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Archive for July, 2008

OLAP Cube as a Mind Map

Posted in BI, Palo, excel, olap, tagged , , on July 30, 2008 | No Comments »

If you’ve worked with OLAP technologies for any length of time you’ll undoubtedly have been in the situation where you’ve had to explain the concept of an OLAP Cube to a “newbie”.  If the person in question has come across Excel pivot-tables, then you can probably short-circuit the conversation some what, explaining that a pivot [...]

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New universal SQLite JDBC library.

Posted in ETL, Java, SQLite, Talend, kettle, news, tagged , , on July 21, 2008 | No Comments »

Both Talend (Java) and Kettle distribute the Zentus.com pure-Java SQLite JDBC driver and for most purposes this run-anywhere version is fine. But, if you really need to take advantage of SQLite’s speed then connecting using the native JNI version is a must.  Doing this was easy enough, just change over to using a generic JDBC [...]

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Amazon S3; there’s a holdup on the buckets, Dear Liza…

Posted in AmazonAWS, EC2, S3, news on July 20, 2008 | 1 Comment »

Amazon’s S3 service has been down since 9.00am PDT but I only noticed an hour ago (2.30pm PDT) when a EC2 instance launch failed.
Am I worried? No, but as I become more and more dependent on such services, perhaps I will, but then again at least I’ll not be alone.  WordPress.com and countless others will [...]

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Groovy as Talend’s scripting language

Posted in ETL, Groovy, Java, Palo, SQLite, Talend, data, tagged , on July 20, 2008 | 5 Comments »

Although I had decided to use Talend (Java version) as my primary datasmithing tool I still had one major problem with it, its lack of a scripting tool.  Kettle (Pentaho PDI) has Javascript, Excel has VBA, Picalo has (well OK, is) Python and Talend in its Perl version has Perl.  I could have gone (and [...]

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Boy scratches Python…

Posted in Python, education, programming, tagged , on July 5, 2008 | 3 Comments »

I’ve written before about Scratch, a teaching platform developed by MIT to introduce kids to the art of programming. My son has been playing around with Scratch for over a year and although he still enjoys it, he’s showing signs of needing to move to the next level, a ‘real’ programming language.  I decided that [...]

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Regular Expressions as an end-user programming tool?

Posted in ETL, Talend, excel, kettle, tagged , on July 1, 2008 | 2 Comments »

“What? Have you completely lost the plot, Gleeson?”, I hear you scream.  Jamie Zawinski’s famous quote is intoned once more ..
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think
“I know, I’ll use regular expressions.”   Now they have two problems.
Of course the above quote could be (and probably has been) changed to…
Most business people, when confronted with [...]

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