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Day: January 29, 2024

Finding the Earliest Date in R

Published 2024-01-29 by Kevin Feasel

Steven Sanderson puts on the archaeologist’s fedora and bullwhip:

Greetings, fellow data enthusiasts! Today, we embark on a quest to uncover the earliest date lurking within a column of dates using the power of R. Whether you’re a seasoned R programmer or a curious newcomer, fear not, for we shall navigate through this journey step by step, unraveling the mysteries of date manipulation along the way.

Imagine you have a dataset filled with dates, and you’re tasked with finding the earliest one among them. How would you tackle this challenge? Fear not, for R comes to our rescue with its arsenal of functions and packages.

Click through to see how, keeping those pernicious missing values in mind.

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Finding the Cake Dataset’s Original Source

Published 2024-01-29 by Kevin Feasel

Rasmus Baath has done a good deed for all:

In statistics, there are a number of classic datasets that pop up in examples, tutorials, etc. There’s the infamous iris dataset (just type iris in your nearest R prompt), the Palmer penguins (the modern iris replacement), the titanic dataset(s) (I hope you’re not a guy in 3rd class!), etc. While looking for a dataset to illustrate a simple hierarchical model I stumbled upon another one: The cake dataset in the lme4 package which is described as containing “data on the breakage angle of chocolate cakes made with three different recipes and baked at six different temperatures [as] presented in Cook (1938)1”. For me, this raised a lot of questions: Why measure the breakage angle of chocolate cakes? Why was this data collected? And what were the recipes?

Read on as Rasmus unravels the mysteries of the cake dataset with the help of several others. H/T R-Bloggers.

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Power BI Themes Gallery

Published 2024-01-29 by Kevin Feasel

Seth Bauer shares a tip:

Welcome to today’s tutorial where we’ll explore the Power BI Tips+ Theme Generator and its incredible features designed to streamline your Power BI report building experience. In this walkthrough, we’ll guide you through the process of getting started with the Power BI Tips+ Gallery, focusing on the Sunset theme. By the end of this tutorial, you’ll be able to effortlessly integrate our pre-configured Gallery Projects into your Power BI reports. It doesn’t get easier than this!

Click through for the process, including a video on how to do it.

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A Review of Data Platform Trends

Published 2024-01-29 by Kevin Feasel

Brendan Tierney checks the lists:

Each January I take a little time to look back on the Database market over the previous calendar year. This year I’ll have a look at 2023 (obviously!) and how things have changed and evolved.

In my post from last year (click here) I mentioned the behaviour of some vendors and how they like to be-little other vendors. That kind of behaviour is not really acceptable, but they kept on doing it during 2023 up to a point. That point occurred during the Autumn of 2023. It was during this period there was some degree of consolidation in the IT industry with staff reductions through redundancies, contracts not being renewed, and so on. These changes seemed to have an impact on the messages these companies were putting out and everything seemed to calm down. These staff reductions have continued into 2024.

Click through for Brendan’s thoughts on the new SQL:2023 standard and common estimations of data platform product utilization. I’ve historically focused on DB-Engines rather than TOPDB, but they’re both pointing in similar directions at the top.

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Stack Overflows in Power Query

Published 2024-01-29 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb hits an error:

If you’re writing your own M code in Power Query in Power BI or Excel you may run into the following error:

Expression.Error: Evaluation resulted in a stack overflow and cannot continue.

If you’re a programmer you probably know what a stack overflow is; if you’re not you might search for the term, find this Wikipedia article and still have no clue what has happened. Either way it may still be difficult to understand why you’re running into it in Power Query. To explain let’s see some examples.

Read on to learn what a stack overflow is, how you can create one, and circumstances in which one might arise in Power Query and M. Now Chris has me thinking about tail call recursion this early in the morning.

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Microsoft Fabric Free Trial Capacities

Published 2024-01-29 by Kevin Feasel

Soheil Bakhshi digs into the fine print:

If you are evaluating Microsoft Fabric and do not currently own a Premium Capacity, chances are you’re using Microsoft Fabric Trial Capacities. All Power BI users within an organisation or specific security groups given the rights can opt into Fabric Trial Capacities. Therefore, you may already have several Trial Fabric Capacities in your tenant. Your Fabric Administrators can specifically control who can opt into the Fabric Trial capacities within the Fabric Admin Portal, on the Help and support settings section, and enabling the Users can try Microsoft Fabric paid features setting as shown in the following image:

Read on for a lot more detail, including several common issues you might find along the way.

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