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Day: June 14, 2022

Visualizing SHAP Values in R with shapviz

Published 2022-06-14 by Kevin Feasel

Michael Mayer announces a new package:

SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations, Lundberg and Lee, 2017) is an ingenious way to study black box models. SHAP values decompose – as fair as possible – predictions into additive feature contributions.

When it comes to SHAP, the Python implementation is the de-facto standard. It not only offers many SHAP algorithms, but also provides beautiful plots. In R, the situation is a bit more confusing. Different packages contain implementations of SHAP algorithms

Read on to see how shapviz works, how to install it, and the types of visuals you can create from it.

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Lasso and Ridge Regression

Published 2022-06-14 by Kevin Feasel

Niraj Kumar explains how two regression techniques work:

Lasso Regression is a regularization technique used for feature selection using a Shrinkage method also referred to as the penalized regression method.

Lasso is short for Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator, which uses both for regularization and model selection.

If a model uses the L1 regularization technique, then known as lasso regression.

Click through for a summary of the two techniques.

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Practical Code Development Standards

Published 2022-06-14 by Kevin Feasel

Tom Zika writes out a list of coding standards:

No magic constants 

WHERE p.ProductType <> 4

What is 4? Just set a variable (constant) from a lookup table. Or write a comment with an explanation.
It’s the least you can do.

Read on for a set of things I generally agree with. This one’s a little bit of a tough case, as in extremely high-performance systems where the cost of a lookup is just too expensive, I’d prefer to use keys rather than values and save the compute cost and possible worse query plan. That said, even in that case, yes, definitely write a comment explaining what 4 is. That said, had I picked any of the other dozen or so recommendations, I wouldn’t have had anything interesting to say other than “go read this.”

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Management Strategies: Architects and Gardeners

Published 2022-06-14 by Kevin Feasel

Derik Hammer discusses two management strategies for team leadership:

There are two analogies for leaders that have made a visceral impact on my life and career, the architect leader and the gardening leader. These analogies became central to my personal and professional growth ever since I formally entered management five years ago. Arguably, I have been a leader for much longer than that in the various team or technical leadership positions and my time in the military. However, it wasn’t until my focus moved predominantly to management that I began building models for leadership mindsets.

My philosophy on this hews really well with the book Turn the Ship Around! by David Marquet. I highly recommend it for anybody in management or looking to go into management. One really short synopsis of the strategy I try to follow is to make goals clear, get the level below you invested (in part by bringing them in and actually listening to what they say), and be hands-off enough to let people learn and take initiative in how they solve problems and meet your goals.

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Point-in-Time Recovery with Azure SQL DB and Managed Instances

Published 2022-06-14 by Kevin Feasel

Ahmed Mahmoud looks at point-in-time recovery and answers some frequently asked questions:

On some occasions, after the failover is initiated, the current Primary DR will start a new backup chain from that point and old backups are available on the current secondary DR. If we want to restore the backups which exists in Secondary it will not allow us to perform, apparently restore cannot be initiated on the Primary as the backup is not available.

Also, sometimes we observe in secondary DR for few databases, PitR restore point is available and for few databases it shows “no restore point available”    

Read on to understand why that happens and what you can do about it.

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Consistency as the Best Coding Rule

Published 2022-06-14 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Chant values consistency:

Over the years I have worked a lot with automating T-SQL updates across multiple databases. During that time, it has become very clear that both consistency and comments are essential to make the process smooth.

Naming conventions of objects created using T-SQL should be consistent. Along with comments in your code for colleagues or anybody else who picks up your code.

Especially if you are working in a team who want to work in a DevOps related way.

I value consistency a lot but I’ve found I’m too inconsistent to be consistent.

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Error 13535: Data Modification Failed with Temporal Tables

Published 2022-06-14 by Kevin Feasel

Bob Dorr troubleshoots an issue:

When 2 or more workers are modifying the same row, it is possible to encounter 13535.  The time of the begin transaction and the modification are the defining properties.  When the transaction begin time is before the latest row modification, error 13535 is encountered.

Click through for an example of how you might trigger this error. This ultimately is the optimistic concurrency problem: how do you deal with multiple writers when using snapshot-based optimistic concurrency? Silently clobber or raise an error? Looks like temporal tables, like memory-optimized tables, raise an error instead of going quietly into the night.

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