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...

In my very first blog for OptimalBI I said that breaking from my comfort zone was something I would always strive to do. That blog was about me joining OptimalBI and the excitement that lay ahead. Now, one year and eight months down the track it is time for me 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...

Working at OptimalBI, I am asked to install and configure a number of products be it for production workloads or internal evaluations. Some of these products require days of configuration (according to the vendor) or at the other end of the spectrum require a single...

We have been playing around with Trifacta a lot recently, you can see all our Trifacta coverage here. As we know Trifacta = I can code (well, sort of). But as with any code we want to be able to save it, store it in Git and reuse it. Here is a short tutorial on how to...

Over the next few weeks, I'll be exploring some data with QlikSense using OpenData sets - for today I'll be using some data from Quotable Value (QV) to take a look at the Auckland House Prices to see how different they are to the rest of NZ and whether the recent...

As mentioned in Shane Gibson’s blog, Trifacta = I can code! (and free data wrangling on your desktop), some of us at OptimalBI have had the pleasure of using Trifacta’s Desktop Data Wrangling tool. A little something from their website Data Wrangling to Simplify the...

Some of you may recall I wrote a blog some time ago on SAS Visual Analytics auto load libraries. In that blog, I talked about using the autoload library that is created "out of the box" by SAS, here I am going to show you how to create additional autoload libraries if...

Cool, I found that date field I was looking for on line 8! But also on line 9...damn...what now? Source: author's collection. A natural way for data people to start our projects is to "just get in to the data and see what's there." Almost every week, in fact, I tell a...

We found an interesting issue with QlikSense 2.0 the other day, where the menu options all looked like Hieroglyphics or Greek characters rather than the english characters. A close up of the right hand menu shows the problem:     The problem ended up being...

These steps look difficult too. Are we going up or down? Source: Wikipedia (CC BY 2.0) You read that right, the steps are difficult. I'm not going to lie to you! I've written before about the promise and disappointment of open data. To those of us who work with it,...

There aren't enough Open Data Hero's in the world yet and the first step in any Hero creation process is education and common understanding - What is Open Data, What Stops Open Data and What Data should be Open? Whether you already are / want to become an Open Data...

Agile is trendy! It's all the rage these days to hold a few standups, start referring to weeks as "sprints", change your mind frequently, and claim to be Agile. As we like to say around here "that's ad hoc, not Agile!" And if you search "Agile BI" you'll find...

Time really does fly when you are having fun! I have reached the end of my last sprint, and my eight day internship with OptimalBI. What a different world to government biosecurity response! I'm not sure I ended up 100% where I thought I would, but the journey has...

I knew this internship would speed by, but it feels like only yesterday that I was leaving my job and wondering what 'life outside' the government was going to be like. So far is pretty good. Today was really fun. The aim for the day was to get some dash board style...

Most concerning stat for the day is that Australia is beating us!! They had lower mortality rates over the last 20 years for both men and women than New Zealand. Maybe Vegemite really is good for you? Despite the banner pic, today the project is beginning to take...

Good luck parsing these rules into your data warehouse! Source: Wikipedia You may have noticed some posts appearing about Optimal Data Engine (ODE), our open-source and language-agnostic tool for better data warehousing. Aside from the technical breakthroughs, what...

Today was the end of sprint Two. And it was a bit of a sprint. Things went from rather rosy, to rather not, rather quickly. Which is a lot of rather's. By the end of the day, it is safe to say I didn't complete the sprint which involved using QlikCloud. Despite the oh...