I’m sure most people have used or at least heard about the Adobe product Photoshop.  In this blog I’m going to be looking at some of the programs that are offered by Adobe (the makers of Photoshop) and find free software that will fill the same purpose. To get...

It seems to me that a lot of people dislike Vi. I thought a short blog on the essential commands might be helpful. If you just want to know how to either “save your changes and exit” or “exit and abandon your changes” just jump to here.I’ve collated a list of what I...

Importing data At OptimalBI we love to do cool sh!t with data. In my role in data analytics, I like to investigate new data presentation software and had the opportunity to use Amazon QuickSight to see what its data presentation capability was like. What is Amazon...

When is paranoia a good thing?When it comes to downloading files for sure. Using a cryptographic hash function to test the authenticity of a file is a good practice. Such a good practice, that I wanted to make it as easy as possible to perform.I've written two scripts...

We complete daily health checks for our customers and in one specific case, there is a BI tool which notifies us in case of major error, but we also have to scan logs for small errors and unhealthy processes. We check log files for errors, depending on your luck there...

The first I came across Snowflake was a few years ago when I was learning how to use Attunity Replicate, that time I established a data load into this cloud data warehouse. This time I have decided to explore what Snowflake is about. Terminology I watched some...

The Planets and stars aligned; While visiting family near Wellington and our monthly team meeting was on the same week, I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the SUNZ National conference held at the Michael Fowler Centre in Wellington. For this short post...

When I was in Wellington last week, I headed along to the Hays Salary Guide launch for some insights on the labour force, career progression, and what both employers and employees are wanting out of their roles. If this is something that interests you, I highly...

Here at OptimalBI we love data, and we get upset when it's only piled and doesn't produce value. Like many others who have a website, we use Google Analytics to collect its statistics. This is valuable marketing data, so we want to make use of it and help our...

It is hard to overstate the importance of the database testing, erroneous data costs a lot for a business. Yet, when you say testing, developers' noses crinkle as they think it's hard and boring. I have worked on a multiple data warehouse development projects, and I...

As Chatbot is a part of our latest project Optimal Visualisation Engine I was working on the integrating chatbot with the angular application. I am using angular version 7 to do this.

I had the privilege to listen to the Assistant Commissioner of Privacy, Jon Duffy during National Privacy Week. Jon started at the beginning by exploring what defines privacy simply put as, something that identifies a person. He then took us through a highlights real...

Recently I have been a small part of a team at OptimalBI building a new Angular app. When we approached the point where we wanted to start deploying on AWS I did the standard thing I have always done; create a S3 bucket, setup the bucket for hosting static sites,...

Recently I went to the Advanced Data Vault Modeling course run by Hans Hultgren to take my knowledge to the next level. It was held in Melbourne, and this was my first time in Australia as well. It was hilarious to find out that the most attendees were from New...

Kia ora koutou, This month we have a spotlight on Open Source, our team are passionate about open - Open Data, Open Standards and Open Source.  I first worked on an Open Source Linux kernel back in 1989 (showing my age) so have enjoyed watching this space mature and...

After having an opportunity to use Power BI at a client site, I thought it would be interesting to have a go at trying to create a Power BI report using Jira data. To access this data dynamically I chose to use the Jira REST Application Programme Interface (API)...

Introduction Over the last few months I have been part of a project to help streamline the process of visualising data. The infographic above is part of the output of this project. As I was working through the projects new development cycle, the lack of distractions...

We have recently completed a move from Dropbox to SharePoint and given it was such a interesting process I'd thought I'd share some lessons learned. We had been using Dropbox for several years but decided to move onto SharePoint. What we started with was approximately...