I hosted the blog party this month, with the invite to write about notebooks. These are a neat technology, and I’ve written about them at SQLServerCentral.
This post is a wrap-up of the various responses to my invitation. First, quite a few people give credit to either Aaron Nelson or Rob Sewell for their writings and work with notebooks, so check out their blogs.
With that, Rob’s post this month has a number of links to his notebook work and a list of how he has used them with clients.
Aaron has kids, lots of them, and they keep him busy. However, he asked his entry this month to be a video where he discusses parameterizing notebooks.
Rob Farley talks about executing a notebook from Powershell, which to me is one of the key components that makes notebooks usable for something besides teaching.
Glenn Berry has a fantastic set of diagnostic DMV queries that are incredibly useful for anyone administering a SQL Server instance. He writes about his queries being bundled up in a notebook.
Chris Johnson was disappointed his organization didn’t adopt notebooks, but found another use. He makes notes to help learn new T-SQL features in notebooks and has a Github repo with them in it.
Benni De Jagere is rewriting some scripts into notebooks (with the help of PoSh and Bing), starting with extracting Power BI logs into csv files. Hopefully we’ll see him give a presentation on this process sometime in the future.
Deepthi Goguri writes about how notebooks work, including giving us some magical commands that you might consider adding to your notebooks.
Barney Lawrence uses notebooks often at work on a regular basis. One of his tasks is a notebook to run git commands for branches. He has also converted a series of blog posts on XML into notebooks that you can use to follow along with his posts.
Andy Cutler writes about testing the flow of presentations in a notebook. He embeds images near the code to help walk through the process of setting up Synapse.
Deborah Melkin writes about her challenges getting started, similar to mine. She is using these for some PoSh scripts, but the challenge of running some cells to set up variables and then other ones to do some work. The big win is keeping similar scripts together and documented with text around the code cells. She would like to see some things like execution plans, and I agree.
Justin Bird has played with them, but not much use in practice. He did some research and learning after the invite and shares some thoughts.
Julie Koesmarno tells us how she challenged herself to work on Python and microeconomics to build a chart that displays some data. Notebooks help her quickly get hands on and become a better learner. A great use of notebooks.
Martha Clancy has a few ideas to make notebooks a part of your daily work. Some good tips in there in her humorous flow, which doesn’t sound great, but it shows there is some value in thrashing around a bit.
Chris Voss tells us the best use he’s found. He puts a number of scripts together with documentation, even when he can’t run the the code. A colleague can. He also would like to see execution plans in notebooks.
Mikey Bronowski gives a few scenarios where he has found notebooks to be useful, notably learning and improving processes.
Hugo Kornelis takes the approach that Microsoft is pushing notebooks a little too much, even in places they may not be appropriate, but he has a few use case: production support, data analysis, and presentations. Another vote for execution plans in notebooks.
VR expert Todd Kleinhans uses notebooks to work with GPUs, SQL Server on Linux, containers, and RAPIDS. Quite a technical list.
Linda Kovacheva discovered how powerful notebooks can be with Azure Machine Learning.
Kevin Chant has been using notebooks for a number of things in the Azure Data Engineering Services at Microsoft.
That’s the wrap. If I’ve missed anyone, let me know and I’ll update the post.
