I read lots of examples on the internet that check if an object exists, and then drop it before creating it. You'd be excused for thinking that this is good practise. It's not. Dropping an object has negative side effects: Fisher emphasizes that all of the GRANTs and...

As a consultant I rarely see systems that are operating well. People don't take their cars to the mechanic when they are functioning properly. I appreciate that this colours my experience. Still, I'm continually surprised to find smart people working in the "Care and...

As usual I've been exploring, this time with security and working out a standard for securing content in Yellowfin. I thought I'd share a quick overview in case you're thinking about how it works for your instance. There's four parts for content security which makes...

SQL Server's Transact SQL has some weird constraints. One of which is that certain statements must be the first one in their batch. This causes all kinds of head-aches for dynamic SQL. I start with a statement that I want to execute, that I have generated dynamically....

Infographics are a fun and unique way to visualise your data, but how do you make one? Here are a few things that I consider when building my infographics: 1. Who is the audience? The first step in their creation, is to characterise the audience for the visualisation....

As is common in a data warehouse solution, over time the primary SSIS Project has grown dramatically as new packages have been added and a definable split in the function of those packages has appeared. To make deployment easier for one of our customers we have...

A while back we had a problem, a disconnect between what people were asking for and what they really wanted. At Optimal we're all about data but more importantly how people get insight from it, if a customer doesn't get value from what we've provided then we're not...

Recently I've been doing a bit of development work in the MS SQL space and one of the frustrations I had was (my) inability to quickly show the schema information for a specific table within Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio - I'd got use to Oralce's SQL...

When designing your Data Vault, you first start with defining the Hub tables.  The Data Vault is made up of many subject areas, and each Hub is the central piece to each core subject.  If you’re confused already, I recommend you have a read of my introductory Data...

We're always hiring here at OptimalBI. Our new staff have a variety of experience, and a variety of gaps in their knowledge as a result. I recently prepared the following list of my favourite books on programming for one of our new hires. There are more than a few...

You will have seen blogs from us recently on Agile Data Warehousing and Agile Business Intelligence, even a couple of blogs on a methodology called BEAM - one of the most successful techniques we have adopted, and is now an important aspect of our "secret sauce". This...

This week I've been putting RapidMiner Server through its paces to prove capability for a potential customer. RapidMiner Server allows you to offload heavy processing loads from your client PC to more capable hardware. We run it on the AWS cloud as part of our...

It's the first day of spring here in Wellington, and OptimalHQ is buzzing after our successful first delivery of "An Optimal Introduction to BEAM✲". We spent two sprints developing the course from scratch, including a running example, and it was great to see it come...

So one of OptimalBI’s SAS administration service selling points is that all of our SAS admin’s are certified, which meant I needed to pull finger and sit the exam (Yay - I am now certified in SAS Platform Administration in SAS 9).  This got me thinking, what is the...

If you think someone may be slightly dyslexic when you hear them talking about D3 – this blog is for you. D3 (or D3.js) is a brand name and stands for Data-Driven Documents. It’s a JavaScript library that helps you “bring your data to life”, according to the...

What happens when you take the best of 3rd Normal Form and the best of the Dimensional Star Schema, and mix them together?  You get Data Vault. Data Vault is a data warehousing modelling technique that makes designing a robust, agile, historical and future-proof data...

Recently I had to change my password (as we all do), but on this occasion it didn't work, while not completely anyway. This is my story and what I learnt. I changed my password when prompted during the login process and then logged into SAS Enterprise Guide and...

Here at OptimalBI we have recently trialled a slightly different approach to our data modelling, with great success. As a consulting business our customers hire us because we’re good and we deliver, usually in an area they don’t have the resource available for...