Apr 23 2013
The other week, Microsoft announced GeoFlow for Excel 2013 at the SQL PASS Business Analytics conference in Chicago. While it’s not exactly new, it is at least, a pretty impressive looking addition to the data visualisation toolkit. However, while GeoFlow finally brings 3D geographical visualisation to Microsoft’s self-service BI utility belt (in your face, Batman), …
Mar 13 2013
As if renaming the accurately titled Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) to the rather ambiguous SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) wasn’t bad enough, in December, Microsoft’s latest SSDT release only brought half the expected capabilities to Visual Studio 2012. Yep, the December 2012 SSDT download was missing a key component: the project and item templates …
Mar 09 2013
I recently posted some thoughts regarding Microsoft’s Windows-compatible Hadoop implementation, HDInsight. I was investigating it for a project that I figured would benefit from a distributed processing approach, although ultimately decided to pursue other alternatives. It led our team to make some quite interesting discoveries about Hadoop, and some scenarios of when current distributed processing …
Mar 07 2013
Hadoop. Everyone and their dog is talking about it. That and “Big Data”. There was an excellent post on Brent Ozar’s DBA Reactions Tumblr blog recently that encapsulated it perfectly, titled “When the executives ask if we’re Hadooping”. It’s a valid point though, Hadoop is mentioned in just about every article these days, along with the …
Mar 05 2013
I recently posted about a quandary in which I found myself that led to me building my own extended ForEach File Enumerator in SSIS. All things considered, it was a reasonably straightforward experience, with most of my issues stemming from a relative unfamiliarity with Windows Forms development (I was always an ASP.NET man). The whole …
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