Baseball Analytics: SQL Server 2016 In-Database R, presented by Bradley Ball

With baseball season nearly upon us here in Pensacola and for the Blue Wahoos, this seemed like an appropriate and exciting topic for our group!

This session is meant to dive into the world of R using awesome data to make learning memorable. We will discuss a brief overview of the syntax, how to write an In-Database R query, and then dive into a data set using the Lahman database & data from Retrosheets.org to examine baseball games from 1990 – 2016 to answer the following questions: If I want to see my team win a game should I go to a double header? What is the best day of the week to see my team play? What is the best day if they are above .500 or below? What if they have home vs. away games? Then we will display the results in Power BI or and Excel Dashboard. Come for the Science, stay for the data!

Bradley Ball is currently a Premier Sr. Consultant for Microsoft on the PSfD Team, Premier Support for Developers. He is a current Microsoft MVP Reconnect member and former MVP. Bradley spent 8 years working as a Defense contractor for clients such as the U.S. Army and The Executive Office of the President of the United States, and is the former Data Platform Practice Manager for Pragmatic Works Consulting. He has presented at many SQL Saturdays, for PASS SSUG’s across the US from California to Florida to New Hampshire, SQL Rally, DevConnections, SQLBits 2015, TechReady 24, SQL Live[masked], & the PASS Summit[masked]. He wrote Chapter 14 Page & Row Compression for PRO SQL Server 2012 Best Practices and he can be found blogging on the Deeper Insights blog on MSDN https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/deeperinsights/ or on http://www.sqlballs.com about anything else that interests him.

Be sure to RSVP, and let your colleagues know about it!

We'll also be discussing the upcoming SQLSaturday event being held at Pensacola State College on June 3rd. See you April 27th!

Cheers,
Karla and Rodney