Three-Word Review Get it. Now. More Than Three Word Review DevToys is a Windows app which provides a series of helpful tools for developers. We know they're helpful because in many cases, there are popular websites which provide these tools. For example, there is a built-in PNG/JPEG compression tool, similar to what TinyPNG offers us.…
Getting Started with KQL
In the last exciting episode, we loaded some Mars farming data into our Data Explorer pool. Today, we're going to query that data. Navigating to https://dataexplorer.azure.com, we can see the Synapse workspace, Data Explorer pool, and table in the Query tab. Ready to query! In order to query data, we need to use the Kusto…
Loading Azure Synapse Analytics Data Explorer Pools
In today's post, we will look at the newest Azure Synapse Analytics pool type available: the Data Explorer pool. As of the time of this post, these pools are in a public preview, so things may change between now and when they go GA. Creating a Pool It's pretty straightforward to create a Data Explorer…
Having Fun with Streamlit
In the course of working on my book, I wanted to build an easy-to-use website for outlier detection. The idea here is that I have a REST API to perform the outlier detection work but I'd like something a little easier to read than JSON blobs coming out of Postman. That's where Streamlit comes into…
Markdown Like a Champ in Visual Studio Code
Today's post will be fairly short. We are going to talk about a pair of extensions for Visual Studio Code which make it easy to build markdown files. Markdown All in One The first tool of choice is a big one, Yu Zhang's Markdown All in One. This extension provides several great features. One of…
The Basics of MLflow
This is sort of related to a series on getting beyond the basics with Azure ML but is not officially part of that series. In this post, we are going to cover MLflow, a platform for managing the machine learning lifecycle. What is MLflow? MLflow is a set of products which allow data scientists to…
Writing Testable Code: the Functional Approach
In yesterday's post, I covered the resources I used for chapter 5 and teased an approach to writing testable code. Today, I want to give you a sneak peek at Finding Ghosts in Your Data and show you an excerpt from chapter 5 of the book. Note that this is text from the first draft,…
From Cosmos DB to the Synapse Dedicated SQL Pool
With the announcement back at Ignite that SQL Server 2022 will have support for Synapse Link, I figured it would be a good idea to put together a quick post showing how you can use Synapse Link today, using the already-available connector for Cosmos DB as an example. I don't know if the behavior will…
Upping My Audio Quality Game
A few months ago, Anthony Nocentino discussed his Pluralsight setup. I decided that this was a good time to take advantage of a friend's knowledge and upgrade my system. Obligatory Warnings Before I get into the setup, I have to lay out some warnings. You get two classes of obligatory warning here: first, that I…
Musings on Technical Debt
On a recent episode of Shop Talk, we discussed the concept of technical debt. In this post, I want to delve into the topic a bit more and give the topic the thought it deserves. What Is Technical Debt? As developers, we throw around the term "technical debt" a lot, but I think it makes…