Graham

Author's details

Date registered: August 31, 2011

Latest posts

  1. GeoFlow brings 3D geographical visualisation to Excel 2013 — April 23, 2013
  2. Installing SQL Server Data Tools – Business Intelligence for Visual Studio 2012 — March 13, 2013
  3. Is Hadoop the right tool for the job? — March 9, 2013
  4. Hands-on with Hadoop and HDInsight — March 7, 2013
  5. Notes from building a Custom ForEach Enumerator in SSIS — March 5, 2013

Most commented posts

  1. Workaround for the Battlefield 3 “no weapon” glitch — 55 comments
  2. Ghost Recon Future Soldier audio bug leaves players speechless — 11 comments
  3. How To Create Multi-Column Lists in SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) — 7 comments
  4. How to open your NAT settings for Xbox LIVE on O2 Wireless Box II — 5 comments
  5. Installing SQL Server Data Tools – Business Intelligence for Visual Studio 2012 — 4 comments

Author's posts listings

Apr 23 2013

GeoFlow brings 3D geographical visualisation to Excel 2013

The map visualisation showing globe navigation from Indian Jones

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), …

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Mar 13 2013

Installing SQL Server Data Tools – Business Intelligence for Visual Studio 2012

Screenshot showing adding a new Business Intelligence project in Visual Studio 2012

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 …

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Mar 09 2013

Is Hadoop the right tool for the job?

Graph comparing Spark vs Hadoop

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 …

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Mar 07 2013

Hands-on with Hadoop and HDInsight

Start page for creating a new HDInsight cluster

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 …

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Mar 05 2013

Notes from building a Custom ForEach Enumerator in SSIS

Example of a custom UI for an SSIS ForEach File Enumerator

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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