Dinesh Asanka

Dinesh Asanka
Dependancy Network tab in the Mining view in the Association Rule

Association Rule Mining in SQL Server

January 28, 2020 by

Association Rule Mining in SQL Server is the next article in our data mining article series in which we have discussed Naïve Bayes, Decision Trees, and Time Series until now. Association Rule Mining, also known as Market Basket Analysis, mainly because Association Mining is used to find out the items which are bought together by the customers during their shopping.

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Data types for selected attributes in Time Series Model

Microsoft Time Series in SQL Server

December 12, 2019 by

The next topic in our Data Mining series is the popular algorithm, Time Series. Since business users want to forecast values for areas like production, sales, profit, etc., with a time parameter, Time Series has become an important data mining tool. It essentially allows analyzing the past behavior of a variable over time in order to predict its future behavior.

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Transaction log usage after TRUNCATE TABLE statment is executed.

Truncate Table Operations in SQL Server

September 25, 2019 by

Truncating a table is removing all the records in an entire table or a table partition. TRUNCATE table is functionally similar to DELETE table with no WHERE clause. However, TRUNCATE table is much faster than DELETE with respect to the time and the resource consumptions which we will look at in this article. TRUNCATE statement removes the data by de-allocating the data pages in the table data. This means that TRUNCATE is similar to drop and re-create the table. Also, it records only the page de-allocations in the transaction log, not the row-wise as in DELETE statement.

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Dependency network of the Decision tree model.

Microsoft Decision Trees in SQL Server

September 12, 2019 by

Decision trees, one of the very popular data mining algorithm which is the next topic in our Data Mining series. In the previous article Introduction to SQL Server Data Mining, we discussed what data mining is and how to set up the data mining environment in SQL Server. Then in the next article, Microsoft Naïve Bayes algorithm was discussed. In this Article, Microsoft Decision Trees are discussed with examples. The Microsoft Decision Trees algorithm is a classification and regression algorithm that works well for predictive modeling. The algorithm supports the prediction of both discrete and continuous attributes.

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Selecting the mining struture from the available list

Introduction to SQL Server Data Mining

July 23, 2019 by

Prediction, is it a new thing for you? You won’t believe you are predicting from the bed to the office and to back to the bed. Just imagine, you have a meeting at 9 AM at the office. If you are using public transport, you need to predict at what time you have to leave so that you can reach the office for the meeting on time. Time may vary by considering the time and the day of the week, and the traffic condition etc. Before you leave your home, you might predict whether it will rain today and you might want to take an umbrella or necessary clothes with you. If you are using your vehicle then the prediction time would be different. If so, you don’t need to worry about the rain but you need to consider the fuel level you need to have to reach to the office. By looking at this simple example, you will understand how critical it is to predict and you understand that all these predictions are done with your experience but not by any scientific method.

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SQL Server auditing with Server and Database audit specifications

November 20, 2017 by

Auditing is a key feature in any application or any system as it provides end users with better analysis for administrators. Apart from analysis, auditing can be used as a troubleshooting mechanism too. Apart from organizational reasons, there are compliance reasons for enabling auditing depending on the domain of operation.

Auditing is mainly about answering four questions, i.e. who, when, what and where. However, depending on the situation, it might be decided what questions of the mentioned four should be answered.

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Point in Time Recovery with SQL Server

December 19, 2016 by

Introduction

How often are you working with multiple environments? For example, if you are a database administrator who is responsible for a production environment as well as another environment, it most likely that you will be working with both environments simultaneously. What is the probability that you will execute a script on production, which actually needs to be executed on the other environment? I would say it is high. To prove this point let me present you an example.

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How to Avoid CXPACKETs?

November 25, 2015 by

CXPACKET is one of the famous wait types that database administrators are experiencing. Before moving into the details of the CXPACKET wait type, first, let us discuss the waits in SQL Server in brief.

SQL Server is a mini operating system. When SQL Server is executing any task and if for any reason it has to wait for resources to execute the task, it will wait in a list until it gets the relevant resources. This list is called the Waiter list or suspended list. This is not a queue as whenever that task is ready with required resources it will move to the runnable queue which means that it is ready to execute whenever the processor is free to execute. Depending on the type of wait, there are more than 200 wait types. CXPACKET, WRITELOG, ASYNC_NETWORK_IO are the most common wait types. This is a very brief discussion about waits. For any case where this is not clear, it will be better to get more details from other sources as this article is not intended to discuss waits in detail.

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