SQl Server Diagnostics scripts

Glenn Berry's SQL Server Performance

http://sqlserverperformance.wordpress.com/2013/07/09/sql-server-diagnostic-information-queries-for-july-2013/

Download and go. Pretty darned good.

SQL Server 2005 Waits and Queues

Really, really useful. Everywhere I go the same problems exist. SQL Server slow and no one knows why. It's a useful topic and this is a good part of it.

SQL Server 2005 Waits and Queues - SQL Server Best Practices Article, by Tom Davidson, 2005

It can be downloaded from http://bit.ly/aUh6S


"wait time" - the total time taken for a thread to go from Running, to being "put on the queue", or to being "queued, and then back to Running again.

"resource wait time" - the time a thread is waiting on the Waiter List with the state of Suspended.

"signal wait time" - time waiting for the processor once the resource has become available.

So wait time = resource wait time + signal wait time

When a thread has server time, and then becomes blocked, it is set as Suspended and then placed on the Waiter list.

When it receives a signal to say the resource is available, it is set to Runnable and it is place on the Runnable Queue. It will wait here until it is given to the Processor.

sys.dm_os_waiting_tasksDMV
Will show all threads that are currently suspended.

Machine Learning in Python

I was looking for info on Stocastic Gradient Decent algorithm and saw this:

Scikit

http://scikit-learn.org/stable/index.html

There is a good 45 min video http://scikit-learn.org/stable/presentations.html (the skit-learn video by Jake Vanderplas) where the url he talks about is wrong I think he means http://www.astroml.org/sklearn_tutorial/

I've since been searching around and found the following that look interesting too:

PyBrain

http://www.pybrain.org

mlpy

http://mlpy.sourceforge.net
Seems pretty extensive

milk

http://pythonhosted.org/milk/

Still early days

Calling Prolog from Python

This is my shopping list of things to investigate. It's a notes page of where I am at the moment in the process of connecting Python and Prolog. I hope it might help someone who is trying to do the same thing, or perhaps thinking about trying to do the same thing. If you have any ideas then it would be great to hear from you. At the moment I am thinking that programming in C++ and using SWI-Prolog's C++ interface might be the answer.

I've been looking into this lately and have collected these  things to look at.
I can program in Prolog and like it. I'm not great at it but I love the way of thinking. I have been using Python also, not that I particularly like Python, but it's so useful and appears in so many places. (yes I've been plating with the Raspberry Pi). So, can I get the Pi to use prolog as it's decision making engine?

pyswip

https://code.google.com/p/pyswip/
This is a bridge between SWI-Prolog and Python and it seems to be the first place to visit. It works on Linux and Win32 but not sure about OSX

I looked at this first and thought that it had stopped being developed. I'm not sure. I think there was an update in December 2012.

There seems to be a nice post on someone's expereince from 2011 here: http://ryepdx.com/2011/09/prolog-in-python-pt-1/

Picstus

This is an interface between Sicstus Prolog and Python. I probably wont look at this as I am using SWI-Prolog for the time being. Sicstus costs about 165 Euros and I'm not that professional.
http://www.biolab.si/picstus/picstus.html

A Prolog Interpreter in Python

This is very interesting stuff. Excelent stuff. http://wwwold.stups.uni-duesseldorf.de/thesis/Bolz2007-Bachelorarbeit.pdf but probably it's not going to help me.
[UPDATE 2016] The above link no longer works. Try this http://stups.hhu.de/w/A_Prolog_Interpreter_in_Python

There is also some work by Chris Meyers http://www.openbookproject.net/py4fun/ a few links in this page. In summary though it's too slow for a real world solution.

SWIG

"SWIG is a software development tool that connects programs written in C and C++ with a variety of high-level programming languages." So We could wrap Prolog with Swig.

http://www.swig.org/

Probably not what I want to do as a bit complex.

Pwig

This is a swig extension for Python.

http://pwig.sourceforge.net
The last activity was in 2004.
Can download from here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pwig/files/pwig/
SWIG is at version 2.0 but PWIG required SWIG 1.3.23 which I couldn't see. It might be there somewhere.

PyKE

Now this is interesting. http://pyke.sourceforge.net/ 

It introduces a form of logic programming into Python. There is an interesting paper at http://pyke.sourceforge.net/PyCon2008-paper.html 

It has an inference engine but the syntax is new. I suppose it would do but it's a shame not to improve my skills in Prolog. That said though, the skill in prolog is the thinking not the syntax.

PyProlog

A Python extension embedding SWI-Prolog. This was last updated in 2001 so is a tad out of date with very little or no information.

http://pyprolog.sourceforge.net/

Pyrolog

I'm not sure about this one. A prolog interpreter written in RPython.
https://bitbucket.org/cfbolz/pyrolog

PyLog

http://wiki.python.org/moin/PyLog

Well I'm not sure about this. It's a first order logic library. It also

Knowrob

KnowRob is a knowledge processing system that combines knowledge representation and reasoning methods with techniques for acquiring knowledge and for grounding the knowledge in a physical system and can serve as a common semantic framework for integrating information from different sources.

Too big for my needs here but really cool.

http://www.knowrob.org/knowrob

So now what do I think?

Well I'm beginning to think I should look at coding in C or C++.
My task is for the Raspberry Pi and it's a shame to slow it up by getting into C again after so many years.  Python wold be such a fast and rapid development. Maybe I create a C interface to my Prolog. Then use Python for all other motor controlling, sensor controlling. Then, when it's a success and become a millionaire, I can refactor all the code from Python to C for the fun of it.
This is a disappointment. I'll do some more digging and write my thoughts here.