Cloud

  • Using ChatGPT as a Development Tool

    As a developer, you are always looking for ways to streamline your workflow and improve efficiency. One tool that you should consider adding to your development toolkit is ChatGPT. What is ChatGPT? ChatGPT is a chatbot developed by OpenAI that uses the power of machine learning to understand and generate human-like text. It is trained on a large dataset of human conversations, which allows it to understand the context and nuances of language,…

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  • Power BI Databricks Spark connection error

    When querying data from Azure Databricks (spark) into Power BI you may encounter an error: “ODBC:ERROR [HY000] [Microsoft][Hardy] (100) The host and port specified for the connection do not seem to belong to a Spark server. Please check your configuration.“ This is usually caused by trying to connect to a ‘Standard’ Databricks instance, but Power BI (and ODBC in general) can only connect to Databricks using a…

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  • Sampling data in Data Lake U-SQL for Power BI

    Being able to hook Power BI directly into Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) is a very powerful tool (and it will be even more so when you can link to ADLS files that are in a different Azure account!! – not yet available as at January 2017). However there is a problem, Data Lake is designed to scale to petabytes of data whereas Power BI has a 10GB limit. Yes this is compressed, so we’d expect around 100GB of raw data, however to load…

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  • What is U-SQL?

    By now you may have heard about U-SQL, the new kid on the query language block. But what is U-SQL? Where is it? What’s it for? I was lucky enough to be at the 2015 MVP Summit in Redmond, at which one of the sessions was hosted by Michael Rys (@MikeDoesBigData), talking about U-SQL. As it’s creator, there’s no-one better to learn the ropes from. I was pretty much blown away by what it can do and the ease of access, so I’ve…

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  • New Azure User Group in Birmingham

    We’re launching a new Azure user group in Birmingham, UK! The first session is on Thursday 16th April, 6.30pm at the MAC (Midlands Art Centre) next to Edgbaston Cricket Ground. The first session will feature two of the most prominent Azure MVPs in the UK; Richard Conway (Blog | Twitter) and Andy Cross (Blog | Twitter). With Cloud based solutions becoming ever more prevalent, focusing on providing free Azure training and information for the…

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