Press "Enter" to skip to content

Category: Misc Languages

Building Retry Logic for Database Calls

Published 2022-12-19 by Kevin Feasel

Jose Manuel Jurado Diaz tries and tries again:

Today, I worked on a case that our customer faced an execution command timeout “Msg -2, Level 11, State 0, Line 0 – Execution Timeout Expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding“

As this business process is running over the night and they need to ensure that the execution will be completed, they asked if there is possible to implement an Execution Retry Logic. 

In the similar way that we have for Retry-Logic for Transient Failure We could implement a similar mechanism to retry the operation, the only thing that we need is to change the commandTimeout parameter, for example, in .NET. 

Click through for an example of how you can implement this in code. I’d also recommend Polly, which is a library explicitly built for these sorts of issues.

Comments closed

C# Text Classification via ML.NET 2

Published 2022-12-12 by Kevin Feasel

Matt Eland tries out ML.NET 2.0:

Recently ML.NET 2.0 was released, giving us a bevy of new features for the open source machine learning library for dotnet applications.

The release improved ML.NET’s text processing capabilities and improved some aspects of the already fantastic automated machine learning capabilities it had. Moreover, the release seemed to reaffirm ML.NET’s determination to be relevant for advanced machine learning tasks, including deep learning and transformer-based architectures.

In this article we’ll explore ML.NET 2.0’s new text classification capabilities and see how you can use C# to analyze sentiment, match utterances to intents, or otherwise classify textual data without having to write a lot of custom code.

Read on to learn more about ML.NET and plenty of turtles.

Comments closed

AI: Lying at Card Games via Probabilistic Modeling

Published 2022-12-06 by Kevin Feasel

Matt Eland is on a mission:

I taught an AI to lie at my favorite card game.

In this article, I’ll explore how I did that and what considerations I had to make while designing an artificial intelligence to play a social deduction-based card game. I’ll also discuss where the project is headed and the potential approaches that you might consider building game systems as an AI developer.

The game I chose to model is One Night Ultimate Werewolf by Bezier Games. This is a social deduction game modelled on the popular party games of Werewolf and Mafia. I’ll give you a quick overview of the rules in the next section, for those unfamiliar with it.

This is an interesting overview of the card game, as well as describing the project itself.

Comments closed

Azure SQL Trigger for Azure Functions

Published 2022-11-11 by Kevin Feasel

Drew Skwiers-Koballa announces a new feature:

The Azure SQL trigger for Azure Functions uses SQL change tracking functionality to monitor a SQL table for changes and trigger a function when a row is created, updated, or deleted.  Change tracking is available for Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance, and SQL Server, making the Azure SQL trigger for Azure Functions a flexible component for event-driven applications.

Similarly to the Azure SQL bindings for Azure Functions, a connection string for the SQL database is stored in the application settings of the Azure Function and supporting authentication options such as managed identity. In addition to the connection string, the SQL trigger is configured with a table name. The SQL trigger is specified on lines 12 and 13 in the C# Azure Function example below, which will log information about each change made to data in the dbo.Employees table.

Read on to see how it works.

Comments closed

Finding Near-Duplicates in a Corpus

Published 2022-10-04 by Kevin Feasel

Estelle Wang de-dupes text data:

Building a large high-quality corpus for Natural Language Processing (NLP) is not for the faint of heart. Text data can be large, cumbersome, and unwieldy and unlike clean numbers or categorical data in rows and columns, discerning differences between documents can be challenging. In organizations where documents are shared, modified, and shared again before being saved in an archive, the problem of duplication can become overwhelming.

To find exact duplicates, matching all string pairs is the simplest approach, but it is not a very efficient or sufficient technique. Using the MD5 or SHA-1 hash algorithms can get us a correct outcome with a faster speed, yet near-duplicates would still not be on the radar. Text similarity is useful for finding files that look alike. There are various approaches to this and each of them has its own way to define documents that are considered duplicates. Furthermore, the definition of duplicate documents has implications for the type of processing and the results produced. Below are some of the options.

Click through for solutions in SAS.

Comments closed

Running Postman Tests in GitLab

Published 2022-09-02 by Kevin Feasel

Rahul Kumar automates Postman tests:

Hi folks, In this brief blog post, we’ll learn more about Gitlab CI and Postman, the API testing tool we use the most frequently. This article’s goal is to provide a quick process for automatically testing the service API response. The solution makes use of the capabilities provided by the Gitlab-integrated Continuous Integration tool.

Click through for the tutorial.

Comments closed

Raw String Literals in C# 11

Published 2022-08-29 by Kevin Feasel

Patrick Smacchia shows off raw string literals:

C# 11 introduces Raw String Literals. Undoubtedly this feature will become very popular because it represents an elegant way to solve some issues with actual string literal.

Let’s have a look at such raw string literal with interpolation. Notice that a raw string literal necessarily starts and ends with at least 3x double quote characters """.

This is similar to how several other languages, including F# and Python, do it.

Comments closed

What’s New in SynapseML

Published 2022-08-11 by Kevin Feasel

Nellie Gustafsson and Mark Hamilton share an update:

SynapseML is a massively scalable (feel free to spin up hundreds of machines!) machine learning library built on Apache Spark. SynapseML makes it easy to train production-ready models to solve problems from simple classification and regression to anomaly detection, translation, image analysis, speech to text, and just about any ML challenge you are facing.  Under the hood, SynapseML integrates a wide array of ML technologies such as LightGBM, Vowpal Wabbit, ONNX, and the Cognitive Services into a single easy to use API compatible with MLFlow. We know, we know, everyone hates when developers invent new APIs, but you can rest easy because SynapseML integrates cleanly into existing Spark ML APIs so you can embed models directly into existing pipelines. We strive to make SynapseML available to developers wherever they work, and the library is available in a variety of languages like Python, Scala, Java, R. As of this release SynapseML is also usable from .NET, C#, F#.

Saving the best language for last, I see. Click through for the list of updates.

Comments closed

Neo4j Imports and Case Sensitivity

Published 2022-08-09 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones is getting me in a ranting mood:

I kept editing the file and trying different things. I compared what I had locally with what was on GitHub. Eventually, I realized this is the issue:

{employeeID:row.EmployeeID}

In the GitHub csv, the first row has headers with EmployeeID. In my local file, the header is “employeeID” (lower case). As soon as I edited this, it worked.

Case sensitivity is a big historical mistake.

Comments closed

SQL Server and Golang

Published 2022-08-02 by Kevin Feasel

Shane O’Neill goes long:

It’s all very well and good to open up Golang and write a FizzBuzz (note to self: write a FizzBuzz), but I still work with databases.

So before I do anything with Golang, I’d like to know: can it interact with databases. 

Granted, everything can, but how easy is it? And does trying to interact with databases kill any interest I have in the language.

So, let’s give it a go.

Click through to see what Shane came up with.

Comments closed