft Translator:

Today, we’re excited to announce that Microsoft Translator has added 12 new languages and dialects to the growing repertoire of Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services Translator, bringing us to a total of 103 languages!

The new languages, which are natively spoken by 84.6 million people, are Bashkir, Dhivehi, Georgian, Kyrgyz, Macedonian, Mongolian (Cyrillic), Mongolian (Traditional), Tatar, Tibetan, Turkmen, Uyghur, and Uzbek (Latin). With this release, the Translator service can translate text and documents to and from languages natively spoken by 5.66 billion people worldwide.

I’ve used the live translation service a few times. It’s a little clunky but it does work pretty well.

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Scheduling Tasks in SQL Server Express Edition

Published 2021-10-14 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Stedman & co don’t need your SQL Agents:

One of the feature differences between SQL Server Express Edition and the other paid versions is the ability to schedule jobs or tasks using the SQL Server Agent.

Even if you are running SQL Server Express Edition, there is a need to run scheduled jobs.

I’ve used this option and yes, it does work. But it’s definitely a few steps down from using SQL Agent jobs. Still, if that’s not available to you, this is a viable fallback option.

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Index Maintenance and Pipeline Operation Scripts

Published 2021-10-14 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Chant has a two-fer for us:

My first personal go-to script is one that has helped me out a lot over the years. Because I have used it a lot to identify missing indexes. I know there are a few different versions available online that you can use. However, I tend to use the one that comes with Glenn Berry’s Diagnostic Queries.

It is so easy to use. I’m not sharing the snippet of code on here because I want to encourage people to download the entire diagnostic script instead. Just download the script that is relevant for your version of SQL Server and search for ‘Missing indexes’.

Read the whole thing.

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Things You Can Do with Random Values

Published 2021-10-14 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Yun shows off some random skills:

First, there are times where you need multiple random numbers. Simply using multiple iterations of RAND() in a single statement won’t cut it, as you need to vary the seed. So I keep this snippet handy for when I need a bunch of random values in a single statement:

Click through for that as well as two more uses of RANDOM(). This is my reminder that RANDOM() generates data across a uniform distribution (every value in the range is equally likely to be chosen), making it great for these sorts of experiments but can look weird by itself if you’d expect non-uniform distributions of the data. For that, you would need some distributional trickery—though frankly, between the uniform and normal distributions, you’ve probably covered about 95-99% of test dataset needs.

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15 Short Code Snippets

Published 2021-10-14 by Kevin Feasel

Chad Baldwin goes the extra mile:

I’m excited that this will be my first time participating in a T-SQL Tuesday topic!

Most of my time is spent writing T-SQL, PowerShell and working in the PowerShell terminal, so that’s how I’ll split the post up.

I had to cut it short otherwise this post would be a mile long. If you’re interested in seeing more quick tricks, SQL Prompt snippets, etc, please leave a comment and let me know and I can do a Part 2 in the future.

Click through for a baker’s dozen plus a couple spares.

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Best Practices for SQL Server on Physical Machines

Published 2021-10-14 by Kevin Feasel

Anthony Nocentino has some practices for us, the best practices:

The intent of this post is a quick reference guide based on the recommendation made on Pure Storage Support page in the Microsoft Platform Guide . The target audience for this blog post is for SQL Server DBAs introducing them to the most impactful configurations and settings for running SQL Server on physical machines on Pure Storage.

Click through for a checklist of recommendations.

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