Chaos, complexity, curiosity and database systems. A place where research meets industry
Welcome
Passionately curious about Data, Databases and Systems Complexity. Data is ubiquitous, the database universe is dichotomous (structured and unstructured), expanding and complex. Find my Database Research at SQLToolkit.co.uk . Microsoft Data Platform MVP
"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing" Einstein
This recording provides an overview of implementation and real-world
application scenarios, with demos, of three critical engine investments
in SQL Server: Temporal, Query Store and JSON support.
SQL Saturday Exeter was held Apr24-25 2015 at Jurys Inn Hotel in Exeter. I was excited to be helping at the event for the community again. There were various excellent training day sessions.
The Saturday keynote was the most amazing fun keynote I have seen and a highlight of the event. The video was by Phil Factor about Spinach and Database Development.
Here a few of the points contained within the video on Spinach:
What has spinach got to do with Database Development? Generations of children were fed spinach in preference to more nutritious
things, such as cardboard, because of the persistence of bad data.
Guarding the quality of your data is about the most important thing that you
as a data professional can do. You may think that performance is important but
it would just deliver you the wrong answer faster. Resilience? it would just
make it more likely that you’d be able to deliver the wrong answer. Delivery?
Yep you got it, the wrong answer quicker.
A good database professional must be unequivocal.
Statistics can help us to make very confident assertions about large
datasets if they conform to one of the common distributions but they cannot
tell us anything about individual items of data. You can of course remove
outliers but in fact outliers are just items of data that don’t conform to your
assumptions about the data and the whole point of data analysis is to test your
assumptions. By cleaning data, by removing outliers you can prove almost
anything scientifically.
The new PowerBI dashboard designer in early preview in the US provides data
transformation and visual analytics to build reports. It can be downloaded from powerbi.com
Power BI Designer consolidates Power BI Excel add-in
tools: Power Query, Power Pivot and Power View into one application.
Power BI Designer also provides self-service ETL . The free desktop data discovery tool can be downloaded and installed side-by-side with any version of Office or Excel on Windows.
•Front-end (Excel)
•Data shaping and cleanup. Self-service ETL (Power Query)
•Data analysis (Power Pivot)
•Visualization and data discovery (Power View, Power Map, Power BI Designer)
• Dashboarding (Power BI Dashboard)
• Publishing and sharing (Power BI sites)
• Natural language query (Power BI Q&A)
• Mobile (Power BI for Mobile)
• Access on-premise data (DMG, Analysis Services Connector)
Power
Query
Power
Pivot
Power
View
Power
Map
Power BI
Designer
Power BI
Dashboard
Power BI Site
Power BI
Q&A
Power BI
for mobile
SQLBits Superheroes was held at ExCeL, Royal Victoria Dock, London between
4-7 March 2015. In its usual tradition an amazing conference packed full of a
massive variety of Data and Database technology sessions. Attendees came from
all over the world and it was a privilege to be able to help at the event again.
I have now attended every SQLBits event and seen the event grow in size and strength.
It is the place for the SQL community to grow and share.
This year SQLBits was extended by an extra day consisting of 3 days and a
free SQL Server community day on Saturday. There were more preconference
choices, extended session lengths and double length sessions. The variety of
topics discussed has exploded to cover the vast breath of the data platform
from OLTP, Data Warehousing, Analytics, Hadoop, Azure etc. for DBA’s, developers
and analysts. All in all an amazing conference.
This is Elasticsearch’s data visualization engine. It allows native interaction with all data in Elasticsearch via custom dashboards. It has dynamic dashboard panels displaying changes to queries in real-time. Kibana works with any kind of data — structured and unstructured. It helps understand large volumes of data, easily create bar charts, line and scatter plots, histograms, pie charts, and maps.
.jpg)