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Day: March 29, 2024

Using the map() Function in purrr

Published 2024-03-29 by Kevin Feasel

Steven Sanderson reads the map():

In the world of data manipulation and analysis with R, efficiency and simplicity are paramount. One function that epitomizes these qualities is map(). Whether you’re a novice or a seasoned R programmer, mastering map() can significantly streamline your workflow and enhance your code readability. In this guide, we’ll delve into the syntax, usage, and numerous examples to help you harness the full power of map().

Click through for examples of how this works in R.

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A Bayesian Approach to CATPCHAs

Published 2024-03-29 by Kevin Feasel

John Cook claims to be human:

I set up a GitHub account for a new employee this morning and spent a ridiculous amount of time proving that I’m human.

The captcha was to listen to three audio clips at a time and say which one contains bird sounds. This is a really clever test, because humans can tell the difference between real bird sounds and synthesized bird-like sounds. And we’re generally good at recognizing bird sounds even against a background of competing sounds. But some of these were ambiguous, and I had real birds chirping outside my window while I was doing the captcha.

You have to do 20 of these tests, and apparently you have to get all 20 right. I didn’t. So I tried again. On the last test I accidentally clicked the start-over button rather than the submit button. I wasn’t willing to listen to another 20 triples of audio clips, so I switched over to the visual captcha tests.

Read on to see how a Bayesian approach to the problem could make things a bit less annoying.

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Announcements from the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference

Published 2024-03-29 by Kevin Feasel

James Serra gives us the round-up:

A ton of new features for Microsoft Fabric were announced at the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference. Here are all the new features I am aware of, with some released now and others coming soon:

  • Mirroring is now in public preview for Cosmos DB, Azure SQL DB and Snowflake. See Announcing the Public Preview of Database Mirroring in Microsoft Fabric
  • You get a free terabyte of Mirroring storage for replicas for every capacity unit (CU) you have purchased and provisioned. For example, if you purchase F64, you will get sixty-four free terabytes worth of storage for your mirrored replicas

Click through for a couple dozen more announcements. They’ve been quite busy on Microsoft Fabric.

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Mirroring an Azure SQL Database in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2024-03-29 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevuavilliers holds up a mirror:

Creating a Mirrored Azure SQL Database in Fabric

This week they announced Announcing the Public Preview of Database Mirroring in Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Power BI Blog | Microsoft Power BI

I decided to see how easy it was to create a mirrored database in Fabric and below are my findings (PS it is AMAZING)

Click through for the demo. Though it does look like Gilbert has mirrored the contents of the blog post a few times as well, at least as of the time of my post here.

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SSMS 20 and Mandatory Connection Security

Published 2024-03-29 by Kevin Feasel

Chad Callihan hits an annoyance:

I tried to run a new query for a CMS but the query window opened as disconnected. If I selected one server out of the group and tried to open a new query, I received an error that “A connection was successfully established with the server, but then an error occurred during the login process.”

That can get really annoying if you have a few hundred instances in your Central Management Server. They’d all go away if you set up certificates for the servers, but until then, it would be a major annoyance.

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Parallel Vector Index Rebuild in Postgres

Published 2024-03-29 by Kevin Feasel

Semab Tariq takes a look at parallel index building in pgvector:

Parallel Index Build refers to the capability to build indexes using parallel processing. In simpler terms, it means that multiple workers or threads can be utilized simultaneously to create an index, which can significantly speed up the index creation process.

When performing an index build operation, PostgreSQL can divide the work among multiple parallel workers, each responsible for building a portion of the index.

Read on to learn more about this bit of functionality in pgvector 0.6 and the performance gains you can get from it.

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