Press "Enter" to skip to content

Day: December 4, 2024

Creating a Project in Azure AI Foundry

Published 2024-12-04 by Kevin Feasel

Tomaz Kastrun continues a series on Azure AI:

Azure AI models inference service provides access to the most powerful models available in the Azure AI model catalog. Coming from the key model providers in the industry including OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, Mistral, Cohere, G42, and AI21 Labs; these models can be integrated with software solutions to deliver a wide range of tasks including content generation, summarization, image understanding, semantic search, and code generation.

The Azure AI model inference service provides a way to consume models as APIs without hosting them on your infrastructure. Models are hosted in a Microsoft-managed infrastructure, which enables API-based access to the model provider’s model. API-based access can dramatically reduce the cost of accessing a model and simplify the provisioning experience.

Read on to learn more about what you get when you create a project.

Leave a Comment

Delta Tables in Microsoft Fabric with Polars

Published 2024-12-04 by Kevin Feasel

Sandeep Pawar tries out the Polars library:

The much-anticipated Python notebook in Fabric is finally available and the Fabric users have already developed cool libraries and blogged about the usefulness of these notebooks. Duckdb is everyone’s favorite, but I am a Python guy so here is quick overview of how you can use Polars in the Python notebook.

Polars is an open-source library that uses a Rust engine and supports multi-threaded execution. This means it’s significantly faster than pandas and, in some cases, even faster than Spark. It can efficiently use the limited resources available in Python notebooks (2 cores, 16GB RAM). Polars v1.6 is installed in the default Python notebook environment. So, let’s see how to perform some common operations.

Read on to see how you can load and write out files via Polars.

Leave a Comment

The Cost of Free Testing Tools

Published 2024-12-04 by Kevin Feasel

Lauren Harold reminds us that time has value and opportunity cost exists:

Open source frameworks like Selenium, Cypress, and Playwright are the first stop for most startups when they automate their end-to-end tests. This process generally happens early, according to our research, with 69% of software teams with just 6-10 developers automating their testing.

But make no mistake. We recently surveyed developers and engineering leaders from around the globe to understand how current practices impact software velocity. One thing that immediately became apparent was that open source testing frameworks are “free,” but their costs snowball once you start adding testing infrastructure, plugins, and test management software.

The proposed solution in the article is no-code end-to-end testing, though that often ends up being brittle like other end-to-end testing solutions, and a huge challenge for complicated flows.

Leave a Comment

Importing PDF Contents into SQL Server

Published 2024-12-04 by Kevin Feasel

Sebastiao Pereira loads a PDF:

PDF forms are widely used for data collection, document processing, and digital workflows due to their versatility and consistency across different platforms and devices. They are essential in various industries, including healthcare, education, finance, government, and business. How do you retrieve data from PDF forms and insert into a SQL Server database table?

Read on for an answer using Visual Basic, which is a name I haven’t heard in quite some time.

Leave a Comment