Chaosmail Blog

Feb 26, 2019
Getting Started with Microsoft SQL 2019 Big Data clusters

Microsoft latest SQL Server 2019 (preview) comes in a new version, the SQL Server 2019 Big Data cluster (BDC). There are a couple of cool things about the BDC version: (1) it runs on Kubernetes (2) it integrates a sharded SQL engine (3) it integrates HDFS (a distributed file storage) (4) it integrates Spark (a distributed compute engine) (5) and both services Spark and HDFS run behind an Apache Knox Gateway (HTTPS application gateway for Hadoop).
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Jan 31, 2019
Introduction to BigData, Hadoop and Spark

Everyone is speaking about Big Data and Data Lakes these days. Many IT professionals see Apache Spark as the solution to every problem. At the same time, Apache Hadoop has been around for more than 10 years and won’t go away anytime soon. In this blog post I want to give a brief introduction to Big Data, demystify some of the main concepts such as Map Reduce, and highlight the similarities and differences between Hadoop and Spark.
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Jul 31, 2018

Bing Maps API - Rest Locations (Geocoding)

The Bing Maps APIs provide a REST API for Geocoding, hence finding a location based on a text input. This text input can be either a structured address or an (unstructured) search query. In this blog post we will see how to request a developer key and use the REST API for finding the coordinates to a query using the Bing Maps Location API.

Request an API key

If you already use Azure or have an Azure account, then you can request an API key directly from within Azure. To do so, log into your Azure account and go to the Marketplace. Search for Bing Maps API for Enterprise, select your pricing model and add it to your Azure account. The tier level 1 is free and grants you 10K requests/month. You can find more pricing information in the product documentation.

If you don’t have an Azure account then you can request an API key from the Bing Maps Portal.

Locations API (Rest)

There are 2 types of queries available in the Locations API, structured and unstructured queries. In this example we will use an unstructured query to query the API with a search term. However, you can also find examples using structured queries on the Bing Maps Location API documentation.

Let’s find the geolocation of Howth an Irish village in east central Dublin. To run this, you have to replace the <accesskey> placeholder with you own access key in the following snippet.

$ curl http://dev.virtualearth.net/REST/v1/Locations?query=Howth+Dublin&include=queryParse&key=<accesskey>&output=json

{
  "authenticationResultCode": "ValidCredentials",
  "brandLogoUri": "http://dev.virtualearth.net/Branding/logo_powered_by.png",
  "copyright": "Copyright © 2018 Microsoft and its suppliers. All rights reserved. This API cannot be accessed and the content and any results may not be used, reproduced or transmitted in any manner without express written permission from Microsoft Corporation.",
  "resourceSets": [
    {
      "estimatedTotal": 2,
      "resources": [
        {
          "__type": "Location:http://schemas.microsoft.com/search/local/ws/rest/v1",
          "bbox": [
            53.3509009854156,
            -6.12213139880203,
            53.4088417514008,
            -5.99270815503098
          ],
          "name": "Howth, Ireland",
          "point": {
            "type": "Point",
            "coordinates": [
              53.3798713684082,
              -6.0574197769165
            ]
          },
          "address": {
            "adminDistrict": "Dublin",
            "countryRegion": "Ireland",
            "formattedAddress": "Howth, Ireland",
            "locality": "Howth"
          },
          "confidence": "High",
          "entityType": "PopulatedPlace",
          "geocodePoints": [
            {
              "type": "Point",
              "coordinates": [
                53.3798713684082,
                -6.0574197769165
              ],
              "calculationMethod": "Rooftop",
              "usageTypes": [
                "Display"
              ]
            }
          ],
          "matchCodes": [
            "Ambiguous"
          ],
          "queryParseValues": [
            {
              "property": "Locality",
              "value": "howth"
            },
            {
              "property": "AdminDistrict",
              "value": "dublin"
            }
          ]
        },
        {
          "__type": "Location:http://schemas.microsoft.com/search/local/ws/rest/v1",
          "bbox": [
            53.3849579306227,
            -6.08322532103279,
            53.392683365764,
            -6.06595509125969
          ],
          "name": "Howth, Ireland",
          "point": {
            "type": "Point",
            "coordinates": [
              53.3888206481934,
              -6.07459020614624
            ]
          },
          "address": {
            "adminDistrict": "Dublin",
            "countryRegion": "Ireland",
            "formattedAddress": "Howth, Ireland",
            "locality": "Howth"
          },
          "confidence": "Medium",
          "entityType": "RailwayStation",
          "geocodePoints": [
            {
              "type": "Point",
              "coordinates": [
                53.3888206481934,
                -6.07459020614624
              ],
              "calculationMethod": "Rooftop",
              "usageTypes": [
                "Display"
              ]
            }
          ],
          "matchCodes": [
            "Ambiguous"
          ],
          "queryParseValues": [
            {
              "property": "Landmark",
              "value": "howth"
            },
            {
              "property": "AdminDistrict",
              "value": "dublin"
            }
          ]
        }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "statusCode": 200,
  "statusDescription": "OK",
  "traceId": "40fdef3af24f4784ace0cce7eac525d8|DB40060332|7.7.0.0|Ref A: 4E51EFC390E74430B0E957794757DF59 Ref B: DB3EDGE1021 Ref C: 2018-07-31T13:59:46Z"
}

In the above code we see that the API returns the geolocation, a bounding box and other useful geo information such as country region and administrative district as a json body.

With the Bing Maps API, one can also perform Batch operations. You can find more information about Batch operations on the Bing Blog.

Request an API key

Locations API (Rest)

Resources