We have recently completed a move from Dropbox to SharePoint and given it was such a interesting process I'd thought I'd share some lessons learned. We had been using Dropbox for several years but decided to move onto SharePoint. What we started with was approximately...

I recently discovered a free service that can provide SSL certificates. It's called Let's Encrypt and in the correct use cases, it's a great tool to have in your developer's arsenal. At this point, I should point out a few things worth knowing. The certificate has a...

A side effect of working for OptimalBI is working with new technology and young people. Something I became aware of years ago was that I couldn't keep up with software technology from a technical viewpoint, and so I stopped trying. Well not completely, instead I found...

Last month Amazon Web Services (AWS) have made their Business Intelligence (BI) solution QuickSight generally available for all customers. They describe it like this: "QuickSight is a fast, cloud-powered business analytics service that makes it easy for you to build...

I'm lazy, why doesn't anyone have instructions I can follow already! I guess it's time to give back to the Google seekers of this world. After going through the process I can understand why no one has written a guide, it's not a straight forward process. As this sort...

It's always nice to dip your toes in the familiar with Oralce Apex 5 being out for over a year now I thought I'd validate an old blog I wrote about running Apex in the Cloud. Oracle do provide cloud options if you just want to try it out but like any tech geek I...

Oracle have been catching up in the analytics space. One of the features they had been lacking was in regards to self-service analytics. Basically, the ability for a user to mashup their own data with corporate data. I believe it's the reason why they didn't feature...

This guide covers installing and configuring Flask to run on Apache on Ubuntu. Why would you want to do this? In a nutshell, you want to run Python code in a web environment. Prerequisites: AWS EC2 running Ubuntu Server 14 Instructions: Installing the software SSH...

This is a guide for standing up a quick server using Yum on AWS Linux. Other options for getting a server running are: Manual download and install, instructions can be found here There is a cloud formation template that Neo4J provide here Prerequisites AWS Linux EC2...

This is the third blog of a series on SAML, these are the first and second blogs. Great, it's installed and securing the Apache URL, but it doesn't seem complete. One thing becomes clear at this point. SAML only performs authentication if you are building a custom...

Following on from my previous blog this is where things get harder, well more typing and less clicking anyway. The next piece of the puzzle is, if I deploy something bespoke on Apache can I secure it? I found two guides for installing Shibboleth, there is one on the...

The minimal proof of concept for any SAML solution is to secure two different websites with SAML. For this I decided to secure an off the shelf SAML ready product we had already installed (Qlik Sense) and a simple bespoke application running on Apache. This blog cover...

A discussion around cloud development for Software as a Service (SAAS) offerings is quite clear cut; there are gains to be made using the cloud. Both in speed of delivery and cost. How this is done is much more complex and confusing. Finding organisations that want to...

I'm Ben Lee I'm into report development, data integration and data modelling. In this blog I explain how I helped a customer manage their own help text. Recently I had the scenario where a customer wanted to be able to manage their own help text for a page in an...

I recently had need to transfer some data between Redshift Databases. Coming from an Oracle background I started my search for the Redshift equivalent to import/export. I found was that there wasn't one. However using the unload and copy commands you can achieve the...

I'll admit I'm not sold on the JSON format. However others have embraced the format and this leads to need to be able to store and query this type of data. Amazon Redshift gives you a couple of options to deal with this data. Recently the Copy command has been...

In March Google announced significant drops in pricing for Cloud Storage(down 68%) and on-demand compute(down 32%).  Being new to this Could world, I started to think maybe I should have a look at their cloud offerings compared to Amazon Web Services. I quickly found...