The Recording
The Panelists
- Kevin Feasel
- Mala Mahadevan
- Mike Chrestensen
Notes: Questions and Topics
EightKB in the Books
The first topic of the night was EightKB, an online conference for advanced data platform topics. Their annual event happened recently and you can see all of the videos on their YouTube channel. If you want to dig into topics around SQL Server and other data platform technologies, EightKB is one of the best places to go.
Training Resources for R
Our next question came via e-mail and was around good training resources for a person learning R. In this case, the person was not necessarily that technical but did want to learn about data analysis. Mala, Mike, and I all know R and so we put our heads together and came with the following as resources we can recommend:
- R for Data Science (2nd Edition) — Free book by one of the core developers of the R programming language
- The Epidemiologist R Handbook — Free handbook that specializes in epidemiology but does teach a lot about principles of R as well, so it’s certainly not limited to health topics. I haven’t read this but Mala Mahadevan recommended it.
- An Introduction to R — Another free book. I haven’t read this but Mala Mahadevan recommended it.
- Practical Data Science with R (2nd Edition) — This is a book I whole-heartedly recommend for people getting into data science. Your wife probably won’t care about some of it (stuff like application lifecycle management) but it does a great job on the topic.
- DataCamp — There are 127 separate courses on R currently hosted on DataCamp (as of the time of recording). This is a paid service, but I’ve been paying for it for several years.
Running out of Flight Numbers and other Data Growth Problems
Our third major topic of the night was a post from View from the Wing (via the Brent Ozar Newsletter) around airlines getting closer to having 10,000 flight numbers and some of the challenges around it, especially for places that still have analog boards displaying flight information. None of us hosts has enough knowledge of airline industry software to know how easy or difficult it would be to change (though probably absurdly difficult, given that this seems to be the norm), though Anders in chat did share some interesting thoughts on the topic. We did digress a bit to discuss other problems companies run into, such as running out of identity integers.