Lazy Programmer


How to Install SQLite on Windows: A Visual Walkthrough

January 2, 2018

Quite a few students in my SQL course have asked me about how to install SQLite on Windows.

On the surface, it seems pretty simple: download some files, unzip them, put them into C:\sqlite, and add C:\sqlite to your PATH.

Most people who use Windows don’t have experience with setting environment variables or using the command line and so, I’ve decided to create this visual walkthrough to help.

Hope you find it useful!


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ALL Courses on Udemy $10 Again!

December 19, 2017

Big Surprise!

Earlier this week, I mentioned Udemy was doing a promotion on Tech courses only (if you were signed up for my newsletter you would have gotten the announcement). I’ve just heard news that they’ve opened up the $10 sale to ALL courses for the next 3 days only!

What this means: All my courses will continue to be on sale for $10 (just click the below links). But in addition, you can find other courses (including calculus and probability prerequisites) for $10 too!

With some time off, now is the PERFECT time to catch up on your deep learning / machine learning / data science skills. It’s almost 2018 and AI is rising faster than ever.

What better way than to grab all the deep learning courses you’ll ever want to take, for just $10?

Don’t forget, this is the LOWEST possible price on Udemy – get these courses NOW. We really don’t know when the next big sale is going to be.

If you want to type in the coupon code manually, it’s: WINTER2017 (remember, this is only for my courses). However, the coupon codes are included automatically in the links below.

This sale lasts until Dec. 21 (3 days). Don’t wait!























































And just as important, $10 coupons for some helpful prerequisite courses. You NEED to know this stuff before you study machine learning:

General (site-wide): http://bit.ly/2oCY14Z
Python http://bit.ly/2pbXxXz
Calc 1 http://bit.ly/2okPUib
Calc 2 http://bit.ly/2oXnhpX
Calc 3 http://bit.ly/2pVU0gQ
Linalg 1 http://bit.ly/2oBBir1
Linalg 2 http://bit.ly/2q5SGEE
Probability (option 1) http://bit.ly/2prFQ7o
Probability (option 2) http://bit.ly/2p8kcC0
Probability (option 3) http://bit.ly/2oXa2pb
Probability (option 4) http://bit.ly/2oXbZSK



iOS courses:

Android courses:

Ruby on Rails courses:

Python courses:

Big Data (Spark + Hadoop) courses:

Javascript, ReactJS, AngularJS courses:




Remember, these links will self-destruct on December 21 (3 days). Act NOW!

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SQL for Marketers: Dominate Data Analytics, Data Science, and Big Data

March 19, 2016

This is an annoucement along with free and discount coupons for my new course, SQL for Marketers: Dominate data analytics, data science, and big data


More and more companies these days are learning that they need to make DATA-DRIVEN decisions.


One of the basic languages of data analytics is SQL, which is used for many popular databases including MySQL, Postgres, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, and even big data solutions like Hive and Cassandra.

I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Most high-level marketers and product managers at big tech companies know how to manipulate data to gain important insights. No longer do you have to wait around the entire day for some software engineer to answer your questions – now you can find the answers directly, by yourself, using SQL.

Do you want to know how to optimize your sales funnel using SQL, look at the seasonal trends in your industry, and run a SQL query on Hadoop? Then join me now in my new class, SQL for marketers: Dominate data analytics, data science, and big data!

P.S. If you haven’t yet signed up for my newsletter at lazyprogrammer [dot] me, you’ll want to do so before Monday, especially if you want to learn more about deep learning, because I have a special announcement coming up that will NOT be announced on Udemy.

Here’s the coupons:

FREE coupon for early early birds:

EARLYBIRD (Sold out)

If the first coupon has run out, you may still use the 2nd coupon, which gives you 70% off:


#aws #big data #cassandra #Data Analytics #ec2 #hadoop #Hive #Microsoft SQL Server #MySQL #Oracle #Postgres #S3 #spark #sql #sqlite

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Why databases?

December 3, 2015

This article has been a long time coming. I wrote a shitty version years ago, but wanted to update it with new and current info, in a more organized and less shitty format.

In the current environment you are probably mostly concerned with “big data”, where both for-profit companies and the government download 1000s of TBs of data about you everyday. New and fancy technologies are popping up all the time, marketers and spammers love writing about them on LinkedIn, and gullible executives think they are must-haves.

The talking heads at your workplace might say, “we need to build a scalable product!”, or some such. So you end up creating a Hadoop cluster with a few tiny chunks of data and the overhead of your MapReduce actually takes longer than a for-loop by itself would have.

With all this fanciness you lose sight of the simple solutions – such as flat files, SQLite, and SQL. This article is a short survey of existing data solutions (both big data and small data) and at what scale they are appropriate for use.

Why do you even need data storage?

You are probably familiar with writing code in your first semester C++ class like this:

char* bob = "Bob";
char* jane = "Jane";
printf("Hi %s! Hi %s!\n", bob, jane);

In the real world, your code has to work on more cases than just Bob and Jane. Maybe you are writing an automated Twitter script that programmatically direct messages people when they start following you. If you use Twitter you’ve probably been annoyed at least a few times by this type of spam.

Working off this example, suppose you (the spammer) decides that you’re going to be somewhat nice and try not to spam people more than once.

So you would like to save the usernames you’ve direct messaged somewhere. Enter the flat file.

Flat files

flat file

Flat files are great for storing small data or where you don’t have to look stuff up. Just load the whole file into an array line by line, and do what you need to do.

In our case, we might load the data into a “set” datastructure so that when we want to look up a username, it’s an O(1) search.

Flat files are great for server configurations. As are JSON.

For scripts that automate something in your personal life, flat files are usually adequate.

A problem arises when you want to load your entire dataset into memory (like a set or a hash), and it doesn’t fit. Remember, your hard drive is on the order of 1TB large. Your RAM is on the order of 8GB, much of which is used by the OS (or most if you’re using Mac).

Why databases?


Enter the database. Databases are stored on disk. i.e. They are just a file or set of files.

The magic happens when you want to find something. Usually you’d have to look through the entire database if you didn’t have some “index” (think like the index at the back of a large textbook) to tell you where everything was.

Databases index a whole bunch of metadata so that looking for stuff is really fast. You’ll often see the term “balanced tree” in reference to database indexes. These are better than regular binary trees where searching is worst case O(N).

Relational Databases

relational database

Also called “RDBMS”, short for “relational database management system” (they loved verbose terminology in the 80s and 90s), relational databases usually store things in tables.

Examples: MySQL, PostgreSQL.

For example, you might have one table that stores every user’s ID, name, email, and password.

But you might have another table that stores friendships, so that would store the first user’s ID, and the second user’s ID.

Quite appropriately, relational databases keep track of “relationships”, so that, suppose you deleted the user with ID = 3. That would delete all the rows from the friendships table that contain user ID = 3 also, so that in the application, there won’t be any errors when it’s looking for the friends of user ID = 5, who is friends with user ID = 3, when the actual user with ID = 3 has already been deleted.

Relational small data

iphone sqlite

There is a special relational database called SQLite3. It works on “small data”, so it’s very appropriate for applications on your phone, for instance. iPhone apps on iOS use SQLite3. Many apps on your computer use SQLite3 without you even knowing it.

SQLite3 is stored locally on your machine, whereas bigger relational databases like Postgres can be stored either on your machine or on another machine over the Internet.

Relational big data

big data graph

Relational databases sort of hit a wall when data got too big to store in one database. Advertising companies can collect 1TB of data per day. In effect, you’d fill up an entire database in that one day. What do you do the next day? And the next?

Big data – Hadoop


Hadoop is the open source version of Google’s “Google File System” (GFS) and MapReduce framework.

Suppose for instance that your hard drives have a 1% chance of failing on any given day, and that your data is stored on 1000 hard drives. That means every day, 10 hard drives will fail. How do you make sure you don’t lose this data? You replicate it.

Some very smart people have determined how many copies of your data must be stored so that, even though hard drives are basically guaranteed to fail, you will never lose your data.

In addition to data replication, the data is also spread across multiple “chunks”. So multiple chunks (really files) make up one original data file.

MapReduce is a framework (a.k.a. a fancy way of writing a for loop), that distributes copies of the same program onto multiple machines, where each machine works on different chunks than the other machines.

Ideally, if you use N machines your running time would be reduced by 1/N, but there is lots of overhead that comes with coordinating the work that is done by each machine and merging it all together at the end.



Spark is seen as the “successor” to Hadoop MapReduce. I find that in general Spark jobs are a little easier to write. Note that it’s a framework, NOT a database, but I list it here to ease the confusion.

We will return to Hadoop later, but first, more “big data” generation technologies.



One database that became popular when startups started acquiring lots of data is MongoDB. MongoDB, unlike the other databases we’ve talked about, is not relational. In MongoDB, we don’t have “tables”, we have “collections”. In MongoDB, we don’t have “rows”, we have “documents”.

Documents are JSON documents. The nice thing about MongoDB is that you use Javascript to interact with it.

Startups started using the MEAN stack, which is made up of: MongoDB, ExpressJS, AngularJS, and NodeJS, for an all-Javascript environment.

MongoDB and similar databases don’t guarantee “consistency”. If you’re a bank, and I take out $50 so that my total balance is now $5, I don’t want someone else trying to take out $50 at the same time and putting my balance in the negative.

With MongoDB, I could take out $50, but some other user might still read that same document and see that my account still has $55, and hence try to take out another $50, even though this user read the database after I did my withdrawal.

In many applications this doesn’t matter and it’s good for performance.

MongoDB also allows “replication” and “sharding”.

“Replication” means you can have “masters” and “slaves” which store the same data. Different instances of the application can read from different slaves to decrease the load on any one machine running MongoDB.

“Sharding” means splitting up the data so that certain IDs go on one machine, while other IDs go to another. This also decreases the load.

Often times, people make the mistake of using MongoDB, because it’s new and cool, when their data is actually relational. What happens? They often end up having to program those relationships themselves in the application, which is more tedious and cumbersome than you might imagine.



Some people say “Redis is like a big key-value store”. At a very high level this is indeed what Redis does, and it does so very fast. If you know you don’t have “relationships” in your data, and you know you won’t need to store, query, and update JSON-like structures, then Redis is a great choice. You can also use sharding and replication with Redis, so it can store more stuff than would fit on just one hard drive.

Back to Hadoop…

Hadoop is not a database

Hadoop is not a database. The “Hadoop File System” (or HDFS) is the open source analogue of Google’s GFS. A database exists “on top of” a file system. For example, Postgres can exist on top of your “FAT32” file system. It’s a program that coordinates the storage and retrieval of data.

There are indeed databases that can work on top of HDFS/GFS.

Some examples are: Google’s BigTable and Hadoop’s HBase.

They allow you to do “queries”, like you do with SQL, as opposed to MapReduce’s plain for-loop-like structure.

Which do you choose?

Lessons I think we can learn from other business’ experiences:

1) Don’t use something just because it’s cool and new.
2) Don’t use big data tech when you don’t have big data.
3) Even if you think you have big data, check to see if it’s really that big.
4) Be honest with yourself about how long it’ll take to get big and whether it’s worth investing in a big data solution now.
5) Don’t forget about SQL.

Did this answer all the questions you ever had about databases? Do you have any stories to share about how you once chose a database you thought would be awesome and it not only let you down but caused you to divert your attention for weeks or months just trying to fix its issues? Do you like using stuff even if it’s still at version 0.1? Let me know in the comments!

Update: I don’t mean to suggest that MySQL and Postgres do not support master-slave configurations; they do. And despite MySQL not being what is traditionally thought of as a big data solution, Facebook famously altered MySQL to work on their backend (and they have more data than most companies doing big data).

#big data #big-oh #bigtable #cassandra #Databases #hbase #mapreduce #mongodb #MySQL #nosql #postgresql #redis #spark #sql #sqlite

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How to run distributed machine learning jobs using Apache Spark and EC2 (and Python)

April 5, 2015

This is the age of big data.

Sometimes sci-kit learn doesn’t cut it.

In order to make your operations and data-driven decisions scalable – you need to distribute the processing of your data.

Two popular libraries that do such distributed machine learning are Mahout (which uses MapReduce) and MLlib (which uses Spark, which is sometimes considered as a successor to MapReduce).

What I want to do with this tutorial is to show you how easy it is to do distributed machine learning using Spark and EC2.

When I started a recent project of mine, I was distraught at how complicated a Mahout setup could be.

I am not an ops person. I hate installing and configuring things. For something like running distributed k-means clustering, 90% of the work could go into just setting up a Hadoop cluster, installing all the libraries your code needs to run, making sure they are the right versions, etc…

The Hadoop ecosystem is very sensitive to these things, and sometimes MapReduce jobs can be very hard to debug.

With Spark, everything is super easy. Installing Spark and Hadoop is tedious but do-able. Spinning up a cluster is very easy. Running a job is very easy. We will use Python, but you can also use Scala or Java.

Outline of this tutorial:

  1. Install Spark on a driver machine.
  2. Create a cluster.
  3. Run a job.


1. Install Spark

I used an Ubuntu instance on EC2. I’m assuming you already know how to set up a security group, get your PEM, and SSH into the machine.


Once you’ve spun up your AMI, we can begin installing all the stuff we’ll need.

To make this even easier you can probably do this on your local machine, but if for some reason you’re using Windows or you don’t want to mess up your local machine, then you’ll want to do this.

First, set your AWS ID and secret environment variables.


Now install Java:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install default-jdk maven
export MAVEN_OPTS=”-Xmx2g -XX:MaxPermSize=512M -XX:ReservedCodeCacheSize=512m”

For the last line, we will need this RAM available to build Spark, if I remember correctly.

Now download and build Spark:

wget http://mirror.cc.columbia.edu/pub/software/apache/spark/spark-1.3.0/spark-1.3.0.tgz
tar -xf spark-1.3.0.tgz
cd spark-1.3.0
mvn -DskipTests clean package

By the time you read this a new version of Spark may be available. You should check.


2. Create a Cluster

Assuming you are in the Spark folder now, it is very easy to create a cluster to run your jobs:

./ec2/spark-ec2 -k “Your Key Pair Name” -i /path/to/key.pem -s <number of slaves> launch <cluster name> —copy-aws-credentials -z us-east-1b

I set my zone as “us-east-1b” but you can set it to a zone of your choice.

When you’re finished, don’t forget to tear down your cluster! On-demand machines are expensive.

./spark-ec2 destroy <cluster name>

For some reason, numpy isn’t installed when you create a cluster, and the default Python distribution on the m1.large machines is 2.6, while Spark installs its own 2.7. So, even if you easy_install numpy on each of the machines in the cluster, it won’t work for Spark.

You can instead copy the library over to each cluster machine from your driver machine:

scp -i /path/to/key.pem /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/numpy* [email protected]<cluster-machine>:/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/
scp -r -i /path/to/key.pem /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/numpy [email protected]<cluster-machine>:/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/

You can easily write a script to automatically copy all this stuff over (get the machine URLs from the EC2 console).


3. Run a Job

Spark gives you a Python shell.

First, go to your EC2 console and find the URL for your cluster master. SSH into that machine (username is root).

cd spark
MASTER=spark://<cluster-master-ip>:7077 ./pyspark

Import libraries:

from pyspark.mllib.clustering import KMeans
from numpy import array

Load your data:

data = sc.textFile(“s3://<my-bucket>/<path>/*.csv”)

Note 1: You can use a wildcard to grab multiple files into one variable – called an RDD – resilient distributed dataset.

Note 2: Spark gives you a variable called ‘sc’, which is an object of type SparkContext. It specifies the master node, among other things.

Maybe filter out some bad lines:

data = data.filter(lambda line: ‘ERROR’ not in line)

Turn each row into an array / vector observation:

data = data.map(lambda line: array([float(x) for x in line.split()]))

Train your model:

clusters = KMeans.train(parsedData, 2, maxIterations=20,
runs=1, initializationMode=”k-means||”)

Save some output:


You can also run a standalone Python script using spark-submit instead of the shell.

./bin/spark-submit —master spark://<master-ip>:7077 myscript.py

Remember you’ll have to instantiate your own SparkContext in this case.


Future Improvements

The goal of this tutorial is to make things easy.

There are many areas for improvement – for instance – on-demand machines on Amazon are the most expensive.

Spark still spins up “m1.large” instances, even though EC2′s current documentation recommends using the better, faster, AND cheaper “m3.large” instance instead.

At the same time, that custom configuration could mean we can’t use the spark-ec2 script to spin up the cluster automatically. There might be an option there to choose. I didn’t really look.

One major reason I wrote this tutorial is because all the information in it is out there in some form, but it is disparate and some of it can be hard to find without knowing what to search for.

So that’s it. The easiest possible way to run distributed machine learning.

How do you do distributed machine learning?

#apache #aws #big data #data science #ec2 #emr #machine learning #python #spark

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Automation: For loops in bash (for loops on the command line)

September 23, 2013

If you have to run a script that processes data for a particular file for a particular day, i.e. your file is on hadoop with the date in the path, like this:


And you have multiple days to process, don’t run them manually. Use a for loop instead:

for day in {19..22}
  ./my_script.sh 2013/09/$day
#command line

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Pig Error -> ERROR 1070: Could not resolve count using imports

April 11, 2013


ERROR 1070: Could not resolve sum using imports

COUNT() and SUM() are case sensitive, you need to capitalize them.

#hadoop #pig

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How to kill a hadoop job

April 10, 2013

Hadoop job -list

List running hadoop jobs and their job ids.

Hadoop job –kill <JobID>


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