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Day: March 15, 2022

Checking R Function Inputs

Published 2022-03-15 by Kevin Feasel

Hugo Gruson, et al, share some techniques for ensuring function input matches your expectations:

Are you, like we were, tired of filling your functions with argument checking code that sometimes ends up being longer that the core of the function itself? Are you trying to find what is the most efficient approach to check inputs easily and without forgetting any edge cases? Read about our exploration into the various ways to check your function inputs in R in this blog post. And please share your own tips and discoveries in the comment section!

Read on for several techniques.

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Measurement Units in R

Published 2022-03-15 by Kevin Feasel

K.H. Kim has an article on unit conversion in R:

Data mtcars has a column named mpg. mpg means miles per gallon. ‘Mile’ and ‘gallon’ are units for length and volume. A mile is approximately 1.6 kilometers and a gallon is approximately 3.7 liters. Mile and gallon sound unfamiliar to people who live outside England or U.S.A. because international standard units for length and volume are meter and liter.

In this post, we will learn how to convert a unit to another unit, for instance, we will convert mpg to km/L, which is more comprehensible to people who use SI units

This is something that I’m surprised languages don’t do more of. F# has the concept of units of measure but these are compile-time—at runtime, you can still break the rules. And in most languages, type systems are so simplistic that it’s all just plain decimal math. H/T R-bloggers.

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Understanding Data Mesh

Published 2022-03-15 by Kevin Feasel

Rick Spurgeon has a video series:

Decentralized architectures continue to flourish as engineering teams look to unlock the potential of their people and systems. From Git, to microservices, to cryptocurrencies, these designs look to decentralization as a method of breaking apart centralized bottlenecks. Data mesh is an approach to data and organizational management centered around decentralizing control of data itself. In this post, we’ll look at a Confluent Developer video-led course that tackles the big concepts and walks you through creating your own data mesh using event streams and Confluent Cloud.

Click through for a 9-part video series.

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Working with SIDs in Powershell

Published 2022-03-15 by Kevin Feasel

Jeffery Hicks translates security identifiers:

As usually happens during my day, I get sidetracked to another issue, and before you know it, I have a new PowerShell tool. In this instance, I was looking at event logs using Get-WinEvent. One of the event record properties is a UserID.

That’s very nice, but who is this? In this particular instance, the UserID property is SecurityIdentifier object.

Read on to see how to translate a SecurityIdentifier into something human-understandable.

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Returning Blank instead of Zero in Power BI

Published 2022-03-15 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo does a bit of transformation:

In matrix visuals, Power BI usually hides rows where all the measures return a blank value. To leverage this behavior or simply to change the visualization of a measure depending on its result, you might want to achieve one of the following:

– Transforming a blank result to zero: this is covered in the article, How to return 0 instead of BLANK in DAX.

– Transforming a zero result to blank: this is the scenario described in this article.

Click through to see what the process looks like.

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First Operator Execution Plan Properties

Published 2022-03-15 by Kevin Feasel

Grant Fritchey implores us not to forget the SELECT/INSERT/UPDATE/whatever operator:

I’ve watched several people recently go straight to XML when reading execution plans because they didn’t know about the execution plan properties in the first operator. Now, don’t get me wrong. If going straight to the XML is working for you, that’s fine. Keep doing it. I’m absolutely not questioning how anyone does things. I just want people to know that “hidden” information isn’t so much hidden as much as it’s not too obvious.

Read on to see what this contains.

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WEEKNUM() in Power Query

Published 2022-03-15 by Kevin Feasel

Imke Feldmann translates another Excel function:

If you are looking for the Excel equivalent of the WEEKNUM function for Power Query this article is for you.

As this is also a function that has many regional options, I was lucky to find an algorithm that I could use for its main part here: M functions to convert between ISO 8601 Week & Year ⇄ dates (e.g., 2014-12-29 ⇄ "2015-W01-1") (github.com)

Read on for the code and details on function parameters.

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