One of my customers has a very elegant multi-tenanted application with the flexible schema achieved by the extensive use of JSON. While base tables are the same, JSON allow a lot of customisation. Unfortunately, the tradeoff of this is a lot of manipulation...

Data suggests you should get the COVID-19 vaccine Data for this New Zealand focused blog was collected from various worldwide sources between the 18th and 31st August 2021. A list of sources can be found at the end. NZ is currently vaccinating solely with the...

photo by kolibri5 Some RDBMS support SQL statement MERGE, which also referred as upsert. This is a very common task in data warehousing: we compare the source dataset with what has been recorded in DW, insert new values and update those which have changed since the...

I have done a bit of web scraping lately both to automate some of the tasks I do regularly and some to get data for projects. I have learned one big thing from doing this it is ok to do something for a one off ... sometimes. There are times when working on scripts...

I have been using python for a while now and have used it for a number of different projects, but this one surprised me. Word clouds are something I have not used before. Then, I had the idea of using it for a project a while ago and struggled with finding a way to...

How to Use Data to Motivate.I have found myself not motivated to get up and out walking for a while now and know I need to do something about it. However,  even with this realization that I have not done anything about it for the last few weeks. So thought I would try...

We use words each day of our lives it is only when we use these same words on a screen that we think about how we display them. The ways you can play with typography are endless. You can go from the simply use of contrasting fonts for the body text and headings to the...

Carrying on from part 1 where I covered how to remove objects from images in multiple ways I am going to cover some more things that can help you out in Photoshop first up is one of the big things in Photoshop, that being masking. The 2 main ways to mask that I use...

Google Analytics I have been using Google Analytics for a while now mostly to look at the traffic on our site. Why I have been doing this is for a few reasons one of which is just to keep the team up-to-date with our top blogs. Why I do this and why it is important...

Much like Illustrator Photoshop is a great tool for design. Photoshop is not just for editing photos, but for working with images to create works of art for whatever project you happen to be working on. There are many great tools in Photoshop to help you in your...

Sometimes the hardest things about design work is not the design itself, but the countless hours where you are trying to think of what to even make. Sometimes it’s easy you sit at your desk and boom you are going. Other days you are sitting there coming up with ideas...

The time has arrived where I've needed to learn more Python for a project I'm working on.  Here, I share some resources, thoughts and tips in case you find yourself also needing to learn Python, too. Python is an interpreted object-oriented language. This means you...

Most Adobe programs have some things that are easy to do once you know how to do them, but if you don’t it’s not very intuitive so I thought I would do a list of things and tell or show you how to do them. Paste in place This is a very easy thing to do and can be very...

Git is an unbelievably useful tool for version control. It is used to keep a backup of your work that you can revert to if needed. Working with git you are able to make branches of your work. A branch is an independent line of development used when working on any new...

I've found that most of the tutorials for python data work are in videos.  While this can be good, it's not as easy to skim through for that one thing you are stuck on. So I thought I would cover some basics: how to read a csv and some simple data visualization. Read...

I recently created an Apex application for a fun project, which gave me the chance to install Apex on windows EC2. Here are the steps I followed to install Apex, having decided to use ORDS (Web Listener) to run Apex. The version of Oracle Application Express I used is...

At the end of last year, I attended a virtual conference organised by Snowflake for the Asia-Pacific region. The beauty of online event is that you can watch sessions on demand, which is handy as many interesting sessions were scheduled to be streamed at the same...

We've been BEAM*ing for over 7 years now, and really believe it's a solid way to gather business requirements when building Agile data warehouses.  Here's why. What is BEAM✲? BEAM✲ stands for Business Event Analysis & Modelling, and it’s a methodology for...