Watch Disney’s official trailer for Star Wars: The Acolyte

http://img.youtube.com/vi/BtytYWhg2mc/0.jpg

Based on the synopsis for Star Wars: The Acolyte, you can expect more than just the typical action scenes and sci-fi world building from the show. It seems to have a mystery-thriller slant to it that you could find appealing even if you’re not a Star Wars fan but love that particular genre — and now Disney+ has released its official trailer to give you an idea of what you can expect. Star Wars: The Acolyte’s story is set at the end of the High Republic era, around a century before the events of Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace

It revolves around a former padawan played by Amandla Stenberg (Everything, Everything and The Hate U Give) who reunites with her old Jedi Master (Lee Jung-jae from Squid Game) to investigate a series of crimes. They, of course, unearth more and more clues as they look into the crime spree, which Disney says will lead them "down a dark path where sinister forces reveal all is not what it seems…" As a big fan of mystery and detective stories, it sounds promising, and I’d love it if Disney can nail the execution to give us a satisfying (and unpredictable) ending, as well. 

Star Wars: The Acolyte will be available for streaming on Disney+ starting on June 4. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/watch-disneys-official-trailer-for-star-wars-the-acolyte-150246523.html?src=rssEngadget

The problem with using a UUID primary key in MySQL

https://planetscale.com/assets/blog/content/the-problem-with-using-a-uuid-primary-key-in-mysql/the-problem-with-using-a-uuid-primary-key-in-mysql-social.jpgUnderstand the different versions of UUIDs and why using them as a primary key in MySQL can hurt database performance.Planet MySQL

Memes that made me laugh 201

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXZQCF0EAnlTnhPaedey4Q__TF9rEI3VF4wykZ60QVdPZMtRk0bpquPdV0XrBfW6uI78nzNci0mG-BbVM0aaaikd1qvoBqYPD7nuxUMQc4hOZI3KBElhw8q1Oqd4pV2RdZ12boGMbnxkZMtuQsWFVqgD00o3m3hpXJ_bkq7Bx274TsIqf1Dh4aRo0jsLs/w310-h400/Meme%20-%20terrorist%20pop%20quiz.png

 

Gathered from around the Internet over the past week.  Click any image for a larger view.

More next week.

Peter

Bayou Renaissance Man

Top Power BI Services: Turning Data into Business Insights

https://www.noupe.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/image-2.png

Power BI services offer unmatched capabilities for gaining actionable and impactful business insights in today’s data-driven world. 

As organizations contend with ever-growing data volumes, Power BI empowers them to visualize complex data, uncover meaningful patterns, and make informed strategic decisions. 

With intuitive dashboards and interactive reports, Power BI brings data to life – enabling anyone to derive insights without specialized data skills.

This blog post explores the top Power BI services that make data analytics accessible, collaborative, and mobile-friendly. We discuss how Power BI integrates with various data sources, gets enhanced by third-party tools, and streamlines data workflows for organizations.

Additionally, we provide:

  • Best practices for adoption.
  • Real-world examples of Power BI success.
  • Future capabilities like AI integration.

In short, Power BI is the defining analytics solution for forward-thinking businesses looking to amplify the value of their data and transform decision-making. Read on to learn how leading Power BI services can empower your organization with impactful business insights.

Understanding Power BI

Power BI services, offered by Power BI development companies, provide next-generation business intelligence solutions for modern data analytics. It is a compilation of software services, apps, and connectors that allow organizations to easily access, visualize, and analyze data from various sources.

Some critical capabilities of Power BI services include:

  • Interactive Data Visualization: Create dynamic reports and dashboards to gain data-driven insights. Customize visuals with the latest design features.
  • Self-Service Analytics: Enable business users to derive insights independently without IT involvement. Simple drag-and-drop report building.
  • Augmented Analytics: Leverage AI to generate insights automatically. Natural language queries via voice or text.
  • Unified View of Data: Connect, transform, and combine data from disparate sources, like Excel, SQL databases, etc., into a unified model.
  • Mobile Business Intelligence: Access analytics via intuitive apps on any device, even offline.
  • Collaborative Workspaces: Securely share dashboards and reports with other BI users in your organization.

With this potent mix of features for quick, automated, and collaborative insights, it’s clear why Power BI services from a Power BI development company are critical for data-driven decision-making.

Importance of Data Analysis for Businesses

Source: Freepik

In today’s highly competitive and complex business landscape, leveraging data visualization services for advanced analytics is no longer an option but a necessity. 

Without the ability to garner meaningful insights from their ever-increasing data, organizations struggle with critical activities like:

  • Accurate forecasting and planning
  • Optimizing marketing campaigns
  • Enhancing customer experiences
  • Streamlining supply chains
  • Minimizing risk

This is where Power BI services from top Microsoft Power BI development companies prove invaluable:

Interactive dashboards provide a single source of truth.

  • AI-powered predictions to guide strategies.
  • Democratized self-service analytics, reducing dependency on IT.
  • Unified view of organizational data.
  • Custom analytics consulting for maximized RoI.

In essence, Power BI services empower every business user with data-driven decision-making – be it senior executives charting growth strategies or field managers monitoring daily operations. 

The insights unlocked lead to tangible outcomes like increased productivity, entry into new markets, and achievement of innovation goals.

Top Power BI Services for Business Insights

Source: Freepik

The Power BI platform offers interconnected services that enable organizations to leverage data analysis and visualize insights with compelling interactive reports. Below are the top Power BI services used by leading businesses:

  • Power BI Desktop: This free desktop application allows power users to connect data from 100+ sources, transform and cleanse data as well as design rich dashboards and reports. The drag-and-drop interface makes it easy to analyze millions of rows of data with in-memory performance and create polished visuals without coding.
  • Power BI Service: A Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform to share interactive reports/dashboards created on the Desktop with users across the organization. This collaborative business intelligence environment allows discussion of insights through commentary. Advanced security features protect sensitive data as users access analytics securely on the web and mobile.
  • Power BI Mobile: With cross-platform apps for iOS and Android, key business insights can be monitored on the go with optimized dashboards for touch and smaller form factors. Alerts and push notifications enable quick decision-making and field workforce productivity.
  • Power BI Gateway: This agent can be installed on-premise to access the organization’s data warehouses and other data sources without moving the data. The gateway acts as a bridge to surface internal data securely to the Power BI cloud.
  • Power BI Paginated Reports: For pixel-perfect, printable, and operational reports, Power BI paginated reports provide flexibility to match specific business needs where interactive exploration may not be required.

To maximize the adoption and ROI of these services, smart businesses hire Microsoft Power BI developers to build tailored solutions aligned with strategic goals.

Integrations and Connectivity

Source: Freepik

A key strength of Power BI lies in its extensive connectivity and integration capabilities with various data platforms. Power BI provides standard connectors to import, transform, and enrich data from myriad sources like:

  • SQL Server
  • Excel
  • Analysis Services
  • Azure Data Lake
  • Dynamics 365
  • Google Analytics
  • Facebook
  • More than 100 other data sources

Power BI enables a consolidated view by mapping relationships across these multiple data sources. Further, it integrates tightly with other Microsoft analytics services like Azure Analysis Services and SQL Server Reporting Services for enhanced modeling and governance.

Power BI also offers rich capabilities to embed visuals and reports in custom applications through comprehensive APIs. Whether building internal BI portals or client-facing analytics products, technology partners help extend Power BI for specific use cases.

Leading business intelligence consulting company accelerates Power BI adoption by handling complex integration scenarios like migrating from legacy tools or blending data from on-premise and cloud. Smooth data orchestration minimizes disruption while providing users with a unified lens for data-driven decision-making.

With the ability to tap into virtually any data source and build custom extensions, top Microsoft Power BI development companies help future-proof BI investments for the long term.

Best Practices for Maximizing Power BI’s Potential

Source: Freepik

While Power BI offers a market-leading business analytics platform, thoughtful design and governance are vital to extract the total value. Below are some best practices BI experts share for optimized Power BI deployments:

  • Establish Clear Roles: Carefully classify personas into consumers who mostly view reports, creators who build visualizations, and administrators who govern data access. Define permissions and capabilities appropriate for each user type to promote self-service insights while managing risk.
  • Standardize Data Models: Conform dimensions, measures, and parameters using consistent naming conventions and formatting rules for easier discoverability and usability across multiple reports and workspaces. Maintain reusability and consistency.
  • Promote Reuse: Encourage using certified datasets and templatized reports to accelerate development and adoption. Maintain a centralized repository of approved visuals, custom visuals, and data connections.
  • Apply Query Reduction Techniques: Leverage innovations like query folding, query caching, incremental refresh, and aggregation to optimize dataflows and workload management. Minimize refreshes.
  • Set Optimal Refresh Cadence: Balance most current and acceptable stale data depending on evolving business needs. Schedule refreshes during off-peak usage times.
  • Embrace Continuous Performance Testing: Rigorously load test dashboards and reports early in development and repeatedly uncover and fix issues. Profile usage patterns and data volumes for right-sizing capacity.

Power BI undoubtedly delivers immense data-driven benefits, but working with a competent BI consulting partner to craft thoughtful solutions centered on these best practices unlocks its potential for significant ROI.

Real-world Examples of Power BI Success Stories

Source: Freepik

The true measure of any technology ultimately lies in tangible outcomes delivered for real-world businesses. Power BI services have helped leading organizations across industries transform decision-making, unify reporting, and reduce costs. Below are some stellar examples:

Microsoft leveraged Power BI to gain deep customer intelligence and product insights. By embedding interactive reports and dashboards into internal portals, they reduced time spent in manual reporting by over $250K yearly. Optimized business discovery accelerated decision-making across the organization.

DHL Supply Chain unified operational visibility and transformed management insights using Power BI dashboards blending data from multiple legacy ERP, WMS, and IoT systems. Integrated logistics monitoring reduced order processing time by 16% while increasing warehouse throughput by 13% globally.

Coca-Cola European Partners consolidated scattered sales metrics into an automated self-service Power BI experience. Streamlined analytics strengthened its customer relationships and inventory management, resulting in an 18% sales growth in 2 years.

Adobe tapped into Power BI’s AI capabilities to analyze marketing campaign performance and audience engagement data. Data-driven campaign optimization helped increase conversion rates by 25%, translating to over $60 million in annual revenue.

As these industry leaders exemplify, Power BI services deliver material benefits when leveraging its vast data connectivity and compelling visualization capabilities – turning reports into strategic assets.

Behind these Power BI wins have been competent top BI implementation services specialists driving end-to-end solution delivery aligned with business strategy. Their expertise in data modeling, visualization best practices, and performance optimization unlocks maximum business value.

Indeed, with the right deployment guidance, Power BI data visualization services and analytics consulting unlock data-driven growth opportunities, offering very tangible and industry-leading RoI.

Future Trends and Developments in Power BI

Source: Freepik

The Business Intelligence market is forecasted to achieve a worth of $33.3 billion by the year 2025, according to Markets and Markets projections.

The innovation pace at Microsoft ensures Power BI continues its market dominance in analytics and business intelligence. Some exciting areas where Power BI services are headed:

  • Augmented BI: Instead of just visualization, expect AI-powered solutions that provide deeper and automatic insights, recommend data-backed actions, and guide users to optimal business outcomes. 

Conversational experiences through natural language and voice-first interactions will gain prominence, allowing business users to ask questions in plain language and receive automated responses and supporting visuals.

  • Enhanced Collaboration: Real-time co-authoring capabilities, @mentions, and richer commenting features will integrate Power BI workflows with Microsoft Teams and Office 365 experiences, enabling frictionless analytics sharing.  This will break down silos and amplify user-generated insights.
  • Big Data Integration: First-class support for emerging data sources like Spark, Hadoop, and streaming datasets will empower tapping into vast volumes of structured and unstructured data for patterns and correlations without requiring data movement. Power BI will continue democratizing big data analytics for business users.
  • Hybrid and Embedded Analytics: The gateway and dataflow architecture will continue maturing to simplify access and unification of cloud and on-prem data sources, especially dynamic operational data. Standardization of Power BI embedded analytics, and APIs will accelerate the development of custom BI solutions.

As Microsoft invests billions in cloud and AI research annually, organizations will gain exponentially from combining Power Platform strengths like Power BI, Power Apps, and Power Automate to solve business problems innovatively. 

Partners skilled in the latest analytics methodologies and dashboard best practices help maximize these data-driven benefits.

Conclusion

Due to its uncompromising capabilities, power BI has rapidly become the defining business intelligence and analytics platform. With intuitive visualizations, augmented analytics, and collaborative workspaces, Power BI services empower organizations to uncover game-changing insights from data.

  • Unlock your enterprise’s potential for Power BI by leveraging Power BI services like Power BI Desktop, Mobile Reports, and AI Insights.
  • Ensure success by partnering with competent Microsoft Gold Partners, which offers full-spectrum analytics consulting and development.
  • Future-proof your analytics investments with innovative BI solutions integrated with Dynamics 365, Azure ML, and Power Platform.

Featured Image by standret on Freepik

The post Top Power BI Services: Turning Data into Business Insights appeared first on noupe.

noupe

Top Power BI Services: Turning Data into Business Insights

https://www.noupe.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/image-2.png

Power BI services offer unmatched capabilities for gaining actionable and impactful business insights in today’s data-driven world. 

As organizations contend with ever-growing data volumes, Power BI empowers them to visualize complex data, uncover meaningful patterns, and make informed strategic decisions. 

With intuitive dashboards and interactive reports, Power BI brings data to life – enabling anyone to derive insights without specialized data skills.

This blog post explores the top Power BI services that make data analytics accessible, collaborative, and mobile-friendly. We discuss how Power BI integrates with various data sources, gets enhanced by third-party tools, and streamlines data workflows for organizations.

Additionally, we provide:

  • Best practices for adoption.
  • Real-world examples of Power BI success.
  • Future capabilities like AI integration.

In short, Power BI is the defining analytics solution for forward-thinking businesses looking to amplify the value of their data and transform decision-making. Read on to learn how leading Power BI services can empower your organization with impactful business insights.

Understanding Power BI

Power BI services, offered by Power BI development companies, provide next-generation business intelligence solutions for modern data analytics. It is a compilation of software services, apps, and connectors that allow organizations to easily access, visualize, and analyze data from various sources.

Some critical capabilities of Power BI services include:

  • Interactive Data Visualization: Create dynamic reports and dashboards to gain data-driven insights. Customize visuals with the latest design features.
  • Self-Service Analytics: Enable business users to derive insights independently without IT involvement. Simple drag-and-drop report building.
  • Augmented Analytics: Leverage AI to generate insights automatically. Natural language queries via voice or text.
  • Unified View of Data: Connect, transform, and combine data from disparate sources, like Excel, SQL databases, etc., into a unified model.
  • Mobile Business Intelligence: Access analytics via intuitive apps on any device, even offline.
  • Collaborative Workspaces: Securely share dashboards and reports with other BI users in your organization.

With this potent mix of features for quick, automated, and collaborative insights, it’s clear why Power BI services from a Power BI development company are critical for data-driven decision-making.

Importance of Data Analysis for Businesses

Source: Freepik

In today’s highly competitive and complex business landscape, leveraging data visualization services for advanced analytics is no longer an option but a necessity. 

Without the ability to garner meaningful insights from their ever-increasing data, organizations struggle with critical activities like:

  • Accurate forecasting and planning
  • Optimizing marketing campaigns
  • Enhancing customer experiences
  • Streamlining supply chains
  • Minimizing risk

This is where Power BI services from top Microsoft Power BI development companies prove invaluable:

Interactive dashboards provide a single source of truth.

  • AI-powered predictions to guide strategies.
  • Democratized self-service analytics, reducing dependency on IT.
  • Unified view of organizational data.
  • Custom analytics consulting for maximized RoI.

In essence, Power BI services empower every business user with data-driven decision-making – be it senior executives charting growth strategies or field managers monitoring daily operations. 

The insights unlocked lead to tangible outcomes like increased productivity, entry into new markets, and achievement of innovation goals.

Top Power BI Services for Business Insights

Source: Freepik

The Power BI platform offers interconnected services that enable organizations to leverage data analysis and visualize insights with compelling interactive reports. Below are the top Power BI services used by leading businesses:

  • Power BI Desktop: This free desktop application allows power users to connect data from 100+ sources, transform and cleanse data as well as design rich dashboards and reports. The drag-and-drop interface makes it easy to analyze millions of rows of data with in-memory performance and create polished visuals without coding.
  • Power BI Service: A Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform to share interactive reports/dashboards created on the Desktop with users across the organization. This collaborative business intelligence environment allows discussion of insights through commentary. Advanced security features protect sensitive data as users access analytics securely on the web and mobile.
  • Power BI Mobile: With cross-platform apps for iOS and Android, key business insights can be monitored on the go with optimized dashboards for touch and smaller form factors. Alerts and push notifications enable quick decision-making and field workforce productivity.
  • Power BI Gateway: This agent can be installed on-premise to access the organization’s data warehouses and other data sources without moving the data. The gateway acts as a bridge to surface internal data securely to the Power BI cloud.
  • Power BI Paginated Reports: For pixel-perfect, printable, and operational reports, Power BI paginated reports provide flexibility to match specific business needs where interactive exploration may not be required.

To maximize the adoption and ROI of these services, smart businesses hire Microsoft Power BI developers to build tailored solutions aligned with strategic goals.

Integrations and Connectivity

Source: Freepik

A key strength of Power BI lies in its extensive connectivity and integration capabilities with various data platforms. Power BI provides standard connectors to import, transform, and enrich data from myriad sources like:

  • SQL Server
  • Excel
  • Analysis Services
  • Azure Data Lake
  • Dynamics 365
  • Google Analytics
  • Facebook
  • More than 100 other data sources

Power BI enables a consolidated view by mapping relationships across these multiple data sources. Further, it integrates tightly with other Microsoft analytics services like Azure Analysis Services and SQL Server Reporting Services for enhanced modeling and governance.

Power BI also offers rich capabilities to embed visuals and reports in custom applications through comprehensive APIs. Whether building internal BI portals or client-facing analytics products, technology partners help extend Power BI for specific use cases.

Leading business intelligence consulting company accelerates Power BI adoption by handling complex integration scenarios like migrating from legacy tools or blending data from on-premise and cloud. Smooth data orchestration minimizes disruption while providing users with a unified lens for data-driven decision-making.

With the ability to tap into virtually any data source and build custom extensions, top Microsoft Power BI development companies help future-proof BI investments for the long term.

Best Practices for Maximizing Power BI’s Potential

Source: Freepik

While Power BI offers a market-leading business analytics platform, thoughtful design and governance are vital to extract the total value. Below are some best practices BI experts share for optimized Power BI deployments:

  • Establish Clear Roles: Carefully classify personas into consumers who mostly view reports, creators who build visualizations, and administrators who govern data access. Define permissions and capabilities appropriate for each user type to promote self-service insights while managing risk.
  • Standardize Data Models: Conform dimensions, measures, and parameters using consistent naming conventions and formatting rules for easier discoverability and usability across multiple reports and workspaces. Maintain reusability and consistency.
  • Promote Reuse: Encourage using certified datasets and templatized reports to accelerate development and adoption. Maintain a centralized repository of approved visuals, custom visuals, and data connections.
  • Apply Query Reduction Techniques: Leverage innovations like query folding, query caching, incremental refresh, and aggregation to optimize dataflows and workload management. Minimize refreshes.
  • Set Optimal Refresh Cadence: Balance most current and acceptable stale data depending on evolving business needs. Schedule refreshes during off-peak usage times.
  • Embrace Continuous Performance Testing: Rigorously load test dashboards and reports early in development and repeatedly uncover and fix issues. Profile usage patterns and data volumes for right-sizing capacity.

Power BI undoubtedly delivers immense data-driven benefits, but working with a competent BI consulting partner to craft thoughtful solutions centered on these best practices unlocks its potential for significant ROI.

Real-world Examples of Power BI Success Stories

Source: Freepik

The true measure of any technology ultimately lies in tangible outcomes delivered for real-world businesses. Power BI services have helped leading organizations across industries transform decision-making, unify reporting, and reduce costs. Below are some stellar examples:

Microsoft leveraged Power BI to gain deep customer intelligence and product insights. By embedding interactive reports and dashboards into internal portals, they reduced time spent in manual reporting by over $250K yearly. Optimized business discovery accelerated decision-making across the organization.

DHL Supply Chain unified operational visibility and transformed management insights using Power BI dashboards blending data from multiple legacy ERP, WMS, and IoT systems. Integrated logistics monitoring reduced order processing time by 16% while increasing warehouse throughput by 13% globally.

Coca-Cola European Partners consolidated scattered sales metrics into an automated self-service Power BI experience. Streamlined analytics strengthened its customer relationships and inventory management, resulting in an 18% sales growth in 2 years.

Adobe tapped into Power BI’s AI capabilities to analyze marketing campaign performance and audience engagement data. Data-driven campaign optimization helped increase conversion rates by 25%, translating to over $60 million in annual revenue.

As these industry leaders exemplify, Power BI services deliver material benefits when leveraging its vast data connectivity and compelling visualization capabilities – turning reports into strategic assets.

Behind these Power BI wins have been competent top BI implementation services specialists driving end-to-end solution delivery aligned with business strategy. Their expertise in data modeling, visualization best practices, and performance optimization unlocks maximum business value.

Indeed, with the right deployment guidance, Power BI data visualization services and analytics consulting unlock data-driven growth opportunities, offering very tangible and industry-leading RoI.

Future Trends and Developments in Power BI

Source: Freepik

The Business Intelligence market is forecasted to achieve a worth of $33.3 billion by the year 2025, according to Markets and Markets projections.

The innovation pace at Microsoft ensures Power BI continues its market dominance in analytics and business intelligence. Some exciting areas where Power BI services are headed:

  • Augmented BI: Instead of just visualization, expect AI-powered solutions that provide deeper and automatic insights, recommend data-backed actions, and guide users to optimal business outcomes. 

Conversational experiences through natural language and voice-first interactions will gain prominence, allowing business users to ask questions in plain language and receive automated responses and supporting visuals.

  • Enhanced Collaboration: Real-time co-authoring capabilities, @mentions, and richer commenting features will integrate Power BI workflows with Microsoft Teams and Office 365 experiences, enabling frictionless analytics sharing.  This will break down silos and amplify user-generated insights.
  • Big Data Integration: First-class support for emerging data sources like Spark, Hadoop, and streaming datasets will empower tapping into vast volumes of structured and unstructured data for patterns and correlations without requiring data movement. Power BI will continue democratizing big data analytics for business users.
  • Hybrid and Embedded Analytics: The gateway and dataflow architecture will continue maturing to simplify access and unification of cloud and on-prem data sources, especially dynamic operational data. Standardization of Power BI embedded analytics, and APIs will accelerate the development of custom BI solutions.

As Microsoft invests billions in cloud and AI research annually, organizations will gain exponentially from combining Power Platform strengths like Power BI, Power Apps, and Power Automate to solve business problems innovatively. 

Partners skilled in the latest analytics methodologies and dashboard best practices help maximize these data-driven benefits.

Conclusion

Due to its uncompromising capabilities, power BI has rapidly become the defining business intelligence and analytics platform. With intuitive visualizations, augmented analytics, and collaborative workspaces, Power BI services empower organizations to uncover game-changing insights from data.

  • Unlock your enterprise’s potential for Power BI by leveraging Power BI services like Power BI Desktop, Mobile Reports, and AI Insights.
  • Ensure success by partnering with competent Microsoft Gold Partners, which offers full-spectrum analytics consulting and development.
  • Future-proof your analytics investments with innovative BI solutions integrated with Dynamics 365, Azure ML, and Power Platform.

Featured Image by standret on Freepik

The post Top Power BI Services: Turning Data into Business Insights appeared first on noupe.

noupe

Real Python: Model-View-Controller (MVC) in Python Web Apps: Explained With Lego

If you’re curious about web development, then you’ve likely encountered the abbreviation MVC, which stands for Model-View-Controller. You may know that it’s a common design pattern that’s fundamental to many Python web frameworks and even desktop applications.

But what exactly does it mean? If you’ve had a hard time wrapping your head around the concept, then keep on reading.

In this tutorial, you’ll:

  • Approach understanding the MVC pattern through a Lego-based analogy
  • Learn what models, views, and controllers are conceptually
  • Tie your conceptual understanding back to concrete web development examples
  • Investigate Flask code snippets to drive the point home

Maybe you built things with Lego as a kid, or maybe you’re still a Lego-aficionado today. But even if you’ve never pieced two Lego blocks together, keep on reading because the analogy might still be a good building block for your understanding.

Get Your Code: Click here to download an example Flask app that will help you understand MVC in Python web apps.

Take the Quiz: Test your knowledge with our interactive “Model-View-Controller (MVC) in Python Web Apps: Explained With Lego” quiz. Upon completion you will receive a score so you can track your learning progress over time:

Take the Quiz »

Explaining the Model-View-Controller Pattern With Lego

Imagine that you’re ten years old and sitting on your family room floor. In front of you is a big bucket of Lego, or similar modular building blocks. There are blocks of all different shapes and sizes:

  • 🟦🟦🟦 Some are blue, tall, and long.
  • 🟥 Some are red and cube-shaped.
  • 🟨🟨 Some are yellow, big, and wide.

With all of these different Lego pieces, there’s no telling what you could build!

Just as your mind is filling with the endless possibilities, you hear something coming from the direction of the couch. It’s your older brother, voicing a specific request. He’s saying, “Hey! Build me a spaceship!”

“Alright,” you think, “that could actually be pretty cool.” A spaceship it is!

So you get to work. You start pulling out the Lego blocks that you think you’re going to need. Some big, some small. Different colors for the outside of the spaceship, different colors for the engines.

Now that you have all of your building blocks in place, it’s time to assemble the spaceship. And after a few hours of hard work, you now have in front of you—a spaceship:

                                  🟦
                                🟦🟥🟦
                              🟦🟥🟥🟥🟦
                            🟦🟥🟥🟥🟥🟥🟦
                            🟦🟥🟥🟥🟥🟥🟦
                            🟦🟥🟩🟩🟩🟥🟦
                            🟦🟥🟩🟦🟩🟥🟦
                            🟦🟥🟩🟩🟩🟥🟦
                            🟦🟥🟥🟥🟥🟥🟦
                            🟦🟥🟥🟥🟥🟥🟦
                            🟦🟥🟥🟥🟥🟥🟦
                        🟦🟥🟥🟥🟥🟥🟥🟥🟥🟥🟦
                        🟦🟥🟥🟥🟥🟥🟥🟥🟥🟥🟦
                        🟦🟥🟨🟨🟥🟥🟥🟨🟨🟥🟦
                            🟨🟨       🟨🟨

You run to find your brother and show him the finished product. “Wow, nice work!”, he says. Then he quietly adds:

Huh, I just asked for that a few hours ago, I didn’t have to do a thing, and here it is. I wish everything was that easy.

— Your Brother

What if I told you that building a web application using the MVC pattern is exactly like building something with Lego blocks?

User Sends a Request

Read the full article at https://realpython.com/lego-model-view-controller-python/ »


[ Improve Your Python With 🐍 Python Tricks 💌 – Get a short & sweet Python Trick delivered to your inbox every couple of days. >> Click here to learn more and see examples ]

Planet Python

Database-Based Operating System ‘DBOS’ Does Things Linux Can’t

Databricks CTO Matei Zaharia "said that Databricks had to keep track of scheduling a million things," remembers adjunct MIT professor Michael Stonebraker. " He said that this can’t be done with traditional operating system scheduling, and so this was done out of a Postgres database. And then he started to whine that Postgres was too slow, and I told him we can do better than that…." This resulted in DBOS — short for "database operating system" — which they teamed up to build with teams Stanford and MIT, according to The Next Platform:
They founded a company to commercialize the idea in April 2023 and secured $8.5 million initial seed funding to start building the real DBOS. Engine Ventures and Construct Capital led the funding, along with Sinewave and GutBrain Ventures… "The state that the operating system has to keep track of — memory, files, messages, and so on — is approximately linear to the resources you have got," says Stonebraker. "So without me saying another word, keeping track of operating system state is a database problem not addressed by current operating system schedulers. Moreover, OLTP [Online Transaction Processing] database performance has gone up dramatically, and that is why we thought instead of running the database system in user space on top of the operating system, why don’t we invert our thinking 180 degrees and run the operating system on top of the database, with all of the operating services are coded in SQL…?" For now, DBOS can give the same kind of performance as that full blown Linux operating system, and thanks to the distributed database underpinnings of its kernel, it can do things that a Linux kernel just cannot do… One is provide reliable execution, which means that if a program running atop DBOS is ever interrupted, it starts where it left off and does not have to redo its work from some arbitrary earlier point and does not crash and have to start from the beginning. And because every little bit of the state of the operating system — and therefore the applications that run atop it — is preserved, you can go backwards in time in the system and restart the operating system if it experiences some sort of anomaly, such as a bad piece of application software running or a hack attack. You can use this "time travel" feature, as Stonebraker calls it, to reproduce what are called heisenbugs — ones that are very hard to reproduce precisely because there is no shared state in the distributed Linux and Kubernetes environment and that are increasingly prevalent in a world of microservices. The other benefit of the DBOS is that it presents a smaller attack surface for hackers, which boosts security, and that you analyze the metrics of the operating system in place since they are already in a NoSQL database that can be queried rather than aggregating a bunch of log files from up and down the software stack to try to figure out what is going on… There is also a custom tier for DBOS, which we presume costs money, that can use other databases and datastores for user application data, stores more than three days of log data, can have multiple users per account, that adds email and Slack support with DBOS techies, and that is available on other clouds as well as AWS. The operating system kernel/scheduler "is itself largely a database," with services written in TypeScript, according to the article. The first iteration used the FoundationDB distributed key-value store for its scheduling core (open sourced by Apple in 2018), according to the article — "a blazingly fast NoSQL database… Stonebraker says there is no reason to believe that DBOS can’t scale across 1 million cores or more and support Java, Python, and other application languages as they are needed by customers…" And the article speculates they could take things even further. "There is no reason why DBOS cannot complete the circle and not only have a database as an operating system kernel, but also have a relational database as the file system for applications."


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Meet BFA at Open Seasons Sportsman’s Expo March 15-17

https://www.buckeyefirearms.org/sites/buckeyefirearms.org/files/styles/slideshow/public/field/image/sportsman-expo.jpg?itok=IlX0PfyA

Leaders of the Buckeye Firearms Association will be on hand this weekend at the Open Seasons Sportsman’s Expo.

The weekend-long expo, to be held inside the Bricker Building at the Ohio Expo Center & State Fair, will feature the latest in outdoor gear from national and regional exhibitors, hands-on demonstration opportunities, numerous entertainment and educational seminars with industry experts, and special guests.

Other attractions include deer exhibits, archery trick shooting, field-to-fork cooking demos, and a 3D archery competition.

Look for BFA leaders at booth 514, between Benning Distributing and Deer IQ.

Event hours are 2 to 7 p.m. Friday, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday, and 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sunday. The expo center is at 717 E. 17th Ave. in Columbus.

For ticket and other information, visit openseasonsportsmansexpo.com/ohio.

Buckeye Firearms Association

Cognition Emerges From Stealth To Launch AI Software Engineer ‘Devin’

Longtime Slashdot reader ahbond shares a report from VentureBeat: Today, Cognition, a recently formed AI startup backed by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and tech industry leaders including former Twitter executive Elad Gil and Doordash co-founder Tony Xu, announced a fully autonomous AI software engineer called "Devin." While there are multiple coding assistants out there, including the famous Github Copilot, Devin is said to stand out from the crowd with its ability to handle entire development projects end-to-end, right from writing the code and fixing the bugs associated with it to final execution. This is the first offering of this kind and even capable of handling projects on Upwork, the startup has demonstrated. […]
In a blog post today on Cognition’s website, Scott Wu, the founder and CEO of Cognition and an award-winning sports coder, explained Devin can access common developer tools, including its own shell, code editor and browser, within a sandboxed compute environment to plan and execute complex engineering tasks requiring thousands of decisions. The human user simply types a natural language prompt into Devin’s chatbot style interface, and the AI software engineer takes it from there, developing a detailed, step-by-step plan to tackle the problem. It then begins the project using its developer tools, just like how a human would use them, writing its own code, fixing issues, testing and reporting on its progress in real-time, allowing the user to keep an eye on everything as it works. […]
According to demos shared by Wu, Devin is capable of handling a range of tasks in its current form. This includes common engineering projects like deploying and improving apps/websites end-to-end and finding and fixing bugs in codebases to more complex things like setting up fine-tuning for a large language model using the link to a research repository on GitHub or learning how to use unfamiliar technologies. In one case, it learned from a blog post how to run the code to produce images with concealed messages. Meanwhile, in another, it handled an Upwork project to run a computer vision model by writing and debugging the code for it. In the SWE-bench test, which challenges AI assistants with GitHub issues from real-world open-source projects, the AI software engineer was able to correctly resolve 13.86% of the cases end-to-end — without any assistance from humans. In comparison, Claude 2 could resolve just 4.80% while SWE-Llama-13b and GPT-4 could handle 3.97% and 1.74% of the issues, respectively. All these models even required assistance, where they were told which file had to be fixed. Currently, Devin is available only to a select few customers. Bloomberg journalist Ashlee Vance wrote a piece about his experience using it here.
"The Doom of Man is at hand," captions Slashdot reader ahbond. "It will start with the low-hanging Jira tickets, and in a year or two, able to handle 99% of them. In the short term, software engineers may become like bot farmers, herding 10-1000 bots writing code, etc. Welcome to the future."


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