It's been a minute since I've done a book review, and I've never done an audiobook review, though as I write this, I'm reminded of the Space Ghost: Coast to Coast episode entitled Dam, in which Space Ghost interviews Charlton Heston: Charlton Heston: Uh, you're, you seem perfectly fluent in English, can you read?Zorak: No.Space Ghost: I like…
Updates for the Big Data and Visualization MCW
Last week, I promised some changes to the Big Data and Visualization Microsoft Cloud Workshop. The bulk of these changes are now in development and I wanted to cover what some of the changes look like prior to their release. Goodbye, Azure ML In the current architecture, you can see that we use both Databricks…
Upcoming Events: Azure Community Conference
Key Details What: Azure Community ConferenceWhere: On the Internet, UTC+5.5 (India Standard Time).When: Friday, October 29th and Saturday, October 30th. Full-day, paid trainings on Sunday, October 31st.Admission is free. RSVP on the Azure Community Conference website. What I’m Presenting 7:30 AM — 8:30 AM EDT — Riding the Rails: Railway-Oriented Programming with F# This is…
Upcoming Events: SQL Saturday Orlando
Key Details What: SQL Saturday OrlandoWhere: Orlando, Florida. Oh my goodness, it's a real-life in-person event!When: Saturday, October 30th.Admission is free. RSVP on the SQL Saturday website. What I’m Presenting 9:00 - 10:00 AM EDT — Saving Your Wallet from the Cloud Not only is this an in-person event, it's also a brand new talk…
Upcoming Events: Swedish SQL Server User Group
Key Details What: Swedish SQL Server User Group.Where: On the Internet, UTC+2.When: Tuesday, October 26th.Admission is free. RSVP on Eventbrite. What I’m Presenting 12:30 PM — 2:30 PM EDT — Approaching Zero: Minimizing Downtime During Deployments
Avoiding NULL with Normalization
Aaron Bertrand sticks up for NULL: A long time ago, I answered a question about NULL on Stack Exchange entitled, “Why shouldn’t we allow NULLs?” I have my share of pet peeves and passions, and the fear of NULLs is pretty high up on my list. A colleague recently said to me, after expressing a…
What Makes a Good Visualization?
This post has been on my backlog for about a year, but I'm finally getting to it. That's the power of backlogs! Xenographics The Xenographics website provides a number of creative ways of visualizing data. Some of them are great. Others are...not. So I decided to review a few and try to explain my reasoning…
The Value of Microsoft Cloud Workshops
Microsoft Cloud Workshops are free, step-by-step guides for implementing solutions in Azure. As part of the work I do with Solliance, I've assisted in creating and maintaining several MCWs in collaboration with Microsoft. Two MCWs in particular that I've been working on updating right now are Innovate and modernize apps with Data and AI and Big data and visualization. Both…
First Experiences with the Framework Laptop
I've had the Framework Laptop for a couple of days, so I wanted to put together a few thoughts on it. I'll start with some build images, move into experiences running Linux on the laptop, and wrap up with some general thoughts. Unboxing and the Build Process The box arrived on Thursday: One laptop box…
Outliers, Anomalies, and Noise
This is part of the series Finding Ghosts in Your Data. For the inaugural post in this series, I want to spend a few moments on terminology. What's the difference between an "outlier" and an "anomaly"? The interesting thing is that there's no clear delineation in the literature. As a quick example, Mehrotra, et al,…
36 Chambers - The Legendary Journeys: Execution to the max! 