Voice of the DBA

Tag: syndicated

  • Practical Web Scraping–More Reading

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

    It’s the end of the month, and I’m behind. I know it’s a short month, but it’s not that short. I had time to read the last couple week and I did some reading, but I didn’t get much practice.

    First the positive, then the excuses.

    Reading

    I did manage to read through the basic tutorial in Part I for how to use he BeautifulSoup module to read through an http page. This provided more ideas for finding sections of code and extracting out sections.

    I started Part II, which talks about more in depth http, with forms and posting. I’m still inside that one, and as of this point, I’m only 30% through the book.

    The plan for this weekend is to stop and practice a bit from BeautifulSoup and see what I can accomplish by reading a few web pages.

    Life Gets in the Way

    This month I had two long events on weekends that ate into my reading/working time, as well as a work project. I’m in the middle of volleyball season, and February brought me two 3 day tournaments to coach or watch. One was coaching a 13 year old team, and that occupied a lot of time. The evenings were spent with other coaches and I didn’t bring a laptop because I knew time would be limited. Add to that the need to get a few things done before and after the trip and I couldn’t practice web scraping.

    The second trip was for my daughter, and apart from watching her, my wife was in charge of team activities and I had to help. I had my laptop, but again, no time. I also chose to enjoy some time with my wife in the evening, which was worth it.

    Work was busy. We’re trying to migrate SQLServerCentral to a new platform and I’ve had to test things, as well as try and get other work done. As a result, I’ve been busy during the week and couldn’t even make time to incorporate any web scraping into my job. I also had to get other work done, so it’s been too busy to do much learning.

  • The Reader’s Choice Awards are Taking Nominations

    If you’re using products, you might want to nominate a vendor or product for a database tool that helps you. The Database Trends and Applications Reader’s Choice Awards is taking nominations for the next few weeks.

    At Redgate Software, we try to build useful products that help you solve problems and get work done. If you think we help you, I’d appreciate you nominating us in one or more categories.

    Enter your nomination today.

  • Git, GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, What’s the difference?

    I was watching Brent’s webcast session on GitHub recently. I’ve struggled to explain this to users in the past, and it’s always good to see what others do when they do similar sessions.

    You can watch Brent’s session, and I’ve got some content on git. Need to do more for Redgate, so look for some content to appear on the Hub or our YouTube Evangelist playlist.

    In any case, what’s the deal with Git, et al?

    Git is a version control system (VCS). If you’ve ever used TFS for code, or Visual SourceSafe or Subversion, Perforce, CVS, etc., they are all methods of tracking versions of files. Usually for code, but could be for any files. Binaries don’t work as well, but any text, and plenty of people use a VCS for book projects.

    While git (or Git) is a VCS, there are various companies that provide git hosting services. GitHub is the most well known, now owned by Microsoft. This means that they provide essentially a remote file service for git projects. Since git is a distributed VCS, this means that you can have multiple copies of your git repository (folder) and sync back and forth. Like DropBox, but with programming code versions.

    BitBucket, GitLab, Beanstalk, Codebase, etc. are all hosting services. You could duplicate the git portion of hosting with a VM in Azure, AWS, etc. However, these services provide a few other things. They include some features like security, clients, and pull requests. A pull request is a method of notifying people to review your code before it merges, and it’s a fantastic team feature. It’s in git, but it’s cleaner with a service.

    I tend to use Azure DevOps for my git hosting, but I do have repos at GitHub as well. I’ve tried BitBucket, and really they all feel the same. I get used to a GUI or CLI push/pull of code and then it doesn’t matter.

    If you’ve never tried using git for code, give it a try today. I’ll get more content and videos up soon, so watch for those.

  • SQL in the City 2019 in London

    We’ve started setting up our SQL in the City Summits for 2019 and the first one is London on April 30. I’m going to start making my plans now and hope to see some of you there.

    We’re still finalizing agendas and getting some speakers lined up, but if you’re anywhere near London, take a day and come see us talk about DevOps, compliance, and Redgate.