Renaming redundant IDs sequentially - visual-studio-2010

Not sure if there's an answer for this, but I'm in a situation where I have a set of idential elements, each having a sequential ID, like id="thiselement1", id="thiselement2", id="thiselement3" etc...
Is there a fast way for me to copy and paste one element 100 times and then give each a sequential identifier as shown above? Trying to save manually typing numbers over and over again.

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Looking for a more efficient way to pull data from multiple datasets in SAS

I'm trying to find a more efficient and speedier way (if possible) to pull subsets of observations that meet certain criteria from multiple hospital claims datasets in SAS. A simplified but common type of data pull would look like this:
data out.qualifying_patients;
set in.state1_2017
in.state1_2018
in.state1_2019
in.state1_2020
in.state2_2017
in.state2_2018
in.state2_2019
in.state2_2020;
array prcode{*} I10_PR1-I10_PR25;
do i=1 to 25;
if prcode{i} in ("0DTJ0ZZ","0DTJ4ZZ") then cohort=1;
end;
if cohort=1 then output;
run;
Now imagine that instead of 2 states and 4 years we have 18 states and 9 years -- each about 1GB in size. The code above works fine but it takes FOREVER to run on our non-optimized server setup. So I'm looking for alternate methods to perform the same task but hopefully at a faster clip.
I've tried including (KEEP=) or (DROP=) statements for each dataset included the SET statement to limit the variables being scanned, but this really didn't have much of an impact on speed -- and, for non-coding-related reasons, we pretty much need to pull all the variables.
I've also experimented a bit with hash tables but it's too much to store in memory so that didn't seem to solve the issue. This also isn't a MERGE issue which seems to be what hash tables excel at.
Any thoughts on other approaches that might help? Every data pull we do contains customized criteria for a given project, but we do these pulls a lot and it seems really inefficient to constantly be processing thru the same datasets over and over but not benefitting from that. Thanks for any help!
I happend to have a 1GB dataset on my compute, I tried several times, it takes SAS no more than 25 seconds to set the dataset 8 times. I think the set statement is too simple and basic to improve its efficient.
I think the issue may located at the do loop. Your program runs do loop 25 times for each record, may assigns to cohort more than once, which is not necessary. You can change it like:
do i=1 to 25 until(cohort=1);
if prcode{i} in ("0DTJ0ZZ","0DTJ4ZZ") then cohort=1;
end;
This can save a lot of do loops.
First, parallelization will help immensely here. Instead of running 1 job, 1 dataset after the next; run one job per state, or one job per year, or whatever makes sense for your dataset size and CPU count. (You don't want more than 1 job per CPU.). If your server has 32 cores, then you can easily run all the jobs you need here - 1 per state, say - and then after that's done, combine the results together.
Look up SAS MP Connect for one way to do multiprocessing, which basically uses rsubmits to submit code to your own machine. You can also do this by using xcmd to literally launch SAS sessions - add a parameter to the SAS program of state, then run 18 of them, have them output their results to a known location with state name or number, and then have your program collect them.
Second, you can optimize the DO loop more - in addition to the suggestions above, you may be able to optimize using pointers. SAS stores character array variables in memory in adjacent spots (assuming they all come from the same place) - see From Obscurity to Utility:
ADDR, PEEK, POKE as DATA Step Programming Tools from Paul Dorfman for more details here. On page 10, he shows the method I describe here; you PEEKC to get the concatenated values and then use INDEXW to find the thing you want.
data want;
set have;
array prcode{*} $8 I10_PR1-I10_PR25;
found = (^^ indexw (peekc (addr(prcode[1]), 200 ), '0DTJ0ZZ')) or
(^^ indexw (peekc (addr(prcode[1]), 200 ), '0DTJ4ZZ'))
;
run;
Something like that should work. It avoids the loop.
You also could, if you want to keep the loop, exit the loop once you run into an empty procedure code. Usually these things don't go all 25, at least in my experience - they're left-filled, so I10_PR1 is always filled, and then some of them - say, 5 or 10 of them - are filled, then I10_PR11 and on are empty; and if you hit an empty one, you're all done for that round. So not just leaving when you hit what you are looking for, but also leaving when you hit an empty, saves you a lot of processing time.
You probably should consider a hardware upgrade or find someone who can tune your server. This paper suggests tips to improve the processing of large datasets.
Your code is pretty straightforward. The only suggestion is to kill the loop as soon as the criteria is met to avoid wasting unnecessary resources.
do i=1 to 25;
if prcode{i} in ("0DTJ0ZZ","0DTJ4ZZ") then do;
output; * cohort criteria met so output the row;
leave; * exit the loop immediately;
end;
end;

How can I cut several sound files using a script?

I am new to Praat and wondering, if someone can help me to find out, how I can cut all my sound files with a script or anything.
I have like 100 sound files I need for my research. They all have a different length, some are 1 min and others are 3 min long.
I would like to have only the first 22 sec from each sound file.
Thanks in advance!
Kind regards
Olga
The first step is to construct a script that extracts the initial 22 seconds of some specific sound object that is already open. In general, the easiest way to at least start a script is to do a thing manually once, and after you've done that, in a Praat script window, copy the command history (with ctrl-h) to see what the underlying commands are. The manual approach is to look for "Extract part" under "Convert", which corresponds to the command
Extract part: 0, 22, "rectangular", 1, "no"
There is also a command to save a file as a wav file, so you would add that to the core of the script.
Then you need to add a loop that does this a number of times, to different files. You will (probably) need a file with wav file names, and some system for naming the output files, for example if you have "input1.wav", you might want to call the cut-down version "output1.wav". This implies some computation of the output file name based on the input file name, so you need to get familiar with how string manipulation works in Praat.
If you have that much sorted out, then the basic logic is
get next input file name file
compute output name
open the input file
extract from that file
save the extracted file
remove the extract
remove the original
loop until no more files
I would plan on spending a lot of time trying to understand simple things like string variables, or object selection. I left out explicitly selecting objects since it is not necessarily required, but every command works on "the selected object" and it's easy to lose track of what is selected.
Another common approach is to beg a colleague to write it for you.

Incrementally reading logs

Looked around with numerous search strings but can't find anything quite like this:
I'm writing a custom log parser (ala analog or webalizer except not for webserver) and I want to be able to skip the hard work for the lines that have already been parsed. I have thought about using a history file like webalizer but have no idea how it actually works internally and my C is pretty poor.
I've considered hashing each line and writing the hashes out, then parsing the history file for their presence but I think this will perform poorly.
The only other method I can think of is storing the line number of the last parse and skipping until that number is reached the next time round. What happens when the log is rotated I am not sure.
Any other ideas would be appreciated. I will be writing the parser in ruby but tips in a similar language will help as well.
The solutions I can think of right now are bound to be brittle.
Even if you store the line number and later realize it would be past the length of the current file, what happens if old lines have been trimmed? You would start reading (well) after the last position.
If, on the other hand, you are sure your log files won't be tampered with and they will only be rotated, I only see two ways of doing what you want, and I'm not sure the second is applicable to you.
Anyway, here goes.
First solution
You store the last line you parsed along with a timestamp. At the next run, you consider all the rotated log files sorting them by their last modified date, figure out which one you read last time, and start reading from there.
I didn't think this through, there might be funny corner cases you will need to handle.
Second solution
You create a background script that continuously watches the log file. A quick search on Google turned out this gem, but I'm not sure if that's even an option for you. Even then, you might want to integrate this solution with the previous one just in case your daemon will get interrupted (because that's clearly bound to happen at some point).
As you read the file and parse the lines keep track of the byte count. Save that. On next read, try to seek to that byte offset in the file. If the file is smaller than the byte count, it's a new file so start at the beginning.

How to create hadoop input splits that span two files?

My data input files are all of the same length, but, the records therein may span two files (starting at the end of the first file and finishing at the beginning of the second).
Is it possible to create an inputsplit that would allow me to span those two files?
Is it better to create an entirely new set of files so that records do not span more than one file?
I would definitely ensure your records do not span more than one file: you could, theoretically, write your own input format that takes care of this, but the overhead is likely to be considerable as you are - in having to ensure that you know which files belong together - taking over part of the responsiblity which the jobtracker and name node fulfill for you.
You should be free to tell the jobtracker/name node where the inputs are, and for the processing to be truly parallel, you don't want to then have to take back some of that control: IMHO it would partially defeat the object of using haoop in the first place.

Generate File Names Automatically without collision

I'm writing a "file sharing hosting" and I want to rename all the files when uploading to a unique name and somehow keep track of the names on the database. Since I don't want two or more files having same name (which is surely impossible), I'm looking for an algorithm which based on key or something generates random names for me.
Moreover, I don't want to generate a name and search the database to see if the file already exists. I want to make sure 100% or 99% that the generated filename has never been created earlier by my application.
Any idea how I can write such application?
You could produce a hash based on the file contents itself. There are two good reasons to do this:
Allows you to never store the same file twice - for example, if you have two copies of a music file which are identical in content you could check to see if you have already stored that file, and just store it once.
You separate meta-data (file name is just meta data) from the blob. So you would have a storage system which is indexed by the hash of the file contents, and you then associate the file meta-data with that hash lookup code.
The risk of finding two files that compute the same hash that aren't indeed the same contents, depending on the size of the hash would be low, and you can effectively mitigate that by perhaps hashing the file in chunks (which could then lead to some interesting storage optimisation scenarios :P).
GUIDs are one way. You're basically guaranteed to not get any repeats (if you have a proper random generator).
You could also append with the time since epoch.
The best solution have already been mentioned. I just want to add some thoughts.
The simplest solution is to have a counter and increment on every new file. This works quite well as long as only one thread creates new files. If multiple threads, processes or even systems add new files, things get a bit more complicated. You must coordinate the creation of new ids with locking or any similar synchronisation method. You could also assign id ranges to every proceses to reduce the synchronisation work, or extend the file id by a unique process id.
A better solution might be to use GUIDs in this scenario and do not have to care about synchronisation between processes.
Finally, you can at some random data to every identifier to make them harder to guess if this is a requirement.
Also coommon is storing files in a directory structure where the location of a file depends on its name. File abcdef1234.xyz might be stored as /ab/cd/ef/1234.xyz. This avoids directories with a huge number of files. I am not really aware why this is done - may be file system limitations, performance issues - but it is quite common. I do not know if similar things are common if the files are stored directly in the database.
The best way is to simply use a counter. The first file is 1, the next is 2, another is 3, and so on...
But, it seems you want random. To quickly do this, you could make sure that your random number is greater than the last file created. You can cache the last file and then just offset your random number with its last name.
file = last_file + random(1 through 10)

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