Monthly Archives: June 2017

Azure Burn

Published June 8, 2017 / by shep2010

I really like the title of this post, it is far more nefarious sounding that what this article truly is. What I mean is Azure burn rate, as in, how fast are you burning your Azure credits or real money.

My subscription, as do all new subscriptions, currently has a processor core cap of 20, which is normal and can be lifted in five minutes by opening a support ticket with MSFT from within Azure, instructions here. Incase you are wondering, MSFT will allow you to have 10,000 cores or more, and you will suddenly get very special attention from the entire company, so be reasonable in your request. I will be looking a AWS at some point, since I am no longer a MSFT employee my primary focus is the individual adopting new skills, not a specific platform. AWS has some interesting bid pricing for compute I am interested in. More later on that.

Continue reading →

Setting up a cloud Data Science test environment, on a budget

Published June 5, 2017 / by shep2010

Before I get into another long diatribe, know that the minimum you need to get started with R is R, and R Studio and know that they will run on just about anything. But if you want a bit more of an elaborate setup including SQL, read on.

Many years ago I took great pride in having a half dozen machines or more running all flavors of windows and SQL to play with and experiment on, it did not matter what it was, it would bend to my will. And in case you are wondering, NT would run very nicely on a Packard Bell.

Once I took over the CAT lab I was in hog heaven, I had a six figure budget and was required to spend it on cool fast toys and negotiate as much free stuff from vendors as I possible could. It was terrible, tough job to have. Jump forward to now, I own one Mac Book pro and one IPhone, and serves every need I have.
Continue reading →

Spring Intersections 2017

Published June 2, 2017 / by shep2010

Spring SQL Intersections 2017 is over, to those who attended I hope you enjoyed the sessions and found everything presented useful! I led the Data Science track this spring and plan on presenting many more sessions in the years to come. I have presented before, and I have presented at intersections before, but this was my first foray into original data science content, or to be more accurate, statistical learning content.

How do I Data Science?

Continue reading →