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Month: July 2023

Customizing a Shiny App Theme

Published 2023-07-07 by Kevin Feasel

Peter Baranovskiy doesn’t want bog standard but is okay with mostly standard:

There are multiple ways to style or theme a Shiny app. A high-level overview is available in the Mastering Shiny book by Hadley Wickham. Here I’ll show the easiest way to do this. If you need to build an entirely – or mostly – new Shiny theme (e.g. a corporate theme), this post is probably not for you. In that case bslib may be the best starting point. Otherwise, if you are generally happy with a pre-made theme and just want to tweak some of its elements, read on.

This post is based on an actual app, so that you can see how it all works. Here’s the app’s source.

Click through to see what kinds of changes you can make without a major overhaul.

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Parameterizing Jupyter Notebooks

Published 2023-07-07 by Kevin Feasel

John Mount shows off a feature:

I’d like to share a great new feature in the wvpy package (available at PyPi).

This package is useful in converting Jupiter notebooks to/from python, and also in rendering many parameterized notebooks. The idea is to make Jupyter notebook easier to use in production.

The latest feature is an extension of notebook parameterization. In addition to the init_code and output_suffix features, which allow adding arbitrary code to notebooks and saving multiple renders of the same notebook under different (non-coliding!) names. The new sheet_vars feature allows the insertion of arbitrary data into notebook renders (in addition to the earlier code insertion facility).

Click through for an example on how to use this. Several years ago, I would have considered this to be outstanding. Today, I think it’s cool, but I’ve also gravitated toward using notebooks as an intermediary step rather than a final product, so it’s less critical for me these days.

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Performance Optimizing Cosmos DB

Published 2023-07-07 by Kevin Feasel

Harshvardhan Singh has a few tips for us:

As with the other databases, indexing is the first go-to option to improve query performance. The same is the case with Cosmos DB as well. Below are a few points which you can leverage to optimize the indexing strategy for Cosmos DB. 

Indexes are kind of similar to indexing in SQL Server in intent, though different enough in implementation that you’ll want to read up on them. Harshvardhan also includes some tips around data modeling and querying data.

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Impact of and Limitations to Parameter Tuning in Postgres

Published 2023-07-07 by Kevin Feasel

Henrietta Dombrovskaya wraps up a series on PostgreSQL parameters:

In this first blog, we didn’t provide any examples of the practical impact of parameters tuning on performance. Indeed, it is challenging to model such an impact on the training database. 

In this blog, we will segue from discussing PostgreSQL system parameters best practices to other ways of performance tuning. Moreover, we will demonstrate that essential database performance tuning goes beyond choosing the appropriate parameters settings.

Click through for that post.

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Azure DataSync: Cannot Insert NULL Value

Published 2023-07-07 by Kevin Feasel

Jose Manuel Jurado Diaz does some sleuthing:

In this blog article, we will delve into a common error encountered when synchronizing data with Azure SQL DataSync. We’ll explore the error message “Error #1: SqlException Error Code: -2146232060 – SqlError Number: 515, Message: Cannot insert the value NULL into column ‘ID’, table ‘dbo.Customers’; column does not allow nulls. INSERT fails. SqlError Number: 3621, Message: The statement has been terminated.” We will provide a detailed explanation of the error and its possible causes, followed by a T-SQL code snippet that reproduces the error scenario.

Click through for four possible causes.

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Creating a Simple Video with Azure Open AI and Cognitive Services

Published 2023-07-06 by Kevin Feasel

Sabyasachi Samaddar has an interesting project:

In today’s digital age, video content has become a powerful medium for communication and storytelling. Whether it’s for marketing, education, or entertainment purposes, videos could captivate and engage audiences in ways that traditional text-based content often cannot. However, creating compelling videos from scratch can be a time-consuming and resource-intensive process.

Fortunately, with the advancements in artificial intelligence and the availability of cloud-based services like Azure Open AI and Cognitive Services, it is now possible to automate and streamline the process of converting text into videos. These cutting-edge technologies provide developers and content creators with powerful tools and APIs that leverage natural language processing and computer vision to transform plain text into visually appealing and professional-looking videos.

This document serves as a comprehensive guide and a starting point for developers who are eager to explore the exciting realm of Azure Open AI and Cognitive Services for text-to-video conversion. While this guide presents a basic implementation, its purpose is to inspire and motivate developers to delve deeper into the possibilities offered by these powerful technologies.

Click through for a guide on how to do it.

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String Casing in Snowflake

Published 2023-07-06 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Wilkie is on the case:

When you’re working with a database, it’s very hard to not deal with strings at some point in your journey. There are lots of different functions that you will be working with when you’re working with strings. Today, I want to go over some of the basic ones that you’ll use in Snowflake.

The first two that you’ll deal with make the string either upper or lowercase. Yes, that’s right – you’ve probably figured out the names of the functions already. UPPER() and LOWER() are the 2 functions respectively.

Kevin mentions title capitalization (though not by name) and the quick rule depends on which rulebook you’re using. I grew up with MLA, which I summarize as:

  • Don’t capitalize articles (the, a, an), prepositions, or coordinating conjunctions (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so)
  • Don’t capitalize “to” when it’s an infinitive (to go, to drive, etc.)
  • Don’t capitalize the second part of a hyphenated phrase if it shows up in the dictionary as one word without a hyphen
  • Capitalize everything else

And a quick bit of advice: understanding title capitalization really does make you look more professional, I promise. Unless we’re using different rulebooks, in which case at least one of us is a heretic.

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Exiting the Cloud to Save Money

Published 2023-07-06 by Kevin Feasel

David Heinemeier Hansson shares a story:

The back of the napkin math is that we’ll save at least $1.5 million per year by owning our own hardware rather than renting it from Amazon. And crucially, we’ve been able to do this without changing the size of the operations team at all. Running our applications in the cloud just never provided the promised productivity gains to do with any smaller of a team anyway.

I’ve never been a big fan of the “Move to the cloud to save money!” story that vendors tell. There are specific advantages, but saving money (as in, my overall IT expenditures are less than what I was spending before moving to the cloud) is more rare than common, in my experience.

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Migrating the Serverless SQL Pool to Fabric

Published 2023-07-06 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Chant makes a move:

By the end of this post, you will know how to migrate serverless SQL Pool objects to a Microsoft Fabric Data Warehouse using Azure DevOps. Along the way I share plenty of links and advice.

Please note that Microsoft Fabric is currently in Public Preview and what you see in this post is subject to change.

This is the relatively easy one. The real challenge will be dedicated SQL pool migration.

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Deploying a SQL Server Container via go-sqlcmd

Published 2023-07-06 by Kevin Feasel

Jes Schultz builds a container:

In the past, you may have downloaded and installed SQL Server Developer Edition on your computer to test features, write queries, and have a sandbox. Do you want a more lightweight development environment that’s quicker to install and use? Enter Docker or Podman, sqlcmd, and SQL Server containers. 

Our modern sqlcmd gives you the capability to query your existing SQL Server and Azure SQL Database instances. It also introduces new features such as creating containers in one line of code, using an existing backup file to restore a database when the instance is created, and opening Azure Data Studio for data exploration in one command. Here is how you can do this end-to-end. 

Click through for the demo.

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