Course Reviews: Fundamentals of Bayesian Data Analysis in R

This is a review of Rasmus Baath's Fundamentals of Bayesian Data Analysis in R DataCamp course. I really enjoyed this course. Rasmus takes us through an intuitive understanding of Bayesian data analysis without introducing Bayes's Theorem until the 4th chapter. The best part is, that's not even a criticism: by the time he introduces the…

SQL Saturday Raleigh Call For Speakers Closes Soon

If you have not already submitted a session for the best SQL Saturday in the Research Triangle in the year 2019, your time and chances are dwindling, so act now! Go to the SQL Saturday Raleigh website and submit a session or four today! Or tomorrow, but no later than Friday because that's when our…

The PolyBase Papers

This week's PolyBase Revealed post is all about a couple of academic papers that Microsoft Research published a few years back. In their first paper, entitled Split Query Processing in Polybase (note the pre-marketing capitalization), David DeWitt, et al, take us through some of the challenges and competitive landscape around PolyBase during 2013. One of…

Approaching Zero: Making Life Simpler

This is part three in a series on near-zero downtime deployments. In the last post, I walked through several assumptions, particularly around source control, deployment processes, and testing. In this post, we will look at a few things you can do to make (near) zero-downtime deployments easier. Use Enterprise Edition SQL Server 2016 Service Pack…

TriPASS Incorporation Update: The Board

It's been a month, so I wanted to provide an update on incorporation. After our articles of incorporation went up in flames (the opposite of going down in flames), I opened up a call for board members among community members. I was able to get enough volunteer (and quasi-volunteer) support to nominate a full slate…

Approaching Zero: Assumptions and Flow

This is part two in a series on near-zero downtime deployments. As we begin to approach zero-downtime database deployments, I'm going to lay out a few assumptions which will make your life much easier. Then, I will cover the idea of the release flow. Key Assumptions There are three major things which will greatly increase…

PolyBase Revealed: CDH Quickstart And PolyBase

All of my experience with Hadoop has been with the Hortonworks Data Platform. But to make sure that the stuff I'm advising in PolyBase Revealed works for Cloudera too, I grabbed the Cloudera QuickStart VM and took it for a spin. The two products are pretty similar overall but there are a few things I…

Approaching Zero: Introduction

This is part one in a series on near-zero downtime deployments. For the past 5+ years, I've worked at a company with a zero downtime policy for deployments. The last time we had a real downtime for code deployment was January of 2014. Mind you, we've had downtimes since then: servers go down for various…

OneNote And Onetastic

I am just a little bit late with this, but I wanted to talk about some things I picked up at a talk Ricardo Wilkins (t) gave at DogFoodCon last year on OneNote. I use OneNote a lot to keep track of what I'm doing, what I'm supposed to do, and generally what I need…

Course Reviews: Writing Functions in R

This is a review of Hadley and Charlotte Wickham's DataCamp course entitled Writing Functions in R. Wickham and Wickham (borther and sister) do a great job of introducing some of the concepts of functional programming in R. The first chapter is a refresher on some of the basic program structures in R. From there, they…