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Day: October 22, 2024

Supply Chain Analysis in R via planr

Published 2024-10-22 by Kevin Feasel

Matt Dancho shows off an R package:

Supply chain management is all about balancing supply and demand to ensure that inventory levels are optimized. Overestimating demand leads to excess stock, while underestimating it causes shortages. Accurate inventory projections allow businesses to plan ahead, make data-driven decisions, and avoid costly errors like over-buying inventory or getting into a stock-outage and having no inventory to meet demand.

Read on to learn more about the package and how it works. H/T R-Bloggers.

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Preparing a Fetch Operation in a Kafka Consumer

Published 2024-10-22 by Kevin Feasel

Danica Fine continues a series on Kafka internals:

Welcome back to the third installment of our blog series where we’re diving into the beautiful black box that is Apache Kafka® to better understand how we interact with the cluster through producer and consumer clients.

Earlier in the series, we took a look at the Kafka producer to see how the client works before following a produce request as it’s processed by the cluster.

In this post, we’ll switch our attention to Kafka Consumer clients to see how consumers interact with the brokers, coordinate their partitions, and send requests to read data from your Kafka topics.

Read on to see what it takes for a consumer to operate in Apache Kafka.

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Using Week-Based Calendars in Power BI

Published 2024-10-22 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari work in weeks:

Weekly calendars are common in manufacturing, retail, and any business that is sensitive to weekends or to the number of working days. For example, the scenario described in this article uses the number of pageviews on a website from 2019 to 2024, with data available until September 3, 2024. The website analyzed has a clear weekly trend, with slower traffic over the weekend, as shown in the following line chart with a daily granularity. It seems like a business website. A sports website would probably display the opposite trend.

Read on to see some of the challenges around week-based calendars. There’s a reason I have a “Dates and Numbers” category on Curated SQL and it’s exactly for things like this: some of the most common things we as humans work with are extremely complex and fraught with exceptions, including calendars.

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Fabric Shortcuts and P1 Capacity

Published 2024-10-22 by Kevin Feasel

Kristina Mishra takes us down an alley of pain:

If you’ve bought a P1 reserved capacity, you may have been told “No worries – it’s the same as an F64!” (Or really, this is probably the case for any P to F sku conversion.) Just as you suspected – that’s not entirely accurate. And if you are trying to create Fabric shortcuts on a storage account that uses a virtual network or IP filtering – it’s not going to work.

The problem seems to lie in the fact that P1 is not really an Azure resource in the same way an F sku is. So when you go to create your shortcut following all the recommend settings (more on that in a minute), you’ll wind up with some random authentication message like the one below “Unable to load. Error 403 – This request is not authorized to perform this operation”:

On the “oof” scale, this rates as “big oof.” Kristina shows some of the differences between P SKUs and F SKUs and why it matters, as well as two unpalatable solutions if you happen to be using a P SKU.

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Tips for Writing an Efficient Query

Published 2024-10-22 by Kevin Feasel

Ben Johnston has a plan:

The ability to write an efficient query starts with a well-designed database. If the database you are working with is poorly designed, your choices are limited. Even in those scenarios, you can still enhance your query design and follow best practices.

The goal of this post is to provide simple guidelines for writing efficient queries. These guidelines aren’t advanced SQL techniques. These are just the basics that anyone can use to write fast, efficient queries. There are many functions and keywords available in TSQL, so many scenarios aren’t covered by these guidelines. But – they are a good place to start for any query.

Click through for the process.

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