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Curated SQL Posts

An Overview of Microsoft Fabric Terminology

Published 2023-07-10 by Kevin Feasel

Soheil Bakhshi takes us through some terms:

In this blog post, I will explain some of the key concepts, personas, and terminologies related to Microsoft Fabric, a SaaS analytics platform for the era of AI. If you are not familiar with the basic concepts of SaaS analytics platforms and how Microsoft Fabric fits in, I recommend you read my previous blog post, where I explain them in detail.

Click through to learn more about what terms like “tenant,” “capacity,” and “persona” mean in the context of Microsoft Fabric.

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Analyzing Postgres Logs with pgbadger

Published 2023-07-10 by Kevin Feasel

Anthony Nowocien takes us through a useful tool:

This week, #PGSQLPhriday is hosted by Alicja Kucharczyk. Every month, one community member proposes a new subject to this monthly blogging event and let the world (or your family/friends/neighbors if you prefer) know all about pgBadger. It’s a tool to analyze your PostgreSQL logs and present you a nice web report.

If you like some history, it has been developed by Gilles Darold since more than 11 years, as v1.0 came along on June the 10th in 2012. At this time, pgfouine was the main log analyzer and the complete Perl rewrite was greatly performance influenced. In V4, it started to have its current look, by embarking the Bootstrap library and fonts.

Click through to see what pgbadger does and an example of how it makes log analysis understandable.

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File Renaming in R

Published 2023-07-07 by Kevin Feasel

Steven Sanderson renames a file:

Managing files is an essential task for any programmer, and when working with R, the file.rename() function can become your best friend. In this blog post, we’ll explore the ins and outs of file.rename(), discuss its syntax, provide real-life examples, and share some best practices to empower you in your file management endeavors. So grab a cup of coffee and let’s dive into the world of file.rename()!

Click through for two examples. But do read the documentation if you’re running on Windows and dealing with symbolic links.

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Customizing a Shiny App Theme

Published 2023-07-07 by Kevin Feasel

Peter Baranovskiy doesn’t want bog standard but is okay with mostly standard:

There are multiple ways to style or theme a Shiny app. A high-level overview is available in the Mastering Shiny book by Hadley Wickham. Here I’ll show the easiest way to do this. If you need to build an entirely – or mostly – new Shiny theme (e.g. a corporate theme), this post is probably not for you. In that case bslib may be the best starting point. Otherwise, if you are generally happy with a pre-made theme and just want to tweak some of its elements, read on.

This post is based on an actual app, so that you can see how it all works. Here’s the app’s source.

Click through to see what kinds of changes you can make without a major overhaul.

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Parameterizing Jupyter Notebooks

Published 2023-07-07 by Kevin Feasel

John Mount shows off a feature:

I’d like to share a great new feature in the wvpy package (available at PyPi).

This package is useful in converting Jupiter notebooks to/from python, and also in rendering many parameterized notebooks. The idea is to make Jupyter notebook easier to use in production.

The latest feature is an extension of notebook parameterization. In addition to the init_code and output_suffix features, which allow adding arbitrary code to notebooks and saving multiple renders of the same notebook under different (non-coliding!) names. The new sheet_vars feature allows the insertion of arbitrary data into notebook renders (in addition to the earlier code insertion facility).

Click through for an example on how to use this. Several years ago, I would have considered this to be outstanding. Today, I think it’s cool, but I’ve also gravitated toward using notebooks as an intermediary step rather than a final product, so it’s less critical for me these days.

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Performance Optimizing Cosmos DB

Published 2023-07-07 by Kevin Feasel

Harshvardhan Singh has a few tips for us:

As with the other databases, indexing is the first go-to option to improve query performance. The same is the case with Cosmos DB as well. Below are a few points which you can leverage to optimize the indexing strategy for Cosmos DB. 

Indexes are kind of similar to indexing in SQL Server in intent, though different enough in implementation that you’ll want to read up on them. Harshvardhan also includes some tips around data modeling and querying data.

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Impact of and Limitations to Parameter Tuning in Postgres

Published 2023-07-07 by Kevin Feasel

Henrietta Dombrovskaya wraps up a series on PostgreSQL parameters:

In this first blog, we didn’t provide any examples of the practical impact of parameters tuning on performance. Indeed, it is challenging to model such an impact on the training database. 

In this blog, we will segue from discussing PostgreSQL system parameters best practices to other ways of performance tuning. Moreover, we will demonstrate that essential database performance tuning goes beyond choosing the appropriate parameters settings.

Click through for that post.

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Azure DataSync: Cannot Insert NULL Value

Published 2023-07-07 by Kevin Feasel

Jose Manuel Jurado Diaz does some sleuthing:

In this blog article, we will delve into a common error encountered when synchronizing data with Azure SQL DataSync. We’ll explore the error message “Error #1: SqlException Error Code: -2146232060 – SqlError Number: 515, Message: Cannot insert the value NULL into column ‘ID’, table ‘dbo.Customers’; column does not allow nulls. INSERT fails. SqlError Number: 3621, Message: The statement has been terminated.” We will provide a detailed explanation of the error and its possible causes, followed by a T-SQL code snippet that reproduces the error scenario.

Click through for four possible causes.

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Creating a Simple Video with Azure Open AI and Cognitive Services

Published 2023-07-06 by Kevin Feasel

Sabyasachi Samaddar has an interesting project:

In today’s digital age, video content has become a powerful medium for communication and storytelling. Whether it’s for marketing, education, or entertainment purposes, videos could captivate and engage audiences in ways that traditional text-based content often cannot. However, creating compelling videos from scratch can be a time-consuming and resource-intensive process.

Fortunately, with the advancements in artificial intelligence and the availability of cloud-based services like Azure Open AI and Cognitive Services, it is now possible to automate and streamline the process of converting text into videos. These cutting-edge technologies provide developers and content creators with powerful tools and APIs that leverage natural language processing and computer vision to transform plain text into visually appealing and professional-looking videos.

This document serves as a comprehensive guide and a starting point for developers who are eager to explore the exciting realm of Azure Open AI and Cognitive Services for text-to-video conversion. While this guide presents a basic implementation, its purpose is to inspire and motivate developers to delve deeper into the possibilities offered by these powerful technologies.

Click through for a guide on how to do it.

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String Casing in Snowflake

Published 2023-07-06 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Wilkie is on the case:

When you’re working with a database, it’s very hard to not deal with strings at some point in your journey. There are lots of different functions that you will be working with when you’re working with strings. Today, I want to go over some of the basic ones that you’ll use in Snowflake.

The first two that you’ll deal with make the string either upper or lowercase. Yes, that’s right – you’ve probably figured out the names of the functions already. UPPER() and LOWER() are the 2 functions respectively.

Kevin mentions title capitalization (though not by name) and the quick rule depends on which rulebook you’re using. I grew up with MLA, which I summarize as:

  • Don’t capitalize articles (the, a, an), prepositions, or coordinating conjunctions (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so)
  • Don’t capitalize “to” when it’s an infinitive (to go, to drive, etc.)
  • Don’t capitalize the second part of a hyphenated phrase if it shows up in the dictionary as one word without a hyphen
  • Capitalize everything else

And a quick bit of advice: understanding title capitalization really does make you look more professional, I promise. Unless we’re using different rulebooks, in which case at least one of us is a heretic.

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