Feed on
Posts
Comments

Archive for September, 2007

Excel 2007 bug and the chance of being hit by a meteorite.

Posted in ETL, Ireland, excel, tagged , , , , , , on September 27, 2007 | No Comments »

Joel On Software gives a very good technical explanation of the Excel 2007 53,535 as 100,000 bug. And, as he points out, it only affects 12 out of a potential 9.214*10^18 floating point numbers, so is he worried?
…no, the chance that you would see this in real life calculations is microscopic. Better worry about [...]

Read Full Post »

MS to fix “65,535 as 100,000 bug” - ASAP

Posted in ETL, excel, tagged , , , on September 26, 2007 | No Comments »

Microsoft have quickly responded to the 65,535 as 100,000 Excel 2007 bug. Their explanation is that it’s a “display only problem” with certain calculations that yield 65535 and 65536 results; the actual “in-memory” value continues to hold the correct figure. As such, the error will not propagate to other cells i.e a1=77.1*850 [...]

Read Full Post »

Zimki - R.I.P.

Posted in GAFyD, JavaScript, tagged on September 25, 2007 | 1 Comment »

Zimki, the London based innovative JavaScript application hosting service is to close down this Christmas Eve. Not surprising really, the announcement last June to stop the proposed open sourcing of the platform and the parent company’s (Canon Europe) decision to order a review on the future direction of Zimki looked ominous at the time. [...]

Read Full Post »

You say 100,000 I say 65,535! Let’s call the whole thing off!

Posted in ETL, excel, news, tagged , , on September 25, 2007 | 2 Comments »

According to this Google groups thread, Excel 2007 has a serious bug. Certain calculations (e.g. =850*77.1) that should yield 65535 are being rendered by Excel 2007 as 100,000. Brilliant, bloody brilliant!
I’ve been a fan of 2007 especially the new table handling features and the ability to handle more than 65536 rows, these are [...]

Read Full Post »

Nirvanix targets Amazon S3 shortcomings

Posted in EC2, S3, data, news, tagged , on September 18, 2007 | No Comments »

Let there be no doubt about it, Amazon’s S3 online storage system is wonderful; it’s secure (both from an technology point of view and from Amazon’s status as one of the web’s most trusted sites i.e. one you wouldn’t worry about giving your credit card to), it’s cheap, it’s pay-as-you-go and it has first mover [...]

Read Full Post »

BI governance - push or pull, carrot or stick?

Posted in BI on September 17, 2007 | No Comments »

Timo Elliott discusses the perennial problem surrounding BI, the great centralised-data-warehouse versus departmental-data-marts debate; who owns what and who decides what to build, corporate IT or individual business units? He suggests a good compromise, a pull model, with individual business units owning, commissioning and paying for BI projects but with a centralised BI competency [...]

Read Full Post »

CouchDB - document centric ODS

Posted in BI, ETL, S3, SQLite, data, tagged , , on September 14, 2007 | 3 Comments »

While the potential of column-oriented DBMSs within BI projects is obvious given the popularity of MOLAP ( a form of column-oriented data store) the potential for the other new kid on the block, the document-oriented database, is less so. One such DBMS,CouchDb, is the latest wunderkid to bubble to the surface, helped by the [...]

Read Full Post »

Google Reader - KM killer app

Posted in GoogleApps, KM, education, tagged , on September 10, 2007 | 1 Comment »

I’ve mentioned before my delight at the new search facility within Google Reader, while regretting that del.icio.us didn’t offer the same facility. Now I find, through Google Reader Search, I already have something more useful, a personalised search engine that searches not just my blog subscriptions’ contents but my also my del.icio.us bookmarks’ meta [...]

Read Full Post »

Proto - desktop BI tool.

Posted in ETL, Proto, RSSBus, VBA, news, xLite on September 9, 2007 | 1 Comment »

I see that Proto have repositioned their excellent VBA scripted mash-up product as a “desktop business intelligence system”. This is to be welcomed as the first time I used it I described it as a “mash-up tool for adults” and although it has the ability to play hard ball with the other Web2.0 mash-up [...]

Read Full Post »

SQLite as a Column Oriented Database

Posted in BI, ETL, Palo, SQLite, data on September 7, 2007 | 1 Comment »

According to Michael Stonebraker , one of the pioneers of relational database technology, the future of  DBMSs lies with column-oriented databases such as C-Store or Google’s BigTable. In the BI sphere, MOLAP column-oriented data-stores are increasingly the norm. But the fact table implementations of most ROLAP star-schemas tend to favour a row-oriented “wide [...]

Read Full Post »

Google Spreadsheets - ETL tool

Posted in BI, ETL, GoogleApps, RSSBus, Ruby, SQLite, Talend, VBA, Web2.0, excel, kettle, tagged on September 6, 2007 | 1 Comment »

Although I’m a total Excel fanboy, I most admit I rarely use it any longer for personal stuff such as home budgets, tax calculations, what-ifs, to-do lists etc.; I now tend to use Google Spreadsheets. Likewise, personal notes, drafts and useful bits of code are stored using Google Docs rather than MS Word. [...]

Read Full Post »

In Memory OLAP

Posted in BI, ETL, Palo, SQLite, VBA, data, excel, olap, xLite on September 5, 2007 | 4 Comments »

The consolidation within the BI market continues, this time with the purchase of Applix by Cognos. As Timo Elliott points out, the interesting bit is the Applix TM1 memory-centric OLAP product. For the vast majority of OLAP users (i.e. the millions of Excel Pivot table jockeys) in-memory OLAP is nothing new, but traditionally [...]

Read Full Post »

Moved to blog.gobansaor.com

Posted in BI, ETL, Web2.0, data, excel, tagged , on September 3, 2007 | 1 Comment »

Over the weekend I transferred this blog over to my own sub-domain, http://blog.gobansaor.com. The blog continues to be hosted by WordPress.com and the old http://gobansaor.wordpress.com addresses will continue to work. Most RSS readers will also gracefully (I hope) handle the transfer of the RSS feed, but if not, you may wish to [...]

Read Full Post »

Rain Has Stopped

Posted in Ireland on September 1, 2007 | No Comments »

Summer eventually arrived, the rain has stopped; last two weeks of August have being warm and dry if not always sunny. Managed to give the kids at least some more time at the beach before they had to go back to school. As usual for our short breaks we headed to Waterford’s “Copper [...]

Read Full Post »