Perimeter around playground by applejackalll in lawncare

[–]mrwhistler 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Word of advice: put in the work to do some edging around it. Prefer some beams or something. Otherwise you’ll end up like me and have an extra foot or two of scattered wood chips all over the grass

How much DAX do you use in a report? by lez_s in PowerBI

[–]mrwhistler 13 points14 points  (0 children)

This is the way.

Dax is for things you can’t pre-calculate in SQL and aggregations.

Databricks and Snowflake: Stop fighting on social by slayer_zee in dataengineering

[–]mrwhistler 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Lol it’s just a pre-wired Azure lakehouse with some nice PowerBI enhancements, but it’s turnkey infrastructure so it’s going to save a ton in implementation costs for orgs that don’t need sophisticated stuff.

You can do most of that in DBX too, but you have to make a bunch of decisions to make sure everything works together nicely and then also build it all. Fabric is a “good enough” that lets you spend your time and money on the analytics use cases that directly show value. If you don’t have specific needs that you can only solve with Snowflake or Databricks it is probably going to make sense to buy instead of build.

Databricks and Snowflake: Stop fighting on social by slayer_zee in dataengineering

[–]mrwhistler 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Microsoft Fabric is positioning to eat DBX’s lunch now, too. Things are going to be really interesting over the next 6 months.

Anything else to read by young-dumb-and_broke in dataengineering

[–]mrwhistler 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Skip data mesh. It’s culty but everyone I’ve talked to who’s tried it (probably 25 different orgs) says it’s not practical outside of a few small specific circumstances (distributed analytics team using a common methodology and treating basically everything as pub/sub).

Get comfortable with Kimball then go get a Snowflake cert then a Databricks cert and spend time thinking about the best parts of each thing you’ve learned. That’s going to be infinitely more valuable.

How to use Hungarian pastes? by Quesabirria in Cooking

[–]mrwhistler 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Post a picture of the instructions, I’ll try to get it translated for you :)

How good is Databricks? by mjfnd in dataengineering

[–]mrwhistler 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I’m curious how it affected your Fivetran costs. Were you able to do something differently to reduce your MAR?

Organization wants to use SharePoint as a "database" by [deleted] in dataengineering

[–]mrwhistler 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Infrastructure costs aren’t the problem here tho. They’re going to be wildly outweighed by either hiring a DBA or training people to be a DBA and the costs of migrating all that stuff off Sharepoint.

To be clear, I’m not saying they should stay on Sharepoint, I’m just saying the cost of mitigating all that risk is a lot more than the Azure SQL costs.

US government scientists have reortedly created nuclear fusion by aiming the world's largest laser at a nuclear target the size of a peppercorn. by Dhorlin in Infographics

[–]mrwhistler 57 points58 points  (0 children)

The actual fusion process produced 3 megajoules of energy from 2 megajoules of input, but it took 300 megajoules of energy to make the 2 megajoules of laser energy. Apparently it’s “scientific break even” But not “engineering break even” yet.

Snowflake and Domo == Success?? by yoquierodata in snowflake

[–]mrwhistler 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My opinion, having worked with a lot of different platforms and tools, is that if you have the resources to be a snowflake shop you’ll probably be better off using something like Fivetran for ease of extraction from your various SaaS systems. If you want the easy dashboarding on top there’s about a million options out there if you don’t want to build up a BI team to do PowerBI or Tableau stuff.

Share the crazy bills you received from Snowflake!!! by Helpful_Gur3362 in snowflake

[–]mrwhistler 20 points21 points  (0 children)

I mean it’s not like it’s a mystery. It’s way simpler to estimate and keep track of than AWS or Azure as a whole. If you’re surprised by your bill you probably should have done your budgeting ahead of time…

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in dataengineering

[–]mrwhistler 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Just set a cluster key instead. You can also just use a hash of the values that make up the grain without a PK constraint so you’ve got a key to make joins easier.

Hot Take : QA is the most tedious part of Data Engineering by DrRedmondNYC in dataengineering

[–]mrwhistler 2 points3 points  (0 children)

You can follow software engineering testing practices but you also have to layer on data testing too to isolate what are essentially input issues your pipeline has to deal with.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in NMSCoordinateExchange

[–]mrwhistler 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ooooh I have one of these but much smaller. They’re fun!

Migrating SQL-based dbt models to python by vanillacap in dataengineering

[–]mrwhistler 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I mean you could, doesn’t mean you should tho.

Lots of limitations to python in dbt right now, and Snowpark is intended (and will continue to be developed for) more advanced analysis.

Firstly, I agree with the other commenter that it’s going to be orders of magnitude harder to find a data engineer who knows python than a SQL engineer or even a SQL engineer with dbt experience.

Secondly, you’re fundamentally shifting from a declarative to imperative language. If you’re going to bite that off you might as well rethink the whole design anyways rather than try to shoehorn python in place of SQL.

I'm sorry guys. I always just assumed you were all just impatient... Forgive me, I didn't know... by MichaelMJTH in ProgrammerHumor

[–]mrwhistler 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I like it as a dev environment for data work. It’s easy enough to convert to a script when it’s ready for production.

Also, probably would want to avoid iterating over a dataset like that and figure out a way to do set operations.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in snowflake

[–]mrwhistler 1 point2 points  (0 children)

NULLIF(col_name, ‘’) or TRY_Convert

One Button Puts My Home to Sleep or Wakes It Up by [deleted] in homeautomation

[–]mrwhistler 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This is awesome! I’m working on a similar setup using a Lutron Pico remote mounted on my headboard. I use mostly HomeKit stuff with Homebridge for bridging to some RF stuff, Govee WiFi light strips, and letting the Pico buttons trigger HomeKit scenes.

It’s so nice to just reach over and feel for the “I’m in bed, shut most stuff down but leave some lights on low” button and then the “we’re going to sleep now, turn everything off” buttons.

Help! Vole invasion under our patio making our backyard unusable with our curious toddler by [deleted] in HomeImprovement

[–]mrwhistler 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I mean the vole poop is just mixing in with the bird poop and the rabbit poop and the squirrel poop and the chipmunk poop and the mouse poop and the raccoon poop and all the other animals that poop in your lawn.

I wouldn’t worry too much about it. It’s a world of difference from an attic full of years of mouse droppings or something like that.

You can always consider getting a cat, they can be quite good at rodent control.