MacKenzie & MacKenzie Consulting Inc.

Hey guys, watch this demo of a product I'm releasing for those of you who use Remote Desktop over the internet. Disrupt those RDP spammers and save your bandwidth and security logs. Make sure to check out the link to my site in the video.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/how-to-block-rdp-98471703?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link

How to Block RDP Spammers with BZ RDP Cloaker | Sean MacKenzie Data Engineering Get more from Sean MacKenzie Data Engineering on Patreon

Feeling really great about this milestone. So many mistakes made, lessons learned, unexpected twists and turns, but ultimately, success. This is just the beginning! Many thanks to my subscribers and viewers on YouTube, and to my dedicated fans on Patreon - this is also part of your journey. I appreciate your amazing stories and feedback, and I look forward to seeing your successes!

Every week, we are adding more to our little fictional tow truck application. This week, we're adding some custom filters so that our users can quickly search the tow list.

How to Add Custom Filter Controls to Your Azure WebForms App In this episode, we're working on our WebForms app in Azure, adding some very useful user controls for users to filter a big list as they work. We'll set up ...

Make sure to check out my recent video on encrypting and decrypting field data in MS Access. Add some data security to your sensitive fields so that they cannot be read if your data files are stolen!

How to Encrypt Passwords and Sensitive Data in Microsoft Access Sometimes in our databases we need to encrypt certain fields, like password fields or other sensitive data. In Microsoft Access, this is also possible by usi...

Sometimes it is necessary to rebuild tables in an MS Access database, and the task can be difficult if your existing keys were autonumber fields. You must rebuild the table using specific values to identify specific rows, and then those values must match foreign keys in other tables. One thing that surprises many people is that there is a way to insert your own values into autonumber fields, then continue to use the rebuilt table (with autonumber) as it was intended. Search Sean MacKenzie Data Engineering on YouTube for this and more videos on desktop, server, and big data topics! https://youtu.be/rJTRlNFu38k

This simple little function is a great time-saver in programming, allowing for you to execute a function on a list or lists of objects so that you can get results in aggregate without having to either stuff a query with a function or loop through a data structure to apply it. Definitely worth a video!

How to Use the Map Function in Python One of the most useful functions in Python is the Map function that allows you to execute a function for every item in an iterable, like a list or a datafram...

I know I'm a bit late in jumping on the ChatGPT bandwagon, but I thought it was time to try and actually code something simple, using only code that is generated by ChatGPT. The free version doesn't really give a lot of processing power as it stops generating after a minute or two (you can get more on off-hours), so if you want something fully working, it needs to be simple. That's what I do in this episode: generate a database and application in Python that will track a few employee fields. How well can it do it? Let's find out!

Building a Database Application with ChatGPT In this episode, we're going to take a quick look at ChatGPT in order to see how it will perform the task of creating a database application. This task is ve...

Let's go take a look at how to use date selectors in our WebForms app! If you're interested in learning how to make an online application using Visual Basic, make sure to watch this series. See the playlist with episodes on my channel page!

How to Use Date Controls in WebForms Apps In this episode, we return to our WebForms playlist, and we'll continue our little tow truck project by adding some date fields to our application. Date fiel...

This week we're taking a look at our free SQL Express instance that we installed last week, and more importantly, designing some tables that will work great with our Microsoft Access database application but with the added security, performance, scalability, and features that a SQL Express backend can provide for us. Let's go!

How to Design Tables in SQL Express for Use with MS Access In this episode, we take a look at how to craft a table in SQL Express (or SQL Server, or Azure SQL) for the purpose of integrating it with a Microsoft Acces...

Feeling pretty jazzed as we get into April and I pass two milestones at the same time, 7k subscribers and 700k views on my channel! Many thanks to everyone who watched and subscribed so far. I get the feeling we're still at the beginning, and there's so much more to come! If you haven't seen it yet, please tap on my channel in my profile, or go to youtube.com/ and subscribe for data topics, tips, tricks, and techniques.

This week's episode is part 2 of our exploration of Visual Basic with WebForms. This is a great way to get a simple web application up and running to collect data from your users anywhere on the web, then store and manage that data in Azure SQL.

How to Use Text Boxes to Update an Azure SQL Database in WebForms In this episode, we're continuing work on our Azure WebForms application where we wanted to connect a web application to an Azure SQL database, display a lis...

Had a bit of fun a few weeks ago and wanted to graph the Top 30 times for production/street cars on the famed Nürburgring. It turned out to be more challenging than I thought. It was so close that every one thousandth of a second was critical. You can see the minutes and seconds as I hover over each bar in the graph. The Corvette had to be demoted one spot due to a possible data error on the source data site (Wikipedia).

Is there a car maker or model that you expected to see here but was not found?

Fastest Nürburgring Nordschleife Lap Times - Production or Street Legal Cars In this episode, I'm looking at how I created a particular visualization about the fastest laps for production or street legal cars on the Nürburgring Nordsc...

This video is for those viewers who are just getting started in data. How can you get prepared for this journey? Let's go!

How to Get Started for a Data Career 00:58 1. Hardware04:20 2. Software08:58 3. Get Started12:07 4. The Cloud13:32 5. Feel the Power14:40 6. Takeaways15:07 7. CareersHow can I get started for a ...

Many thanks to my customers, viewers, and supporters for a wonderful year in 2022. All the best to you, your families, and loved ones this holiday season. Best wishes for a wonderful year in 2023. Happy holidays!

Wildland Fire Time-Lapse with Deep Learning Classification [OC] Posted in r/dataisbeautiful by u/seamacke • 29 points and 1 comment

This video is a Patreon exclusive that follows up on today's YouTube video on how to do String Aggregates in Microsoft Access. String Aggregates allow us to to put a comma delimited list in a field for all records of a particular type. For example, if you were showing cars from your auto dealer lot, you would also want to have a list of colors ready for potential buyers. Or, which years of a particular car you have. All in one row.

We accomplished this task in our YouTube video today, but we used the easiest method that works great for small numbers of records, but gets very slow when we need to process or report on large numbers of records. Enter our RsData procedure that I introduced in a previous article, a procedure that pulls our query up into RAM memory so that we can access it over and over very quickly, without the bottlenecks of disk and network in our way.

In this exclusive video, we use our RsData to pull our distinct list of manufacturers and car years into memory, which we then access using a new str_aggr procedure called str_aggr_fast; in the process we discover that our array function speeds up access to the new field by over 100x.

Stay tuned, because in our next episode we'll explore this example and how to make it even FASTER using our array indexing procedures that I introduced in my last article here on Patreon!

Speeding Up String Aggregates with Arrays | Sean MacKenzie Data Engineering on Patreon Join Sean MacKenzie Data Engineering on Patreon to get access to this post and more benefits.

The first few months here in Victoria have been great! The business has definitely settled into a positive rhythm and I'm making lots of great connections here in Victoria. As an added bonus, I have taken to the biking lifestyle here and rode my bike to work for the past two months. From what I hear, it is possible to bike to work year-round. Let's see how that goes.

Over the past few weeks, we've been taking a dive into Data Macros in Microsoft Access, as well as how to run Python remotely in Snowflake. Check out the links in the comments below.

For those of you who are working through my online tutorials, there is now a downloads page on my website where you can get code snippets and examples.

http://mackenziemackenzie.com/downloads

Also, for those of you who are interested in regularly asking me questions via chat, you can do so on my Patreon (where there are also more code samples and articles):

https://patreon.com/mackenziedataengineering

Photo by Adam Ernster: https://www.pexels.com/photo/an-orca-whale-jumping-out-of-the-water-7767974/

The past few weeks have been a lot of fun, as we first built ourselves a simple neural network to do prediction, then we integrated that network into our MS Access database application to show how adding artificial intelligence to an application can really improve outcomes.

Over the years, people have asked how to build various weighting schemes to classify all kinds of things in their business world. Before A.I. tools were easily available to use, a lot of effort was needed to get any kind of automated classification. Nowadays, it is very easy to build our own artificial intelligence tools do things like classification, computer vision, natural language processing, and more.

The goal with these two videos is to bridge the gap for those building applications but have never built a neural network before.

1. The neural network: https://youtu.be/OJ_sKj7gqYA
2. Integration with sample application: https://youtu.be/4T6qOopbwcM

Photo by cottonbro: https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-with-bionic-arm-6153739/

Well, the office move is finally done and I'm getting used to the new environment here in Victoria, BC, Canada. There is definitely a cool vibe to this city and I think it is going to be a great spot for the business.

When you move a business, it is always a time to reflect on your successes and failures, and to see how you arrived at your current destination. I've never felt more optimistic for the future and all of the exciting adventures ahead.

I would like to give a big thank you to my clients and thousands of subscribers on YouTube, who have really made this journey awesome! I'll be covering many great topics this year. Thanks to everyone who helped and encouraged me along the way!

This picture is of a legislative building nearby. My new office address is at 1321 Blanshard St. and I'm certainly happy to continue my journey in this new location.

See my latest videos below in the comments, or just go to YouTube and search Sean MacKenzie Data Engineering!



Photo by Keelan Clemens: https://www.pexels.com/photo/facade-of-a-parliament-building-in-british-columbia-4157284/

Collections make up an important feature of Microsoft Access, because they allow you to make a list, or "collection" of items of various types with a key value for each one. This allows you to make a collection of strings, numbers, dates, and even objects. With your collection in memory, it is very simple, and much (much!) faster to retrieve these items on-the-fly in repetitive contexts that might be slow otherwise. Though arrays and collections have similar aspects, collections can be simpler and faster to implement in certain contexts.

You can check out this video here:
https://youtu.be/Z8MyC6TEEMg



Photo by Magda Ehlers: https://www.pexels.com/photo/green-purple-and-blue-peacock-feather-digital-wallpaper-1300345/

MacKenzie & MacKenzie Consulting Inc. updated their address.

In this episode, we continue our exploration of using Azure SQL as the backend database for our Microsoft Access application. We look at how much faster Azure SQL queries are on our data, particularly on queries and views with many dependencies on other views. We'll walk through a real-world example, migrating a nested query with several layers and dependencies on other queries. We then can see just how much faster the same queries work on Azure, with the benefit of not needing to change other application objects, who end up using the new queries as if they were native DAO objects. After this demo, you will want to begin migrating most queries to Azure that do not have some dependency on MS Access itself.

https://youtu.be/Xy8OTv8h8s4



Photo by Caio: https://www.pexels.com/photo/macro-photo-of-bumblebees-on-yellow-sunflower-772571/

In this episode we're going to take a high level look at six types of data engineers that are prevalent today. Each of these types has a slightly different set of skills and tools that they use to get the job done. These are six that I thought of for today's video. Is there a type that I missed? Put it in the comments below!

https://youtu.be/fmtUVNcPXJI



Photo by George Lebada: https://www.pexels.com/photo/red-chameleon-567540/

Making interactive maps can be a challenge, but there are some great libraries and other cool stuff that can make things much easier when you're programming with Python. Plotly is a really great library that allows you to do all kinds of maps (along with other graphs), and the open-street-maps feature is something not to be missed, as it allows you to zoom in and out at various heights above your target area on the earth, and gives you the basic set of cities, roads, national parks, and other features to make a map complete.

https://youtu.be/1-6ndLqsy6M



Photo by Flickr: https://www.pexels.com/photo/bengal-tiger-half-soak-body-on-water-during-daytime-145939/

Part of my current research includes analytics and deep learning techniques on wildland fires detected by satellites. Usually, my algorithms are intended to exclude man-made fires like industrial burn-off or other single point fires, so that I can see only wildfires - but, what if I chose instead to include those, to try and get a sense of the scale of what is happening in Ukraine? Would I learn anything from this exercise?

You tell me.

Fire in Ukraine - Following the Hotspots In this video, I show an analysis of the first three weeks of this tragic war through the plotting of hotspots from fire detecting instruments on NASA satell...

Join me as we take a look at how to set the startup form for your Microsoft Access app, so that it is the first thing users see when using your database application. We'll create a welcome form for our Candy database, and set it as the startup form, then remove things like the navigation pane from view as these are confusing for your end-users. In the end, we'll have a simple, easy to understand startup that has little extraneous controls for the user to accidentally click on. See the link in the comments below to view!

https://youtu.be/M6VxBY9mt_s

Photo of Fox Sitting on Ground: Photo by Alex Andrews: https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-fox-sitting-on-ground-2295744/