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Day: May 17, 2024

Counting Words in a String in R

Published 2024-05-17 by Kevin Feasel

Steven Sanderson counts the ways:

Counting words in a string is a common task in data manipulation and text analysis. Whether you’re parsing tweets, analyzing survey responses, or processing any textual data, knowing how to count words is crucial. In this post, we’ll explore three ways to achieve this in R: using base R’s strsplit(), the stringr package, and the stringi package. We’ll provide clear examples and explanations to help you get started.

I, of course, would commission a 128-node Hadoop cluster and write a few dozen pages of Java code to get the answer.

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Backup Storage Redundancy in Cosmos DB

Published 2024-05-17 by Kevin Feasel

Manvendra Singh talks about backups:

This article will explain backup storage redundancy for Azure Cosmos DB. Backups are a critical feature to keep copies of our data to ensure data protection and recoverability in case of any accidental deletion, updating, or any kind of disaster. But this is not enough to run backups only to save its copies. We must also protect those backup copies from accidental deletes or corruption and ensure their proper resiliency should be in place to keep backups safe from any unforeseen circumstances. It depends on the criticality of your data whether you want to keep them locally to want to replicate them in other locations or regions to ensure their resiliencies.

The backup process isn’t the same as with a relational database, but it’s still critical to back up your data, for the same reasons that you’d take backups of relational data.

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Testing if PowerShell is Running from Windows Terminal

Published 2024-05-17 by Kevin Feasel

Mike Robbins wants to know your terminal:

In the evolving landscape of software development and system administration, understanding your environment is essential for ensuring that scripts and commands run as expected. One useful PowerShell function that helps identify whether a script is running within Windows Terminal is my Test-IsWindowsTerminal function. This function is valuable for developers and system administrators who must tailor their scripts based on the terminal environment.

Click through for a PowerShell function that does just that.

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Using Static Cursors

Published 2024-05-17 by Kevin Feasel

Hugo Kornelis digs into one type of cursor:

I have used the GLOBAL scope option, so that it is possible to step through the code one statement at a time. This option does not affect the execution plans used. The FORWARD_ONLY and READ_ONLY options are probably the most commonly used options with cursors, especially with static cursors. We will briefly look at the effect of other options for read direction and concurrency at the end of this post.

Click through to learn more about how cursors show up in execution plans and how you can tell, based on the execution plan of a static cursor, why it’s either really fast (relative to other cursor types) or really slow.

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Sorting Date Values in Power BI Slicers

Published 2024-05-17 by Kevin Feasel

Kenneth Omorodion demands order:

Sorting values on a Power BI visual is a common requirement for reporting. For example, it is standard practice to sort months from January to December when months are represented in a visual. This might also be required in a slicer visual. In both cases, it is easy to sort when it’s a continuous value, like months, years, quarters, or alphabetically.

However, in Power BI, business users might require a slicer visual with string values to be ordered in a way that makes it easier for them to make a slicer selection based on what they want to view on a report page. The issue here is that string values are not continuous in nature, and we cannot leverage the usual sorting approaches. This tip will demonstrate this problem and an approach to resolve it.

Read on for the solution.

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Azure SQL Database Watcher and Query Store

Published 2024-05-17 by Kevin Feasel

Kendra Little is happy:

I’ve spent a bit of time with Microsoft’s new database watcher tool for Azure SQL recently.

There are a lot of things I like about database watcher– which is currently in preview and which refuses to Capitalize Its Name– but it does one big thing that I really, really like: it collects data from Query Store. You can access that Query Store data from built-in database watcher dashboards, query it using KQL, or (something something) in Microsoft Fabric if you’ve got money to burn on your monitoring data.

Query Store has been available since SQL Server 2016, but I haven’t yet heard of monitoring tools that truly take advantage of it. It’s about time.

This is where I’d also plug QDS Toolbox for on-premises environments. A good amount of the reporting information comes out of Query Store and it helps manage Query Store to boot.

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