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Category: Notebooks

SQL Tools Updates

Published 2022-03-01 by Kevin Feasel

Timi Oshin has updates on SSMS and Azure Data Studio:

Azure Data Studio 1.35 now supports easier keyboard navigation in notebooks without mouse clicking. This is done by hitting the Esc key and navigating between cell rows using the Up and Down arrow keys. To enter edit mode, hit the Enter key on the keyboard. The new Table Designer preview feature supports creating new tables and editing existing tables on a connected SQL Server instance. This is a highly requested product enhancement and enables more productive schema management with a modern, streamlined UX.

Haha! It only took several years but my hectoring finally pays off. Now for the full set of Jupyter keyboard shortcuts…

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Working with Notebooks in Azure ML

Published 2022-02-03 by Kevin Feasel

I have started a new series:

In the prior series, Low-Code Machine Learning with Azure ML, we saw how to get started with Azure Machine Learning in a fairly pain-free way, especially for developers getting started with machine learning. In this series, I will assume that you already know all of those details and instead, we’re going to go full-code.

There are a few different ways in which we can go full-code with Azure ML. Today, we’re going to look at the easiest of those methods: using Jupyter notebooks within Azure ML Studio.

Read on for the first post in the series.

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Databricks Notebook Discovery via Notebooks

Published 2021-09-27 by Kevin Feasel

Darin McBeth creates a meta-noterbook to keep track of notebooks:

Elsevier has been a customer of Databricks for about six years. There are now hundreds of users and tens of thousands of notebooks across their workspace. To some extent, Elsevier’s Databricks users have been a victim of their own success, as there are now too many notebooks to search through to find some earlier work.

The Databricks workspace does provide a keyword search, but we often find the need to define advanced search criteria, such as creator, last updated, programming language, notebook commands and results.

Interestingly, we managed to achieve this functionality using a 100% notebook-based solution with Databricks functionalities. As you will see, this makes it easy to set up in a customer’s Databricks environment.

Read on to see how.

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Automating Notebook Execution with Powershell

Published 2021-09-23 by Kevin Feasel

Julie Koesmarno shows off an automation process for notebooks:

When I first think about automation, I generally think in the following way: in order to automate a script, we want to ensure that the script itself can be run via a command line interface (CLI) and with almost no user interaction (except for input and output parameters). Now, how do we apply this to Jupyter Notebooks so that we can automate SQL notebooks or PowerShell Notebooks?

The good news is that these SQL notebooks and PowerShell notebooks that we’ve created using Azure Data Studio, can be run on PowerShell CLI. If these notebooks can be run on PowerShell CLI, that means any automation systems or serverless architecture (Azure Automation combined with Azure Logic Apps as an example) should be able to run these notebooks also.

In this blog post, I’ll cover examples on using Invoke-SqlNotebook, using Invoke-ExecuteNotebook and putting it together with Azure Automation.

Click through to see the whole thing.

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CI/CD with Databricks Notebooks and Azure DevOps

Published 2021-09-22 by Kevin Feasel

Michael Shtelma and Piotr Majer get us started on an MLOps journey:

This is the first part of a two-part series of blog posts that show how to configure and build end-to-end MLOps solutions on Databricks with notebooks and Repos API. This post presents a CI/CD framework on Databricks, which is based on Notebooks. The pipeline integrates with the Microsoft Azure DevOps ecosystem for the Continuous Integration (CI) part and Repos API for the Continuous Delivery (CD).In the second post, we’ll show how to leverage the Repos API functionality to implement a full CI/CD lifecycle on Databricks and extend it to the fully-blown MLOps solution.

Click through for the article and a link to code. You can also see the pipeline YAML (and Python code it calls) in the repo.

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Interactive .NET Notebooks in Visual Studio Code

Published 2021-09-22 by Kevin Feasel

Deborah Melkin tries out .NET Interactive Notebooks in Visual Studio Code:

These days, we tend to think Azure Data Studio when we database developers talk about notebooks, specifically SQL Notebooks. But what Rob used for his demos are a new functionality within VS Code called .NET Interactive Notebooks. It was developed in combination with the Azure Data Studio team and it has support for SQL. But the cool thing that intrigued me was that a notebook could support multiple kernels, unlike Azure Data Studio. Knowing how much we love our SQL and PowerShell and this being a feature that many of us want to see in SQL Notebooks, I decided to try and set this up and poke around.

Click through for Deb’s experiences. And I’ll also point out that .NET Interactive Notebooks supports the best .NET language (and the one which most naturally fits the ethos of notebooks), F#.

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Embedding Power BI into Jupyter Notebooks

Published 2021-06-15 by Kevin Feasel

Dennes Torres takes a look at a new Power BI feature:

Microsoft recently announced the ability to include Power BI reports inside Jupyter notebooks. After overcoming the dazzle of this exciting feature, what comes to my mind is: “Why do we need this?”

I’m far from being a Jupyter notebook expert, but as far as I know, they are used for interactive analysis. Why, in the middle of an interactive analysis, would I need to get a Power BI Report?

Even if the Power BI Report is not exactly what I need, I could continue the analysis in Power BI. Why should I move it to Jupyter and make this kind of integration with an existing report?

Read on to see what you can do with it. As far as how you might be able to use it, that remains an open question.

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Learning the Basics of Kafka via Notebook

Published 2021-05-14 by Kevin Feasel

Francesco Tisiot shares a way to learn about the basics of Apache Kafka using Jupyter notebooks:

One of the best ways to learn a new technology is to try it within an assisted environment that anybody can replicate and get working within few minutes. Notebooks represent an excellence in this field by allowing people to share and use pre-built content which includes written descriptions, media and executable code in a single page.

This blog post aims to teach you the basics of Apache Kafka Producers and Consumers through building an interactive notebook in Python. If you want to browse a full ready-made solution instead, check out our dedicated github repository.

The classic tutorials tend to use a couple command prompts and the built-in producer and consumer shell scripts. I like this approach as a way of being able to review the code and results later as a refresher.

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T-SQL Tuesday 137 Round-Up

Published 2021-04-26 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones wraps up the latest T-SQL Tuesday:

I hosted the blog party this month, with the invite to write about notebooks. These are a neat technology, and I’ve written about them at SQLServerCentral.

This post is a wrap-up of the various responses to my invitation. First, quite a few people give credit to either Aaron Nelson or Rob Sewell for their writings and work with notebooks, so check out their blogs.

Click through for the list of respondents.

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