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Archive for the ‘data’ Category

Clouds no longer pass by Windows.

Posted in AmazonAWS, EC2, ETL, RSSBus, Web2.0, data, news, tagged , , , on October 1, 2008 | 4 Comments »

Amazon today announced that later this year, Windows Server woud be available on EC2. No details on cost and licensing etc. but this is major.  Up until now, that portion of the business world who are pure MS shops (a very large percentage especially amongst SMEs) were excluded from taking advantage of Amazon’s amazing (and [...]

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Twitter - the penny drops!

Posted in BI, Web2.0, data, tagged , , , , , on September 12, 2008 | 4 Comments »

I’m a fan of most things Web2.0, not just for personal use but as business tools.  Over the last four years or so I’ve enthusiastically embraced Wikis, IM (Google Talk), RSS Readers et al. I could see the benefit and attraction of social network sites such as Facebook even if I’ve not partaken as such. [...]

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Cloudy skies, cloudy apps…

Posted in BI, ETL, Ireland, Palo, Web2.0, cloud, data, excel, news, olap, tagged , , , on August 28, 2008 | 4 Comments »

Just back from a break in Clifden, Connemara, summer is nearly over, the kids return to school today, back to work.
Counties Galway and Mayo were like the rest of the country last week, a tad wet, but unlike the developed east of the island, flooding was not a problem; a problematic drainage area is called [...]

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Talend + SQLite + Groovy the new Oracle …

Posted in BI, EC2, ETL, Groovy, Palo, SQLite, Talend, data, excel, olap, tagged , on August 2, 2008 | 5 Comments »

… well, at least for me.  Let me explain.
For most of my datasmithing career, I’ve had access to corporate Oracle databases and now with the availability of  Oracle10g  Express I can even run my own Oracle instances at home or on EC2.  The combination of a powerful SQL engine, expressive scripting language (PL/SQL) ,OS independence, [...]

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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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SQLite - the ultimate data-smithing tool!

Posted in AmazonAWS, ETL, SQLite, Talend, data, excel, kettle, tagged , on April 26, 2008 | 1 Comment »

Image via Wikipedia
Although my data-smithing tool box is full to the brim with powerful tools such as Talend, Kettle PDI, Picalo and Excel, all backed by the cloud infrastructure of Amazon’s S3, SImpleDB and EC2, there’s one simple yet powerful tool that I always seem to gravitate back to, that tool is SQLite.
Now obviously being [...]

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Python the new VBA ?

Posted in BI, ETL, Palo, Ruby, SQLite, Web2.0, data, excel, news, tagged , , , , on April 11, 2008 | 6 Comments »

These last two weeks, Python has been on my mind. First off, last week I decided to make time to fully investigate Picalo, an open-source Python-based data analysis tool, and then, this week, Google announced their long awaited cloud-computing offering, Google Apps Engine, with the language at its core.
Python was the first of [...]

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A Tale of Two Services.

Posted in Web2.0, data, excel, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 23, 2008 | 3 Comments »

Friday, last week, 15th Feb, two of the services I most depend on, failed. Now as it turned out, neither really concerned me at the time, as that same day my brother was taken seriously ill (he’s now doing fine and on the way to recovery). It’s only now I’ve had the time [...]

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CouchDB = IBM’s SimpleDB and S3 ?

Posted in AmazonAWS, S3, SimpleDB, cloud, data, tagged , , on January 3, 2008 | 2 Comments »

What if you’re a major player in the IT world and suddenly the internet’s equivalent of your local bookshop releases a mould-breaking cloud-based database service, SimpleDB. This is on top of Amazon’s highly acclaimed document data store service, S3!
Well, if you’re IBM you hire Damien Katz the person behind CouchDB. I think 2008 [...]

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The WAN is the new LAN

Posted in EC2, GoogleApps, SimpleDB, broadband, data, tagged , , , , , on December 17, 2007 | No Comments »

While discussing SimpleDB ,Nick Carr points to the polar opposite views that the two computing behemoths, Google and Microsoft, hold as to the future direction of cloud computing. Google’s Schmidt sees an eventual 90/10 split with the cloud being the home to most data and processes while as expected, Microsoft’s Raikes points to the [...]

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SimpleDB + S3 = distributed document-centric database

Posted in AmazonAWS, EC2, S3, SQLite, SimpleDB, Web2.0, data, excel, news, tagged , on December 14, 2007 | 3 Comments »

I’m a database man. I’ve worked on or about most variations on the theme, from roll-your-own flat files, to hierarchical, to CODASYL network databases, to the current crop of relational and MOLAP platforms. Of late, I’ve being investigating what I think will be the future of database technology, the distributed document-centric database. [...]

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DATA + HMRC = GUBU ?

Posted in ETL, data, tagged , , , on November 21, 2007 | No Comments »

I was tempted to use the 1980’s era Irish political acronym GUBU (Grotesque, Unbelievable, Bizarre and Unprecedented ) to describe the announcement by Chancellor Darling yesterday of the loss of 25 million UK citizens’ data records. Grotesque yes; bizarre - putting 25 million private records on two un-encrypted CD/DVD disks and sending it to London, [...]

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Ruby plus Amazon S3 - Document Centric Database

Posted in EC2, ETL, Ruby, S3, Web2.0, data, tagged , , , on November 6, 2007 | 1 Comment »

I’ve said it before and I’m going to repeat myself; learning Ruby has proven to be a great investment, not so much for the language itself but for the insights it gives into other technologies. As soon as a new ‘cool’ technology or idea hits the street some smart Rubyist is bound to attack [...]

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CrashPlan - the best backup service yet?

Posted in S3, Web2.0, data, tagged , , on November 5, 2007 | 4 Comments »

You know when you come across something so simple, so obvious and so brilliant you wonder, why didn’t I think of that? Well for personal/small business data backup I’ve just had one of those moments.
CrashPlan is a consumer/SMB orientated backup service following in the footsteps of Mozy (a service I’ve used in the past [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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Web Offline - all data lost!

Posted in Web2.0, data, tagged on July 20, 2007 | No Comments »

…just a warning, get a life and get a data-backup strategy

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