A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Steve Jones walks through a Python tutorial:
However, there were other errors, which I suspect are related to Python 2.7 v Pyhton 3.5. Rather than solve those, I went on to the columnstore demo. In this, you create a table with 5mm rows and then run a query against it from Python. I did that, then created the columnstore index, then ran it again. The results are below.
And within an hour or so of starting, Steve has hit the 2.x vs 3.x mess in Python.
Comments closedSaveen Reddy announces that Python is now a first-tier language in the Azure Data Lake:
This week, were are now making announcing even more support for Python. As of today Python is now a first-class language supported by our management SDKs. This enables you to develop applications or automate the Data Lake services. Check out or Getting Started articles that now include many python samples
Saveen has a Jupyter notebook which demonstrates Python in Azure Data Lake Store.
Comments closedMax Trinidad mixes two powerful scripting languages:
For this section we previously installed the python module pyodbc which is needed to connect via ODBC to any SQL Server on the network giving the proper authentication method.
The following sample code can be found this link: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/developer-get-started/python-ubuntu
This is probably more useful in larger shops with multiple operations personnel covering different domains, but it’s nice to know that both languages play nice.
Comments closedAllison Tharp shows how to generate a word cloud using Python:
Every week, someone on Reddit posts a “word cloud” on all of the NFL team’s subreddits. These word clouds show the most used words on that subreddit for the week (the larger the word, the more it was used). These word plots are always really fascinating to me, so I wanted to try to make some for myself. In this tutorial, we’ll be making the following word cloud from my board game stats twitter feed, @BGGStats
Looks like the implementation is fairly straightforward, so check it out.
Comments closedKoos van Strien wants to bring a trained Python model into Azure ML:
The path of bringing a trained model from the local Python/Anaconda environment towards cloud Azure ML is globally as follows:
Export the trained model
Zip the exported files
Upload to the Azure ML environment
Embed in your Azure ML solution
Click through to see the details. Koos did a great job making it look easy.
Comments closedAllison Tharp has an update to her NFL Alerts Python script:
Next, I wanted to make the alerts be a little more meaningful. The alert for a scoring play was already pretty good – it sends something like: BUF – Q4 – TD – J.Boykin 4 yd. pass from C.Jones (pass failed) Drive: 8 plays, 83 yards in 1:08 IND (19) at BUF (18). This is good, and in fact it is what I want the rest of the alerts to look like. However, I’d like the subject of the email to have the name of the team that scored (before it was just ‘Scoring Play’).
To do that, I needed to find out how to get the name of the scoring team. This was a little tricky because the documentation for the nflgame library, though pretty good, doesn’t give a good indication on how to find this.
Read on for more details, including specifics on turnovers and penalties.
Comments closedKoos van Strien “graduates” from Azure ML into Python:
Python is often used in conjunction with the scikit-learn collection of libraries. The most important libraries used for ML in Python are grouped inside a distribution called Anaconda. This is the distribution that’s also used inside Azure ML1. Besides Python and scikit-learn, Anaconda contains all kinds of Data Science-oriented packages. It’s a good idea to install Anaconda as a distribution and use Jupyter (formerly IPython) as development environment: Anaconda gives you almost the same environment on your local machine as your code will run in once in Azure ML. Jupyter gives you a nice way to keep code (in Python) and write / document (in Markdown) together.
Anaconda can be downloaded from https://www.continuum.io/downloads.
If you’re going down this path, Anaconda is absolutely a great choice.
Comments closedAllison Tharp has a Python script to track extremely important events:
First, we get the game data for the game we want. In this instance, I am getting game data for the Indianapolis vs Cincinnati game in the 4th week of the 2016 preseason and setting it to the variable g. Next, we will get the current number of scoring plays (scores0), number of home/away team turnovers (home/awayto0), number of home/away penalties (home/awaypenalty0), and finally, the number of yards that resulted from home/away penalties (home/awaypenyds0).
The rest of the script runs while the game is still in progress. To check if the game is in progress, we use g.game_over(). If this object is False, the game is ongoing:
I did not know about the nflgame module and I think my life has just become better as a result of learning about this.
Comments closedJustin Brandenburg has a tutorial on combining Python and Spark on the MapR platform:
Looking at the first 5 records of the RDD
kddcup_data.take(5)
This output is difficult to read. This is because we are asking PySpark to show us data that is in the RDD format. PySpark has a DataFrame functionality. If the Python version is 2.7 or higher, you can utilize the pandas package. However, pandas doesn’t work on Python versions 2.6, so we use the Spark SQL functionality to create DataFrames for exploration.
The full example is a fairly simple k-means clustering process, which is a great introduction to PySpark.
Comments closedAlex Woodie notes the increased popularity of Python for data analysis:
According to the results of the 2016 survey, R is the preferred tool for 42% of analytics professionals, followed by SAS at 39% and Python at 20%. While Python’s placing may at first appear to relegate the language to Bronze Medal status, it’s the delta here that really matters.
It’s interesting to see the breakdowns of who uses which language, comparing across industry, education, work experience, and geographic lines.
Comments closed