I find learning easiest and most fun when I use real projects to put my learning into practice. As I get more familiar with D3, I’m developing a series of infographics using my learning exercises to visualize real data about something meaningful. This week, it’s...

RESTful Web APIs are one of the many tools that a developer has at their disposal in the modern development world. As such there are many ways of creating these web APIs and many frameworks to assist you in creating them. At OptimalBI we have a sudden need for a...

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...

This blog follows my previous blog discussing what programming languages are suitable for writing cloud-focused code using Kotlin. We want to encourage our faithful Java developers (if we had any) to move from Java to Kotlin. So we need to show them how much of an...

My highlight from the GOVIS 2016 conference was the number of attendees who donated their conference bag to Wellington decile 1 and 2 schools, up until the moment a conference attendee told me that he had put a $2 coin in his conference bag before handing it over to...

This time last week the OptimalBI crew were down at GOVIS 2016 which had a theme of disruptive innovation. I even wrote a blog called, What's GOVIS all about?. You can read all our GOVIS blogs here. We did some good things at GOVIS. We made sure that conference bags...

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...

As mentioned in my previous blog AWS TIPS AND TRICKS: TIME ZONE I have had to do a few things I didn’t know how to do when setting up an EC2 Linux server and I thought I would share these learnings. How to automatically create a cron job at Instance creation. I needed...

At OptimalBI we don't sponsor a lot of conferences, but when the opportunity to sponsor the 25th annual GOVIS conference came up, we decided to go for it. We spend a lot our time working with Government organisations so it just made sense. This year's GOVIS conference...

I started working at OptimalBI a few months ago. My area of expertise is Data Warehouse development, using Microsoft SQL Server. I was, therefore, a good candidate to test how difficult it is to start using ODE (Optimal Data Engine). ODE is an open source application...

What is Data Science anyway you might ask? Last week I wrote on how to become a Data Scientist, posting a collection of resources and techniques to get anyone interested started on that career path. It's worth clarifying what the role actually is and what the future...

I have mentioned in previous posts I am no way near an expert in OS’ especially Linux, although I have to use in some form or another on a regular basis. While attempting to configure one of our AWS Linux servers I needed to do a few things that I have not had to do...

OptimalBI is a diverse collection of experts in a range of Business Intelligence subjects from the esoteric through to the extremely technical. To spread some of what we know, we’ve undertaken to explain ‘a concept’ every month with each other, and now to you too. I...

Even though we love our coffee here at OptimalBI, we have never had a place in our hearts for Java. Even so, Java has a lot to offer for the modern cloud-driven world, but writing good, maintainable and human readable code has never been part of a Java developers...

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...

Good luck writing software to consume this! Source: flickr/avlxyz (CC BY-SA 2.0) In a now-famous article published in 2011, Marc Andreessen argued that software is eating the world, because Amazon destroyed Borders, etc. He warned that the market was undervaluing tech...

I have seen a massive change in the business intelligence, data and analytics tools our customers are buying and using over the last couple of years. The advent of data wrangling tools such as Trifacta, open-source analytics tools such as R and visual exploration...

This week I was asked an Excel question that I don't believe I had ever considered before. The scenario being: if you have a list of information held in one column of an excel spreadsheet how do you filter the contents based on the structure of the information? For...