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Day: April 11, 2025

What’s New in R 4.5.0

Published 2025-04-11 by Kevin Feasel

Russ Hyde checks out the changes:

R 4.5.0 (“How About a Twenty-Six”) was released on 11th April, 2025. Here we summarise some of the interesting changes that have been introduced. In previous blog posts we have discussed the new features introduced in R 4.4.0 and earlier versions (see the links at the end of this post).

The full changelog can be found at the r-release ‘NEWS’ page and if you want to keep up to date with developments in base R, have a look at the r-devel ‘NEWS’ page.

There are some nice bits of functionality on the list, so check it out.

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Customizing Spark Settings in Microsoft Fabric Workspaces

Published 2025-04-11 by Kevin Feasel

Nikola Ilic doesn’t accept the default:

In this article, I’ll walk you through how to go from out-of-the-box default Spark configurations to a fine-tuned setup that suits your specific workloads and requirements, as well as getting you ready for the DP-700 exam.

Spark is an extremely powerful engine, but like any powerful tool, it runs best when you tune it. So, don’t always settle for default. Get dynamic—and get Spark working the way you need it to.

Click through for the explanation of functionality.

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Backups Aren’t Enough

Published 2025-04-11 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Hill lays out a common but very important argument:

Many IT leaders and system admins think, “We have full backups every night. We’re covered.” But when the time comes to restore, they discover:

· The backup file is corrupt.
· The storage location is inaccessible.
· The restore process takes way longer than expected.
· The recovery model wasn’t configured properly.
· The point-in-time restore doesn’t actually bring back the data they need.

At that point, it’s not a “backup strategy.” It’s a data loss incident.

The solution is to test those backups, and Kevin provides some guidance on how, as well as additional important parts of the story.

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Microsoft Fabric Extensions for VS Code

Published 2025-04-11 by Kevin Feasel

Sunitha Muthukrishna announces a new trio of VS Code extensions:

Microsoft Fabric is changing how we handle data engineering and data science. To make things easier, Microsoft added some cool extensions for Visual Studio Code (VS Code) that help you manage Fabric artifacts and build analytical applications.

By adding these Microsoft Fabric extensions to VS Code, developers can quickly create Fabric solutions and manage their data setups right from their coding environments. Here, we’ll look at these extensions and show why they’re useful.

Click through for notes on the three extensions that are available. Note that two of them are still in preview.

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Using DATETRUNC() in SQL Server

Published 2025-04-11 by Kevin Feasel

Rajendra Gupta shows off a nice feature in SQL Server 2022:

Suppose you are a data strategist or analyst for an organization. You have been tasked with getting actionable insights from customers who want to track customer patterns at different intervals, such as hourly, daily, or weekly. To do this, you need to use several date functions such as DATEADD, DATEDIFF, DATEPART, and DATEFROMPARTS to get the required date format.

In SQL Server 2022, this got a lot easier to do using the DATETRUNC function.

Solutions using DATETRUNC() are significantly easier to read and understand than the alternative of combiningDATEADD() and DATEDIFF()

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