Voice of the DBA

Category: Blog

Python Jupyter Notebooks in Azure

There’s a new feature in Azure, and I stumbled on it when someone posted a link on Twitter. Apologies, I can’t remember who, but I did click on the Azure Notebooks link and was intrigued. I’ve gotten Jupyter notebooks running on my local laptop, but these are often just on one machine. Having a place to share a notebook in the cloud is cool.

Once I clicked on the link, I found these are both R and Python notebooks, as well as F#. These allow you to essentially build a page of code and share it. It’s kind of like a REPL, kind of like a story. It’s a neat way of working through a problem. I clicked the Get Started link to get going and was prompted for a User ID.

Once I had my moniker setup, the next step was to edit my profile. That’s more important than a library, right?

Of course, I needed to fill out the profile with my avatar and some information.

Next I need to create a library, which I’m guessing is a collection of notebooks. I clicked the link and had to enter a name. I decided on the classic HelloWorld name. I decided to keep this public, as I might want to share this with others.

I’ve got a library, now let’s add something. I clicked the Readme.md, but it didn’t load. There was nothing there, as this is a blank file.

I discovered I could right click the file in the list. This lets me edit it. Strange UX, but whatever. The file uses markdown as editing, which is fairly simple, but consists of a few characters to designate titles, lists, etc.

I entered some text, and then my readme appeared below my notebook list, much like it goes on Github. My screenshot got taken after I’d experimented a bit, so you see a couple python notebooks as well.

From there, I could add a notebook. I have choices. I started with Python, since that’s one of my learning goals.

I give the notebook a name and create it.

Once this is created, it appears as a Jupyter notebook. Essentially I have a repl-like command area, and once I enter code, I can click “Run” to execute it. You can see that my Hello, World program ran.

I can enter other code, and I’ve done a few things, just to practice some basics in Python. I’m working through some courses, and I’ll enter code in here to practice concepts.

Jupyter notebooks are a good way of working through a problem and showing flow. They’re especially useful for sharing information with others and letting them follow your thought process.

April 18, 2018
An Open Letter to PASS and John Q Martin
Dear Mr. Martin and the PASS Organization,

In the spirit of advocating for change in a public way, I’m writing this letter to ask you to revisit your policies and processes and embrace the transparency that we, members of the PASS organization, deserve with regards to the SQL Saturday events.

I am directing this to you, Mr. Martin, after seeing your tweet, with the hope that you will follow through and not only provide feedback, but conduct a root cause analysis that updates future decisions. I also am hoping these are not merely words, but also the beginning of some action that you take and about which you publicly disclose the results.

A change was recently made to the SQL Saturday site that requires speakers to register for an event before their submissions can be approved. I realized this when a fellow speaker posted a note on Twitter. While there are potential implications here that are disruptive for event organizers and speakers, those are worthy of a separate debate. In fact, they are worthy of debate.

Today, I examined the PASS blog to look for an announcement. This what I saw.

The last update is from Mr. Fritchey, noting how much PASS wishes to express their affection for SQL Saturday. I appreciate the Board of Directors, most of whom are fellow speakers, may feel that way, but I’m not sure the organization believes this. Again, a separate discussion.

Early on in the life of SQL Saturday, a few people had to make decisions, but those decisions were publicized, with conversations with organizers and speakers. When fundamental changes were made, we announced changes publicly to ensure that others were informed. We setup a board of advisors to help ensure that change was made in a more open way, and to solicit feedback. Andy continued to provide updates later, even as PASS has declined to do so.

That doesn’t seem to have been done any longer. As I scan through the blog, I see no announcements of changes to SQL Saturday. The last posts were from 2016, when the 600 mile radius was announced and then a subsequent post explaining the reasoning.

Once again, almost two years later, PASS lacks transparency and vision. There are no discussions on slack that I find, NDA or otherwise, no emails I’ve received, no list of changes or updates.

What I would request is that you use this as an opportunity to improve governance at PASS. Examine the timeline of when this decision was made, the timeline, and look for opportunities to engage, or at least inform, the membership of PASS of changes. There should be milestones that require
- an announcement of potential changes, NDA or public
- a roadmap – is there a public one? Even one without dates.
- a roadmap update
- an announcement of an upcoming change
- an announcement of the change, publicly
- an update to the FAQ
I appreciate that there may not be funds for future changes, though there are obviously some still in progress. However, this is separate from funding. This is a process and governance issue that should be addressed.

It’s also simple common courtesy.

Sincerely,

Steve Jones

PASS member since 1999
April 18, 2018
Webinar: 6 Principles of the GDPR and SQL Provision

On April 24, I’ll be hosting a webinar that talks about the GDPR and how you can help ensure compliance in your development environments. I’ll talk about some of the issues and show how SQL Provision can help.

The GDPR is complex, but it certainly does ask us to protect and prevent issues with data from development environments. There are many ways you can try and ensure you don’t have any issues, and I’ll show one with Redgate tools.

Register today and I look forward to talking with you next week.

April 17, 2018
Exploring the Caves of Code Analysis in #SQLPrompt

I enjoy themes, and when I ran across the SQL Prompt Treasure Island, I had to take a few minutes and go through it. I wrote about a few of the items, and this post continues on with a feature that was added last year to SQL Prompt, Code Analysis.

Code Analysis

One of the big leaps forward for computer science, in my opinion, was the development of various static code analysis (SCA) tools. These are automated programs that examine the structure of source code and look for potential issues with the way the algorithms are implemented. This was originally the job of a fellow programmer, and still is in many cases, but humans make mistakes, and reviewing someone else’s code is a tedious, somewhat boring task. Over time, many humans become worse at it as we look for certain issues, but may ignore others.

Over time, SCA tools have included scanning for potential security issues, such as buffer overruns, which can easily permeate many systems if the developers do not follow coding practices designed to avoid issues. I wish we had such advances in SQL tools, but they’re not here yet.

In SQL Prompt v9, Redgate added some SCA features. These were a set of rules that are used to scan your T-SQL code for potential issues. such as casting data types without specifying a length, or as the Caves of Code Analysis post shows, forgetting to qualify an object. In my example below, the green squiggly line below the code represents an SCA finding, and as I’ve hovered over the line, I see the warning about an old style join.

Each of the rules is designed to highlight some issue that is known to be a potential problem. For the most part, these are useful tools and you should use these to examine your code. Some, however, aren’t useful and can be annoying.

There is a dialog that allows you to enable or disable any of the rules, which are divided into different types. I often disable ST002, which deals with aliases. I prefer the old style equal sign as opposed to the AS syntax. This isn’t a code issue, so I don’t need the warning.

This is a basic set of SCA tooling for T-SQL code, but it does serve to educate newer developers about the dangers of using certain patterns in their code. It also reminds experienced people if they’ve done something like used COUNT() in a test instead of EXISTS(). Those types of changes can often improve the overall quality of your code.

Give SQL Prompt a try today and I’m sure you’ll be pleased with just how quicker you can write code and learn about the potential issues you’ve been including in your code.

April 16, 2018