Today was the end of Sprint One, and the beginning of Sprint Two. I have ticked off all my acceptance criteria from sprint one, and sprint two is looking like refining the data, learning new software, and creating a storyboard for the tale I am looking to tell.

BUSINESS USER BUSINESS ANALYST The Scenario? An analyst asks business users what they require to be delivered.  The business user articulates what they require and the analyst documents this in a standard requirements document template. But when the solution is...

I felt distinctly like I was herding cats today trying to not only extract data, but also meaning from World Health Organisation (WHO) data sets. Just as I thought I was heading in a direction, something took off at a tangent. But with some chipping away, and timely...

Assuming you can find the right stone, how will you get the blood (or open data) out? Source: flickr/dj2lip (CC-BY-2.0) Why I want more open government data (we paid for it already!) As you might already know I'm a bit of a crusader for open government data. Maybe it...

Where to start? The beginning or the end? The feeling of brain drain, or the buzz of stretched grey matter! Today was day one working in an eight day internship at the funky orange office that is Optimal BI. I couldn’t be in a space much different to my steady government job I finished just four days ago.

16 years ago Scott McNealy famously quipped to the media "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it". The incident that lead up to that quote has always stuck with me, for the most part because he was one of my former business hero's (yes Sun failed, yes he sold to...

Recently I was tasked to create a pipe delimited file from an Excel Spreadsheet, a simple task you would expect.  On first glance it was not as simple I thought. I use Excel 2010 and was expecting to be able to do something like ‘save as’ and select the file type ‘CSV...

I have always enjoyed investigating new business intelligence techniques and tools which will benefit my efforts as a data analyst. Yesterday I was given the opportunity to learn a new dimension modelling technique through the An Optimal Introduction...

Feeling out of your element, dude? Let me explain. Photo: Ginger Williams-Cook We've been blogging a lot recently about AgileBI, BEAM✲ and Modelstorming, and we use those terms somewhat interchangeably. I'll use this post to help you through the maze of terminology....

I recently attended a course titled “Agile Data Warehouse Design Workshop”. Presented by Lawrence Corr and based on the book “Agile Data Warehouse Design”, written by Lawrence in collaboration with Jim Stagnitto. Synopsis The major differentiator of this course is a...

We have published version 1.0 of OptimalSpyglass - an Open Source tool designed to provide you with a portfolio view of resources running on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Here is a summary of what's new in v1.0 with a link to download this handy tool at the end: Security...

By default Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) 11g uses the “old-style” join syntax when joining tables.  While many Oracle developers still prefer that style of join, I for one find ANSI joins to be far cleaner and easier to read. Oracle started supporting ANSI joins in...

I have been researching different ways that we can get data into AWS Redshift and found importing a CSV data into Redshift from AWS S3 is a very simple process. Get the CSV file into S3 -> Define the Target Table -> Import the file   Get the CSV file into...

Introduction The security and access for OptimalSpyglass is important. In order to make OptimalSpyglass as secure as we could we talked to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and tried to get as many other views on security models as we could. We wanted to resolve the following...

I was shown the following technique for comparing tables when I was a junior programmer many years ago. WITH A as (SELECT something) , B as (SELECT another_similar_thing) SELECT * FROM A MINUS SELECT * FROM B UNION ALL SELECT * FROM B MINUS SELECT * FROM A; This...

SQL*Loader is an Oracle tool used for loading data into tables from external files.  This blog assumes you have some, but not comprehensive knowledge of SQL*Loader.  You can do some quick reading of Oracle’s documentation if you are completely unfamiliar. Data Source...

When someone queries your Data Warehouse, what will the time context of the result be? This discussion applies to designs where you have a collection of detail history of data arriving in your Warehouse. What Date / Time do you use to version the data? Then Back in...

Not all certifications are created equally - some are designed to maximise the pass rate to ensure the product vendor engages participants leading to increased license sales. Data Vault certification isn't one of these. The course itself, certification exam and...