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Day: August 26, 2025

Contrasting Three Classification Algorithms for Small Datasets

Published 2025-08-26 by Kevin Feasel

Jayita Gulati compares a few mechanisms to classify data:

When you have a small dataset, choosing the right machine learning model can make a big difference. Three popular options are logistic regression, support vector machines (SVMs), and random forests. Each one has its strengths and weaknesses. Logistic regression is easy to understand and quick to train, SVMs are great for finding clear decision boundaries, and random forests are good at handling complex patterns, but the best choice often depends on the size and nature of your data.

In this article, we’ll compare these three methods and see which one tends to work best for smaller datasets.

All three are quite reasonable algorithms to compare, though I’d want to add in gradient descent or XGBoost, as I’d expect it to perform better than random forest with small datasets.

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Tracking Time Series Rates of Change in SQL Server

Published 2025-08-26 by Kevin Feasel

Rick Dobson wants a measure of variation:

This tip presents a brief introduction to Common Table Expressions (CTE), along with a few references for those seeking additional details on CTEs beyond those described and demonstrated here. We will examine CTEs that are defined by either one or two SELECT statements. Additionally, we will provide a demonstration of a recursive CTE. All the examples illustrate how to process time series datasets with CTEs.

Click through for the tip.

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Microsoft Fabric Pipeline Copy Job Activity in Preview

Published 2025-08-26 by Kevin Feasel

Connie Xu makes an announcement:

We’re thrilled to announce that the Copy job Activity is now in Preview! 

This new orchestration activity brings the simplicity of the Copy job item directly into your Microsoft Fabric Data Factory pipelines, enabling you to manage data movement alongside transformations, notifications, and more; all in one place. 

Read on to learn more about it, including how it differs from the Copy activity and the Copy job item.

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Passing Selections from Visuals to Translytical Task Flows

Published 2025-08-26 by Kevin Feasel

Jon Vöge sends along some data:

A common misconception about Translytical Task Flows is that the only way for you to parameterize and pass user inputs to the User Data Function, is through Slicers in Power BI.

That is not true at all.

In fact, one of the most powerful ways of integrating Task Flows into your Power BI reports, is by allowing user selections made in visualisations in your report, flow through to your task flow.

Read on to see how you can do this.

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Week-over-Week Calculations in Power BI without DAX

Published 2025-08-26 by Kevin Feasel

Boniface Muchendu wants to avoid DAX for this calculation:

Power BI visual calculations provide a simplified way to perform time-based comparisons like week-over-week (WoW) analysis without writing complex DAX. Power BI’s time intelligence functions are powerful, but they can become challenging when working with custom calendars or unique business logic. If you’ve ever struggled with calculating WoW performance, this post will show you how to streamline the process using visual calculations.

Read on to see how. Though one thing to keep in mind is that it says week-over-week, but that assumes you have data for each week. I don’t believe this solution would cleanly handle gaps in data, so that would be something you’d want to do beforehand.

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Join Operator Properties and Query Performance

Published 2025-08-26 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword takes a closer look at the big three join operators in SQL Server:

In the previous post I explained Join Operators in SQL Server. Whilst compiling that I dug a little deeper and came across a few interesting points I thought were worth sharing.

Let’s look at behaviour of the operators which may occur under specific conditions. Hopefully you find them as interesting as I did:

Click through for an interesting tidbit about nested loops joins, merge joins, and hash joins.

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