Amazon Web Services have just turned 10 and they gave a present away. For about half of March, they made all of their QwikLabs free. What is a QwikLab you ask? Who better to answer than AWS themselves (Thanks, QwikLab FAQs) “A qwikLAB is an online learning environment...

This week we welcome Guest Blogger, Bill Grant from the AllGo Analytics Limited. Bill is an experienced data professional with a new business focused on performing data analytics for small and medium-sized business. Take it away Bill … FACT SHEET 1: What is Market...

Evaluating BI tools used to be easy. You either took a stack approach and picked a vendor first, then selected the modules you wanted to use from their product catalog. Or you picked one thing you wanted to do extremely well and selected a best of breed product/vendor...

Recently the cloud space has got all Dockery and another tool has popped up in the space from Docker themselves, Docker Cloud. This tool allows you to do all our Docker service maintenance from a central dashboard no matter where we are deployed. What does it do?...

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...

From my experience one of the first things that teams learn after writing the ‘front’ of a user story (as a… I want… so that…) is that the ‘back’ of a user story; the acceptance criteria, can make or break it. I started writing a blog about getting good acceptance...

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 Analytics and Data Mining tools space is growing prolifically, new startups keep popping up and raising various masses of cash to build their product out - many disappearing as the result of an early stage sale or running out of said cash too. There are loads of...

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...

I was reading a book called Agile Data Warehousing Project Management by Ralph Hughes. There is a phrase in it which I found funny; “Data warehousing teams should be aiming for something very close to 100% accuracy.” Wow! Isn’t it obvious that any team should aim 100%...

vs. When you are in the AWS console you may have noticed that there are two options for search, ElasticSearch Service and CloudSearch. Both of these are in different sections of the console and both seem to offer search, but which should you use? As we are in need of...

When talking about deploying an application to the cloud (especially SaaS or similar hardware independent applications) Docker always seems to come up in conversation. With that and the new(ish) Docker Elastic Container Service offering from Amazon we decided that now...

So we have been trundling along with Trifacta and now have exported our recipe, and now we want to do cool stuff with it. One of the cool things that we can do now is use the logic from Trifacta and produce our own little mini parsing engine that we have complete...

At OptimalBI we have been exploring what you can do with Qlik for a while now, you can find our full coverage here. Intrigued by what all the fuss was about I decided to investigate. The first thing I learned was there is QlikView and Qlik Sense. So, my first question...

Late last year I wrote a blog on how easy Qlik Sense was to install, but hinted there might be an even easier way. Well it appears that there is, especially if you are using AWS as your instance/server provider, and if you use the Qlik Deployment Console (QDC)....

We're still loving our Open Data journey, speaking to organisations helping them understand the possibilities is a really rewarding exercise. It does help that Shaun is an Open Data evangelist and makes it easy to bring people on the journey when he is so passionate,...