Blog

Sometimes packages have functions that don’t do the things the way you want them to do them and you have to either re-build the function, or work with it as-is and add code around it to solve your issue.

As a heavy R and Tidyverse user, I’ve been playing with Microsofts m/Power Query language included in Excel and PowerBI from that perspective, looking for the functions to make my life easier, developing small code pipelines for my processing and trying to get a smooth, clear and maintainable data manipulation process in place.

People use R for lots of reasons: “It’s great for the models I need”, “I like the functional approach”, “It’s the tool I’m most comfortable with”.

We’re done with the basics of handling data in R. Now we want to know how to make sense of it. We know what kind of data it is, we know how to look at column names, dimensions and the like. If you’re trying to add value to this data however, that very often isn’t enough, so here’s a look at using the tools available to you to start figuring out how to do what you want.

Cosmos DB is a snazzy new(ish) Microsoft Azure product. I was able to go to Microsoft Office in London for three days of training on the database service, which was really well structured and well run, with a lot of knowledgeable Microsoft bods around to pass on their considerable knowledge. This post will extract out some key features and benefits of the service, and then discuss how this fit’s into a data scientists role.

To quickly recap, so far we’ve just worked with some single values to get to grips with how some of the various operations work. Of course, we rarely work with a single value! If we did, we could just use a calculator.