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1080 By The Numbers
If you have lived in New Zealand for long enough, I am sure you would have heard of the poison 1080, used by the Department of Conservation (DOC) as a form of pest control. 1080 can be used in bait stations or by airdrop, which is used for many of the remote and hard...
Keeping your team connected when they’re working remotely
Lockdown started on the March 26 here in New Zealand, and following the Prime Minister's announcement on April 20th, we're looking at just an extra 2 business days in Level 4, before we move to Level 3 after the ANZAC long weekend. Level 3 means that...
Adobe equivalent Free Open Source Software (Pt2)
In part two of my Adobe equivalent Free Open Source Software (FOSS) blog I thought I would look at the video editing pipeline and find some free alternatives for your video editing needs. You can read Part One which covers Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign here....
Difference between ETL and CDC
Reporting and analytics computations are usually very resource-consuming, therefore they are never executed on the same server where the crucial business application is running. Instead, data is copied into dedicated servers to be dissected and studied for insights....
Keeping your brain busy while in lock down
Many places all over the world are currently in self-isolation mode in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In New Zealand, lock down started on Thursday March 26, which means that some people are able to work from home. At OptimalBI, we are working from home and on the...
Check out our new website!
Woohoo we've got a new website! If you're reading this blog you're already on it and we reckon you should click a few extra buttons than you were planning to and go check it out... Data really does make anything possible, and we're here to help you harness data...
Planning for the COVID-19 Pandemic at OptimalBI
We find ourselves in unprecedented times. All across the globe the impact of COVID-19 is being felt, it’s heart-breaking reading the stories of loss, the impact on societies, businesses and individuals as a result of measures put in place to restrict the momentum of...
Building Services and Applications for Generic Data
One of the things many developers love about MongoDB and other NoSQL databases is the ability to store flexible objects in their native format. When you walk around the office singing its praises, experienced developers chime in and tell you that this is a quick path...
What is data literacy and why should you care?
You might have heard this term thrown about a bit recently. Perhaps it's because you've heard politicians referring to it when discussing educational reform, or you've noticed how your job has you doing more with spreadsheets than you did five years ago. What ever...
What is algorithmic bias and why should you care?
What is algorithmic bias? A systematic error in computer algorithms which leads to unfair outcomes and giving privileges to one of the groups of users over all others. An algorithm is a set of instructions designed to perform a specific task. This can be a simple...
I tried the Qlik Data Literacy course
I've spent the last 8 years of my life surrounded by data nerds, and while I've learned so many new things about data, I can not even pretend I'm a data nerd myself. An enthusiast for sure, but a nerd... no way! I lack what my peers would consider the hammer and...
Fun with Identity fields in Sparx EA
After a bit of inventive adjective use the other day I found out that the way you create new database tables in Sparx Enterprise Architect database models has an impact on whether or not you can specify an Identity column for a SQL Server database table. ...
Everything you need to know about BEAM* to define data requirements
We first came across BEAM*, Lawrence Corr and Jim Stagnitto over seven years ago when we were scratching our heads trying to figure out a better way to design an agile data warehouse. Since then, we've convinced Lawrence to travel to Aotearoa many times...
Meri Kirihimete from OptimalBI
Kia ora koutou and welcome to the last OptimalBI newsletter of 2019 - hasn't this year flown by! We have enjoyed supporting our customers to create amazing outcomes for their organisations this year with a range of really interesting projects - payment integration,...
Single Source of Truth and Interpretation
One thing I've been thinking about lately is Single Source of Truth (SSOT), it's relationship with interpretation, and how that lands with data. We often consider the data warehouse, in at least it's traditional star schema sense to be a record of fact, obviously.....
Data Quality 30 years on – what’s changed
My second full-time job was a data quality one back in 1989 (yep I am that old). Timberland the footwear company had massively diversified in the 80's adding clothing lines and opening their first branded store outside the USA - in London on Bond Street. The UK...
Learn and Earn – Kaggle
Working in the Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing space I'm constantly keeping abreast of what's hot and what's not. Obviously Data Science, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence fall under the BI/DW banner, somewhere. So today I want to share Kaggle!...
Open Source Datasets
Have you ever needed data for a work or academic project? If so, are there any good sites on the internet where you can easily access data? I have had to complete several projects at work where I had to build reports in various BI tool (Qlik and PowerBI). I needed to...