Data Science and Databases

Sorting a table can make some queries faster—but the maintenance cost is untenable. Enter real database indexes and their most common implementation structure: the B-tree.

The Tanagra.js library is designed to be simple and lightweight, and it currently supports Node.js and ES6 classes. The main implementation supports JSON, and an experimental version supports Google Protocol Buffers.

Retailers often face supply and demand issues that cause them to miss out on potential sales or tie up a lot of money in overstocked products. In this article, Toptal Data Scientist Ahmed Khaled explains how retailers can boost revenues and cut costs with sales forecasts backed by artificial intelligence.

Working with non-numerical data can be challenging, even for seasoned data scientists. To make good use of such data, it needs to be transformed. But how? In this article, Toptal Data Scientist Yaroslav Kopotilov will introduce you to embeddings and demonstrate how they can be used to visualize complex data and make it usable.

TensorFlow is one of the leading tools for training deep learning models. Outside that space, it may seem intimidating and unnecessary, but it has many creative uses—like producing highly effective adversarial input for black-box AI systems.

Web scraping has been around since the early days of the World Wide Web, but scraping modern sites that heavily rely on new technologies is anything but straightforward. In this article, Toptal Software Developer Neal Barnett demonstrates how you can use Python and Selenium to scrape sites that employ a lot of JavaScript, iframes, and certificates.

Properly used, an SQL database index can be so effective that it might seem like magic. But the following series of exercises will show that underneath, the logic of most SQL indexes---and wielding them correctly---is quite straightforward.

ETL can consolidate data from various sources into an organized, reliable, and usable database. This allows businesses to employ previously unused or underused data to improve their performance. In this article, Toptal Data Modeling Developer Alexandre Wanderer demonstrates all stages of the ETL process in building a data warehouse.