SQL Saturday Distances, A Closer Look

Last week, I put together an analysis of SQL Saturdays.  There were a lot of great comments, including one by Jack Corbett, who was interested in seeing a closer analysis of how far attendees tend to travel: Most people from Maine aren’t going to anything outside of New England, and most aren’t going to go south of…

Become A Better Speaker

That's a big title.  Expect "(on the margin)" in tiny font after the title. What Other People Say Let me start off with some great resources, and then I'll move to a few things that have helped me in the past. Troy Hunt Troy is a master of preparation.  Check out his prep work he…

Calculating SQL Saturday Distances

EDIT 2016-07-21 17:30:00 --- It turns out that my distance calculation query was a little bit off. I was accidentally filtering out SQL Saturdays which did not have any 600-mile collisions in the next week but did have a 600-mile collision in the current week. With this in place, there are now 38 pair collisions…

Spark, R, And Zeppelin

We are going to combine three of my interests today:  Spark, data analysis, and notebooks.  Unlike last week's discussion of notebooks, I'm going to use Apache Zeppelin today.  In today's post, we will load some restaurant data into Spark and then build a notebook to visualize some of that data. Getting Started If you have not done so,…

Pluralsight Reviews: Exploration With R

I just wrapped up watching a Pluralsight course entitled Exploratory Data Analysis with R.  Matthew Renze put together a nice introduction to R.  The first module helps someone brand new to R install the product and RStudio, but from there, it's digging into descriptive analytics.  The course is a bit light on CRAN packages, instead focusing mostly on…

R: Touching On Advanced Topics

Wrapping up this mini-series on R, I'm going to link to a notebook which touches on some more advanced topics, especially from the standpoint of a one-hour presentation starting from scratch.  In this last post, I plan to gloss over the details and give you the notebook links and let you see what's going on.…

R: Database Access

In today's post, I'm going to use RODBC to connect to SQL Server and perform a few operations. Pre-Requisites There are a couple of steps we're going to have to do in order to get RODBC to work with SQL Server. Grab The Notebook The first step is to grab the Basic SQL Server Connection notebook…

R: The Basics Of Notebooks

This blog post is in anticipation of SQL Saturday Columbus, in which I'm going to give a talk introducing R to SQL Server developers.  My primary vehicle for explaining R will be notebooks. Notebook Basics I'll start with two big questions:  what are notebooks and why should we use them? Notebooks Are... Remember chemistry class in…

Pluralsight Reviews: Scala

I recently had the chance to go through Justin Pihony's Pluralsight course on Scala.  If you want to write Spark code using Scala, this is a good starter course. The entire premise of the course is to write a relatively simple file searcher, but Justin takes you through the entire process, including getting build tools working,…

DevTeach Review

I had the pleasure last week of attending and speaking at DevTeach.  This year's DevTeach was in downtown Montreal, and here are a few scattered, unstructured thoughts on the event: On day 1, Itzik Ben-Gan gave a talk on advanced SQL Server techniques, and I found one technique so interesting that I had to blog…