A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Colin Gillespie looks through the changelog:
Another year has passed, which means an updated version of R is due to be released – R version 4.2.0. As usual there have been many changes and improvements over the last year. This blog post only picks out a tiny handful, but there are dozens of smaller changes and bug fixes that can be found in the changelog.
Read on for some of the bigger changes.
Comments closedRobert Cain has a bunch of posts:
Since September 2020 I’ve been posting extensively about PowerShell in a series I’ve titled Fun With PowerShell. In my next post I will begin a series on a new topic, but before I do I wanted to leave with a Fun With PowerShell Roundup” post.
Below you will find a listing of all posts in my Fun With PowerShell series. Note there are other posts I’ve done in this time frame, but since they did not focus on PowerShell I’ve omitted them from this listing.
Click through for a lengthy and good series.
Comments closedReitse Eskens does some troubleshooting:
For those who are not familiar with Always Encrypted: it’s a built-in technique in SQL Server where data gets encrypted in a random or deterministic manner with a certificate and an algorithm. Long story short, without the certificate it’s gobbledygook. If you want to read more, check out this link.
As mentioned, the encryption was working perfectly, no-one could read the data in a usable way in the application. The point was that the application should be able to do that. And so we took up the challenge to see where things went wrong.
I’ve found that data is much more secure when nobody can ever see it again. That’s why I store all of my data in /dev/null. It’s also extremely fast.
Comments closedAshok Anand Kumar has some performance tips:
Azure Data Explorer provides the capability to easily fetch telemetry data from a variety of data sources and run complex analytical queries. Azure Data Explorer supports both batch and streaming ingestion to support near real-time latency requirements. Batch ingestion will have latencies based on the batching policy and query frequency from applications. Streaming ingestion can be leveraged for low latency requirements. Data is cached and indexed for faster query performance and optionally exported out to Azure Data Lake in parquet format for batch processing and integration with other Big Data and Machine Learning (ML) services.
Read on for several tips.
Comments closedThe Hadoop in Real World team shreds some URLs:
Hive offers 2 functions to work with URLS – parse_url and parse_url_tuple.
With both functions you can extract information like – PROTOCOL, HOST, PATH, QUERY, Query parameters etc.
Let’s see them in action.
Let’s, shall we?
Comments closedBrendan Tierney uses Python to look at some data:
One of the most common, and sometimes boring, task when working with datasets is writing some code to profile the data. Most data scientists will have built a set of tools/scripts to help them with this regular and slightly boring task. As with most IT tasks we should be trying to automate what we can, to allow us to spend more time on more important tasks, such as deriving insights and delivering value to the business, instead of repeatedly writing code to produce various statistics about the data and drawing pretty pictures.
I’ve written previously about automating and using some data profiling libraries to help us with this task. There are lots of packages available on pypi.og and on GitHub. Below I give examples of 5 Python Data Profiling libraries, with links to their GitHubs.
Brendan includes some good examples of libraries here so check it out.
Comments closedKristi Cantor renames columns en masse:
Recently, we hosted Allision Kennedy on the Raw Data by P3 Adaptive Podcast. During the course of the conversation, our co-host Thomas LaRock expressed his frustration at the lack of a simple method to complete what should be a simple task in Power Query. In Tom’s example, he explained he wanted to replace a given value within the column names without individually renaming all of the columns. He pointed out that this has been possible in Office for 20+ years but requires learning some M to complete in Power Query due to the fact that column headers are not considered data.
It turns out, however, that there is an answer here. Read on for that answer.
Comments closedGreg Dodd diagnoses a problem:
I hit an error recently on a server that caused backups to fail. The database was backing up to a UNC path. Looking in the SQL Log file and Event Viewer, I found the following error:
The operating system returned the error ‘121(The semaphore timeout period has expired.)’ while attempting ‘DiskChangeFileSize’ on ‘\\uncpath\folder\databasename.bak’.
Read on to see what caused this error.
Comments closedMatt Allington goes to the bargain bin:
Paginated Reports have been available in Power BI since 2019. They serve an important purpose, but they are not easy for the average business user to learn, plus they require Power BI Premium to use. In my blog and video today, I will show you how you can use Excel as a substitute for Paginated Report Builder to build simple paginated reports from your Power BI Desktop data model.
Click through to see how.
Comments closedWhen I’m working in a client’s Azure environment, and they don’t have a delete lock on their production environment I always work on getting them to have one.
This doesn’t always play nicely with everything in Azure, so read on for Denny’s advice when working with Azure Migrate.
Comments closed