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Day: December 1, 2023

Benchmarking Memory Usage in Shiny Apps

Published 2023-12-01 by Kevin Feasel

Ryszard Szymanski tracks memory utilization:

R/Shiny allows you to prototype a working web application quickly and easily. However, with increasing amounts of data, your app may become slow and, in extreme cases, crash due to insufficient memory.

When the worst-case scenario happens, we need to figure out a way to lower the memory usage of our app to avoid those crashes.

A crucial part of optimization efforts is benchmarking how much memory our app is consuming. This allows us to check if the changes we made to the app are indeed moving us in the right direction.

In this step-by-step guide, we will describe how to do that based on an example application.

Read on for the process and how you can diagnose memory problems. H/T R-Bloggers.

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Quantile Regression in R

Published 2023-12-01 by Kevin Feasel

Steven Sanderson performs quantile regression:

Quantile regression is a robust statistical method that goes beyond traditional linear regression by allowing us to model the relationship between variables at different quantiles of the response distribution. In this blog post, we’ll explore how to perform quantile regression in R using the quantreg library.

If you need to hone up on your quantile regression knowledge, Wikipedia is usually good for statistics and here’s an academic paper from Roger Koenker and Kevin Hallock on the topic.

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Replacing the Workspace Summary with Azure Workbooks

Published 2023-12-01 by Kevin Feasel

Josephine Bush works around a deprecation notice:

I’m saddened that the Workspace Summary is being deprecated in Log Analytics Workspace. I am trying to reproduce it in workbooks. While it isn’t an exact match, workbooks provide me with enough information to use and share with others.

Click through to see what you could get from the Workspace Summary and how to re-implement a fair amount of that in Azure Workbooks.

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Knowledge Management via Azure OpenAI

Published 2023-12-01 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Hernandez builds a system:

In this post, I would like to show you how I implemented a simple use case to exemplify how you can query your data by implementing a chat application using Azure Open AI. Of course, we cannot only answer questions, LLMs are also capable of summarizing texts, or extracting entities. I decided to call it “Knowledge Management Assistant”, since I would like to use the application to assist me with some tedious tasks, which consumes some of my limited time.

Click through for the process. I would have recommended checking the box for vector search, though I imagine that would have blown past the limitations of the Basic tier of Azure AI Search (nee Azure Cognitive Search).

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SSMS Improvements for Always Encrypted

Published 2023-12-01 by Kevin Feasel

Pieter Vanhove shares an update:

A couple of months ago we released a new version of the Always Encrypted Wizard that now supports secure enclaves and in-place encryption. With the new release of SSMS 19.2 we introduced a bunch of extra performance improvements and a big Always Encrypted Wizard enhancement. In this blog post I’m going to give you an overview of the new wizard capability and the performance improvements.

Read on to learn more about this new wizard, as well as what else the SSMS team has been working on with respect to Always Encrypted.

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Operating the Data Wrangler in Microsoft Fabric Notebooks

Published 2023-12-01 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers rustles up some data:

In this blog post I am going to show you an easy way to clean your data (which is often fixing data issues or mis-spelt data) using the new feature Launch Data Wranger using DataFrames

I had previously blogged about using Pandas data frames but this required extra steps and details, if you are interested in that blog post you can find it here: Did you know that there is an easy way to shape your data in Fabric Notebooks using Data Wrangler?

In this blog post I am going to show you how I cleaned up the data in my location column.

Read on for a demonstration of what you can do.

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Preemptive vs Non-Preemptive Waits in SQL Server

Published 2023-12-01 by Kevin Feasel

Chad Callihan interrupts this broadcast for an important message:

Have you ever been reviewing SQL Server waits and spotted any that had PREEMPTIVE in the name? There about 200 variations of PREEMPTIVE wait types out there, so I’m guessing you’ve seen at least one at some point in your career. They don’t always get the same type of attention as a CXPACKET wait or a THREADPOOL wait, so perhaps you never took the time to find out what they mean. Let’s discuss PREEMPTIVE waits as well as what NON-PREEMPTIVE means.

Read on for the answer.

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