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Author: Kevin Feasel

MLOps on Databricks

Published 2022-01-17 by Kevin Feasel

Piotr Majer and Michael Shtelma complete a series on MLOps on Databricks:

This is the second part of a two-part series of blog posts that show an end-to-end MLOps framework on Databricks, which is based on Notebooks. In the first post, we presented a complete CI/CD framework on Databricks with notebooks. The approach is based on the Azure DevOps ecosystem for the Continuous Integration (CI) part and Repos API for the Continuous Delivery (CD). This post extends the presented CI/CD framework with machine learning providing a complete ML Ops solution.

Check it out.

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New Azure Synapse Database Templates

Published 2022-01-17 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Schofield has some new database templates for us:

The Synapse Database Template for Automotive Industries is a comprehensive data model that addresses the typical data requirements of organizations engaged in manufacturing automobiles, heavy vehicles, tires, and other automotive components.

The Synapse Database Template for Genomics is a comprehensive data model that addresses the typical data requirements of organizations engaged in acquiring and analyzing genomic data about human beings or other species.

Click through for more information on these, as well as two other fields.

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Logins and Users in SQL Server

Published 2022-01-17 by Kevin Feasel

Lee Markum disambiguates two security terms:

You’re a data professional learning about managing SQL Server and you’ve been asked to grant permissions for SQL Server to an individual or a group of individuals. What do you need to understand in order to accomplish this? I’ll be your guide to getting started with handling access to SQL Server.

Click through for the mandatory automobile analogy and a good way of laying out what logins and users are.

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Cannot Open User Default Database

Published 2022-01-17 by Kevin Feasel

David Alcock backs out of a problem:

This error isn’t to do with my login as such, it’s still there with sysadmin role membership so I don’t have to do anything too drastic like restarting SQL Server with the -m or -f startup parameters and recreate it. The error message is telling me that my logins default database cannot be opened, which is more than likely because I’ve deleted it.

Click through to see how David got out of this issue. This is a big part of why I highly prefer not to change the default database from master for logins..

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Getting IDs of Visuals using the Power BI Embedded Analytics Playground

Published 2022-01-17 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb meets us on the playground:

Log Analytics contains information on the dataset, report and visual that are associated with a DAX query but that information is in the form of IDs rather than names. Getting the IDs for specific datasets and reports is fairly straightforward – you can get them from urls in the Power BI Portal – and as I wrote here, it’s possible to get a list of IDs and names for the visuals in a report from the JSON file you get when you export from Performance Analyzer in Power BI Desktop. However, my colleague Rui Romano recently showed me a different way to get the same information using the Power BI Embedded Analytics Playgound, which may be an easier option to use in some cases.

Click through to learn more about the playground itself, as well as a way to convert visual names to their component IDs.

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Vim as an IDE

Published 2022-01-17 by Kevin Feasel

Andrew Pruski shares some settings:

Disclaimer – I like VS Code and I won’t be uninstalling it anytime soon and I’m not recommending people do.

However, I feel it can be overkill for 90% of the work that I do. So I’ve been playing around with Vim to see if it will give me what I want.

What I really want is a light weight text editor that allow me to run commands in a terminal…that’s it!

I’ve found that vim-markdown is one of those extensions Andrew mentions not having installed but being good.

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Sparklines in Power BI

Published 2022-01-14 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad gives us the lowdown on sparklines:

You can, of course, achieve the same thing using a line chart. You have to multiply it for each of the categories (you can do that in Power BI using small multiples). However, if you have many categories, then a small multiple might now show a nice view. that is why Sparkline can be helpful.

Sparklines are normally with minimal information. Their X-axis is a trend based on date (or something similar), but the axis is hidden because of minimal space. You can use the sparkline to understand the trend, the highest, the lowest, the starting and the ending point, etc. Because of their minimal nature, Sparklines are not used for a very detailed analysis. Instead, they are used to understand the trend of different categories over time in a high-level view.

Click through to see how you can add a sparkline to a table or matrix.

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(Not) Title Casing Graph Titles

Published 2022-01-14 by Kevin Feasel

Mike Cisneros lays out the argument:

In school, I was taught that you should center-align and capitalize the first letters of words in titles. I’ve noticed, though, that storytelling with data charts only capitalize the first word in the chart title, use ALL CAPS for the axis titles, and don’t center-align anything. Why?

Title casing is a really hard habit for me to break. I understand the “why” behind this, but it’s a change I’m unlikely to make anytime soon.

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SSIS Framework File Community Edition

Published 2022-01-14 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Leonard has an announcement:

The very first data integration / data engineering framework I ever wrote was for Data Transformation Services, or DTS. The DTS framework had one job: manage connections. I don’t recall all the details, but I remember DTS included a task that allowed packages to retrieve settings from INI files. INI files are key-value files, so I simply added entries with identical keys and different values – values that matched connection strings for each lifecycle tier – and placed each version of the INI file in the same location on every server in the lifecycle.

The next framework I wrote was for SSIS. I stored metadata in tables – including connections metadata – and created a concept I called an SSIS Application. An SSIS application is, according to my definition, a “collection of SSIS packages that execute in a pre-determined order.”

The SSIS Framework File Community Edition is very similar to this first framework, except for the connections management.

Click through to learn more about the SSIS Framework File Community Edition and check it out.

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