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Author: Kevin Feasel

Comparing Pre- and Post-Event in Power BI

Published 2022-08-16 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari do a bit of comparative analysis:

Many article ideas come from questions we receive from our customers and readers, and this article is no exception. The requirement is to analyze the sales volume before and after a selected time period, to a specific customer segment. In this case we define the segment as the brand that the customers have purchased in the past. For example, considering the customers who purchased Contoso-branded products in February 2018, what is the Sales Amount of Contoso and other products sold to those same customers 180 days before and after February 2018?

Read on to find out.

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Building a Data Serving API in Azure

Published 2022-08-15 by Kevin Feasel

Justice Zishanhi has some recommendations for serving data in Azure:

Data is an important asset to all organizations big and small. As these organizations mature, building an end-to-end data platform to enable BI and AI at scale has become part of that journey. Some organizations, have the requirement to expose modelled data in a data warehouse or data lake (Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2) to downstream consumer applications (mobile or web apps) where access patterns can be unpredictable in respect to frequency of access and/or type of data that is requested.

Data warehouse engines and data lakes are not designed for singleton transactional (request / response) interactions.  To serve these requests at scale and to meet the different SLAs and access pattern unpredictability, data needs to be offloaded to a suitable database engine (i.e., a caching layer) that is built to serve such queries.  

The “Design Patterns” section of this article highlights a generalized pattern for implementing a data serving API which meets this requirement – consisting of a Data Platform component and an API component. For implementing the API, two patterns are commonly adopted – a synchronous pattern or an asynchronous pattern. Both are explored in the “API Implementation Patterns” section of this article.

The example focuses on Cosmos DB and provides quite a bit of helpful guidance.

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Solving the Traveling Salesman Problem in R

Published 2022-08-15 by Kevin Feasel

Tomaz Kastrun gives us a solution to the Traveling Salesman Problem:

Travelling Salesman Problem is an NP-complete problem and an old mathematical problem. For this useless function, we will look for the nearest city from the previous city (or starting point) and repeat until we visit all cities. The greedy solution is fairly simplified but one disadvantage; it might not give you the best path (optimal solution) and proving that the solution is correct is an additional issue 

As Tomaz notes, this is not guaranteed to be the best solution, just a solution. Considering that TSP is NP-hard, if Tomaz did have a globally optimal solution for us, he certainly wouldn’t be calling it ‘useless-useful’ but instead would be calling it “My prize-winning algorithm.”

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SQL Server 2022 and S3 Object Integration

Published 2022-08-15 by Kevin Feasel

Anthony Nocentino does some PolyBase work:

In this blog post, I’ve implemented two example environments for using SQL Server 2022’s s3 object integration. One for backup and restore to s3 compatible object storage and the other for data virtualization using Polybase connectivity to s3 compatible object storage. This work aims to get you up and running as quickly as possible to work with these new features. I implemented this in Docker Compose since that handles all the implementation and configuration steps for you. The complete code for this is available on my GitHub repo…I’m walking you through the implementation here in this post.

In my post Setting up MinIO for SQL Server 2022 s3 Object Storage Integration we did this step by step at the command line. Using Docker Compose it will do all the hard work for you and you can get up and running fast.

Let’s walk through what you’ll get in each environment.

Read the whole thing, especially the note at the bottom about minimum RAM requirements on the Docker container.

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Converting a Referenced Query Column to a Table

Published 2022-08-15 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Svensen does a bit of magic:

Let’s imagine I have a query with a column called Reportid – and I want to create another query with the unique values from the column.

Normally I would create a new blank query and than reference the column with – queryName[ColumnName]

And then there are a bunch of other steps which eventually lead you to the result. Or you can go straight to easy mode. That sounds like a pretty good idea to do instead.

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Custom Infix Functions in R

Published 2022-08-12 by Kevin Feasel

Dominik Rafacz loves infix functions:

Custom infix functions are one of my favorite features in R. This article is my love letter to them. But first, a quick recap.

For those unfamiliar with the terminology, infix function is a function fun which is called using infix notation, e.g., x fun y instead of fun(x, y). Those functions are also called infix operators by base R, and I will use those terms and name infixes interchangeably. There are a lot of infix operators in base R used very frequently, i.e., arithmetic or logical operators. We use them so often that we usually forget that they are functions. And that we can call them just like regular functions.

Infix functions are something I tend to forget entirely about developing on my own but they can be extremely useful, as Dominik shows. H/T R-Bloggers.

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An Intro to Key Word Analysis

Published 2022-08-12 by Kevin Feasel

Lewis Prince continues a series on natural language processing:

Here we are with part 2 of this blog series on web scraping and natural language processing (NLP). In the first part I discussed what web scraping was, why it’s done and how it can be done. In this part I will give you details on what NLP is at a high level, and then go into detail of an application of NLP called key word analysis (KWA).

Read on for a high-level overview of the topic and how to do it in Cognitive Services. But not the topic model—that’d be a different post.

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Purview Access Policies and SQL Server 2022

Published 2022-08-12 by Kevin Feasel

Srdan Bozovic links Purview and SQL Server 2022:

The focus of this article is on using Microsoft Purview to enable access to user data as well as specific system metadata in SQL Server 2022 running on Azure Arc–enabled servers.

With the SQL Server 2022 release, the goal is to enable three main scenarios:

– Browsing data in user-defined tables and views.

– Performance monitoring with system commands, functions, and views.

– Security auditing with security-related system functions and views.

If Azure Arc-enabled servers are required for Purview to work, I think that will seriously hinder uptake.

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