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Archive for the ‘news’ 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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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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Amazon’s SAN in the cloud is a mirage…

Posted in AmazonAWS, EC2, S3, Web2.0, news, tagged , , on August 9, 2008 | 1 Comment »

This morning I got very excited.  While quickly scanning the headlines of the 1000+ unread feeds that had accumulated in my Google Reader this week, one heading in particular caught my attention, “Amazon Elastic Block Store goes live!“.
The post from the Right Scale folks gives a detailed overview of the new  Amazon ‘SAN storage in [...]

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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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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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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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Zimki - the spirt lives on …

Posted in JavaScript, Ruby, Web2.0, news, programming, tagged , , , , , , on December 13, 2007 | 2 Comments »

Although Zimki is to shut down on Christmas Eve, the ideas behind the service live on. Two new offerings, Horuku and AppJet, offer variations on the idea of hosted application development/deployment.
AppJet, funded by Paul Graham’s Y-Combinator, is very similar to Zimki, being a server-side JavaScript platform. No details yet as to what [...]

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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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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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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 [...]

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10,000 hits …

Posted in news, tagged on August 25, 2007 | 2 Comments »

Sometime during August I recorded my 10,000th hit on this blog. OK, that doesn’t put me in the A-list ( more like the does-anybody-know-what-comes-after-Z-list) but it’s a start. I started the blog in February 2006 as a destination for my del.icio.us feed auto-posts, but my first real post wasn’t until December 2006. [...]

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Google Apps not just for SMEs?

Posted in GAFyD, GoogleApps, news, tagged on July 9, 2007 | No Comments »

The relentless positioning of Google Apps as an alternative to MS Office continues.  Google has just announced the acquisition of Postini an on-demand hosted provider of secure communications (EMail and IM) for large corporate clients.  The use of hosted email and document storage solution is a no-brainer for small  businesses but compliance and data security [...]

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CRM - How not to do it …

Posted in news, tagged on June 21, 2007 | No Comments »

Having been through a lost luggage experience myself in the past I can understand Damein Mullvey’s frustration and anger.
Sky Handling Partners “handling” of the issue would make a good example of how not to deal with an irate customer when that customer is also a prominent blogger. And now this ….

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Zimki - goes off the boil.

Posted in JavaScript, Web2.0, news, tagged on June 14, 2007 | 1 Comment »

Looks like any further enhancement of Zimki is to be put on hold until Fotango’s parent company, Canon Europe, completes a review on the future direction (and viability?) of the hosted application market. This means the platform will not be open sourced in the near future. This and the lack of any sign [...]

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A time of war and a time of peace …

Posted in news, tagged on May 9, 2007 | No Comments »

Yesterday for Northern Ireland is was “a time of peace”, after centuries of conflict, Planter and Gael agree to share power. Did we ever think we’d see the day? It was a long time coming; I was on my honeymoon in Northern Ireland (moored at Lock No.1 on the Shannon-Erne waterway) in [...]

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HacketyHack from WhyTheLuckyStiff

Posted in Ruby, education, news on April 26, 2007 | No Comments »

No it’s not a tip for the 5.50 at Punchestown it’s the latest project from _why (a legend in the world of Ruby, if a language as young as Ruby can have legends). HacketyHack is a framework to teach kids how to program, built using Ruby and the gekco browser engine, it’s free [...]

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Talend ETL - A New Contender

Posted in BI, ETL, SQLite, Talend, kettle, news, olap on April 26, 2007 | 4 Comments »

Talend have released a new version of their Open Studio ETL tool. Not as full featured as Pentaho Kettle; only supports a limited number of databases and file formats - no SQLite support shock-horror! The press release promises More than 100 Native Connectors and promises connectors to ERP and CRM tools but [...]

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New Open Source OLAP

Posted in BI, ETL, data, news, olap, tagged on April 22, 2007 | 4 Comments »

Cubulus is a Mondrian-like OLAP engine supporting a subset of MDX and offering an alternative way of organising fact tables using “hierarchial range clustering of keys” rather than the traditional star-schema approach. Written in Python, very much a pre-alpha release. Interesting but a bit too experimental for me this early on a Sunday morning; [...]

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New software - Pentaho Kettle 2.5 RC1 and IMP:Palo

Posted in BI, ETL, Palo, data, excel, kettle, news on April 21, 2007 | 3 Comments »

I’ve spend a few hours trying out the latest Kettle 2.5.0 RC1 release candidate, new UI and lots of new features. Looks like the PALO code developed by 3a-strategy will not make into this release, but I see Cubeware have released IMP:PALO cube loading software, offering both a free and a premium [...]

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