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Archive for the ‘excel’ Category

Spending time on Excel-SQLite, C, VBA Callbacks & Twitter

Posted in BI, ETL, Palo, SQLite, VBA, Web2.0, excel, xLite, tagged , on November 20, 2008 | No Comments »

Haven’t posted here in a while as my spare time has been soaked up programing, well actually refactoring would be more exact.  My xLite “SQLite empowered Excel” codebase has grown over the years and required a serious makeover to get rid of stuff I no longer use and to generally make it more robust.  I [...]

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I’ll give up Excel Pivot Tables when you take ‘em from my cold, dead hands

Posted in BI, Palo, excel, olap, tagged , , , , on October 10, 2008 | 11 Comments »

Jedox, the company behind the open source MOLAP server Palo, has just announced an MDX/XMLA driver. This means that it’s now possible to access Palo cubes using Excel Pivot Tables or indeed any tool that supports ODBO or XMLA.  This is excellent news, as MOLAP to most Excel users IS a Pivot Table, and somewhat like [...]

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Why Larry hates the cloud, and my data trinity.

Posted in AmazonAWS, ETL, Palo, SQLite, cloud, excel, olap, tagged , on October 4, 2008 | No Comments »

Last week Oracle certified Amazon EC2 as a supported platform, that same week Larry Elison attacked the concept of cloud computing as pure hype. Obviously, Larry is not happy with this whole cloud thing, and I think it’s not just the threat it poses to the software industry’s traditional licensing model that worries him, rather, as Robert X. Cringely [...]

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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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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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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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Palo OLAP and sparse dimensions.

Posted in BI, ETL, Palo, excel, tagged , , , , , , , on May 26, 2008 | 9 Comments »

Last week I tried out both the latest Palo 2.5 release and its sister product, ETL-Server.  Although I’ve not done any proper benchmarks, 2.5 does appear to be faster than the previous release and the Excel add-in also behaves better when co-habiting with other add-ins and macros (the previous release’s use of, and response to, [...]

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Python to replace VB6 …

Posted in ETL, Python, VBA, excel, tagged , , on May 5, 2008 | 2 Comments »

… well at least for me. As I discussed previously I’ve been seriously investigating using Python as my primary datasmithing scripting language, in effect a new VBA. I also currently use VBA’s compiled cousin, VB6, for certain tasks such as building Excel RTD servers. The problem with VB6 is it depends on [...]

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Palo ETL Server - Not for me …

Posted in BI, ETL, Palo, SQLite, excel, tagged , on May 1, 2008 | 2 Comments »

Jedox have just released V1.0 of their Palo-centric ETL Server. I had been looking forward to this, not so much for its ETL ability (which is somewhat limited when compared to the likes of Pentaho PDI or Talend) but for the drill-through capability it would add to Palo. Alas, there’s a catch, you [...]

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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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xlAWS - Excel VBA Code for accessing Amazon’s S3 and SimpleDB

Posted in AmazonAWS, S3, SimpleDB, VBA, excel, programming, tagged , , on February 22, 2008 | 4 Comments »

I’ve been using Amazon’s S3 service from within Excel for sometime now and as there are no libraries or examples for calling AWS services from VBA (or VB6) I had to roll my own. As with most things Excel, getting the job done always triumphs over elegance and industrial strength implementations, in other words [...]

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Dublin Bus and PALO ETL - the connection!

Posted in AmazonAWS, BI, ETL, Palo, S3, SQLite, SimpleDB, Talend, VBA, excel, kettle, olap, tagged , , , , on January 26, 2008 | 5 Comments »

Dublin buses, as is the norm with most road-based public transport systems in our increasingly car-choked cities, tend to operate on the basis of “no sign of a bus for ages, then two or three arrive at the same time”. Palo MOLAP ETL options appear to be following the same pattern; we’ve been waiting for [...]

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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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JavaScript as an Excel scripting language via ExcelDNA

Posted in JavaScript, VBA, excel, tagged , , , , , , on October 4, 2007 | 2 Comments »

Developing .NET DLLs that are to be used within an Excel VBA add-in is relatively easy to do. But the overhead of the COM managed interfaces can be a serious performance bottleneck if the .NET managed functions are called from within a tight loop. The alternative is to create a C++ XLL and [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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