Voice of the DBA

Category: Blog

Practical Web Scraping–Getting Started

As part of my learning goals for 2018, I wanted to work through various books. This is part of my work with Python.

After going through a few first chapters, I decided to start my February learning with Practice Web Scraping for Data Science, which looks at data acquisition using Python to pull data from the web. I found the book interesting and also this would be a nice setup for two of the other books (Power BI and natural language processing).

Like many people, I find lots of data on the web, but I’m constantly struggling to get it into a database. I find myself going through gyrations at times to get data. Even with the cool features of Power BI, it hasn’t been as smooth as I’d like to get data, so I thought this would be a good book.

Part 1

The first few chapters of the book are about the basics of web scraping. We learn what this means, and get a little bit of a tutorial on who uses this technique, with some specific examples. We also get a basic python tutorial, which I skimmed. I know a bit about Python and this was a very basic, getting started.

The next part of the early book deals with the basics of what http transport looks like and how some networking works. This is interesting to me, though not sure it matters for scraping. We’ll see. There is some discussion on GET and the http standard, so perhaps that’s helpful. It is good to at least know what codes might come back or what headers or parameters you need to use.

The third chapter starts to get code working. It opens with a discussion of HTML and how you can examine the structure of pages in your browser. This is a good reminder and basic tutorial of some of the web page developer tools that exist in your browser and that you might want to use when trying to build applications, especially those that scrape pages. There is also a basic CSS tutorial, which was good as I needed a little refresher. I rarely deal with CSS stuff, leaving that to others.

The last part of the chapter starts with the BeautifulSoup library, which is built to parse out text, and specifically, makes working with HTML easier. The examples are with a Wikipedia Game of Thrones page, but I added some examples, trying to translate this to a sports page. It worked OK, and I learned a few things.

The last part looks at Regular Expressions with BeautifulSoup and how you can search out elements and then start to copy data. It’s more complex and tedious, but then again, lots of programming is tedious. Once it’s working, it’s amazing.

Experimenting

I started to work with this in Azure Notebooks as a different way of tracking some work in Python. I’ll want to store things in a file at some point, but for now, this lets me start and stop learning and keep track of where I am without worrying about files and names.

Not sure if anyone can access it (it’s marked public), but my project and notebooks are here: https://notebooks.azure.com/way0utwest/projects/web-scraping-with-python

I ran some of the early scripts, which are just getting you used to working with Python and accessing web pages. I then copied some examples from my Calibre view of the book and executed them. I even tried to experiment a bit.

One note: copying the code seems to leave some invalid character in there for Azure Notebooks, so I ended up editing the beginning of every line to remove the offensive character.

This got me the basics of working with web scraping. Now to try and grab some data from another page and see what I’ve learned.

February 15, 2019
Learn about the State of Database DevOps Next Week

It’s a week to my webinar with Donovan Brown (b t, y g), leader of the League of Extraordinary Cloud DevOps Advocates, Principal DevOps Manager at Microsoft, and the guy that wants to Rub DevOps on Everything. He’s a passionate, intelligent, exciting guy whose enthusiasm is infectious. I’ve been honored to present with him at Build and I’m looking forward to our chat next week.

Join us next Thursday for our webinar on the 2019 State of Database DevOps report. You can register now and we’ll be live at 11am EST.

The 2019 State of Database DevOps report is available now and you can download it today. We’ll be analyzing some of the findings and discussing what this means for many organizations.

Register today and I’ll see you next week.

February 14, 2019
Adding Objects to our SCA Project

In my last post, I started out with a new SCA project, getting a connection to my database up and running. Now, let’s start the new project by adding some objects.

Adding Objects

I’m going to start with a couple objects to make this simple, but we’ll move on from there in other posts to describe the options and details.

Our database is not terribly useful without tables, so let’s create a table. I’ll start by using a query window to build a table. Right click the database and choose New Query.

Once this opens, let’s write a query. I’m comfortable building tables like this, so I’ll add the first table to hold my SQL Server builds. I’ll write the code shown below and then execute this.

At this point, the development database has a change, but it’s not in my project. I need to use the SCA pane to let VS know that I’m ready to import this change. Open the pane and click refresh. The following should appear when the process completes.

In this dialog, we see a new table was found. The process compares the Shadow database, where no changes have occurred, with the development database, which has a new table. This gives me a “diff” in essence and I can add this to my project.

The change is checked on the left, so I can click the Import and Generate Script button. I’ll do that and I see the image below. There’s a lot here, so let’s discuss this after the image.

The first thing to look at is the script that’s active in the upper pane. If you notice, the tab name is on the right side of that upper left pane, highlighted in blue. This is my first migration script. You can see the migration ID at the top and then a PRINT statement, which is useful for logging during the build or deployment process, then the top of my code.

On the right side, in the Solution Explorer, we see that my script has been added to the Migrations folder. The default name has been applied, but I can rename this if I want.

In the SCA pane, we see a few things. First, the change is grayed out because the change was scripted. Above that, we have a yellow bar that notes a migration was generated, and it gives us the path in the project. Finally, there is a “Refresh” button to verify the script. We want to click that. This will use our script with the Shadow database to verity the code is correct. Once I click that, I get a note that the project was verified.

At this point, the Shadow and development databases are in sync.

This tells me that my changes should work when I deploy them to another system. Hopefully that works, and we’ll tackle that next time.

February 13, 2019
What is my why?–T-SQL Tuesday #111

This is an interesting question from Andy Leonard for T-SQL Tuesday: What Is Your “Why”? He is this month’s host and asks us to talk about our motivation, our passion. The question is: Why do you do what you do?

Why I Do What I Do?

I have had a great career in technology. Moving from developer to system administrator to developer to manager, and back through various incarnations. I have had success in lots of positions and helped improve systems and code, teaching and mentoring others along the way.

Almost twenty years ago, I participated in a user group and helped someone solve an issue. That inspired me to start writing articles that detailed how to build solutions that had helped me and my employer. Over time that led to SQLServerCentral and regular speaking and writing.

My career in databases really started for the money. I worked with a DBA that was better paid than any sysadmin or developer, and began to study and work with SQL Server. As I earned more, I thought I’d made a good decision, but over time I realized that there was a point where money was less important to me.

Time became the most important thing to me.

There have been many times where I would have traded more time for less money, though that isn’t quite the case now as I have two children attending college next year. Still, in the middle of my career I wanted to, because of the value that I placed on time with family and friends and living my life.

I started to give back with writing, speaking, teaching because I had people do that for me, and because I wished I’d had more. I wished that more people had shared solutions and ideas with me earlier in my career.

I also believe that we fundamentally ought to help others in life when we’ve been helped or been successful. We ought to pay it forward where we can, but more so we need to pay it back. It’s a bit of a social contract with others, a bit of a desire to be the rising tide that lifts all boats, and a bit of a moral obligation I feel to help the world because I’ve been blessed with success.

Everyone walks their own path, makes their own decisions, and follows their own moral code. I try to follow mine, and I hope to inspire others to help others where they can.

It’s why I do what I do, and I’m lucky that I’m able to do so, both as my job, but also because I am able to help others.

February 12, 2019