It seems bias in algorithms is a very hot topic at the moment. In a surprisingly honest move Twitter admits their algorithms aren't always impartial: Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey has told US lawmakers the company's algorithms have not always been...

Recently I have bumped into this blog by David Nicholson. I have heard an opinion that the Graph database and the Data Vault look similar before. This idea comes to mind when you see diagrams next to each other. (You can draw them to be identical, but it doesn't prove...

Introduction Web accessibility may be a phrase that evokes a number of reactions in different people. As a developer you may feel anything from relief to indifference to contempt. The fact is accessibility is important, easier than you might think, and can still look...

Microsoft has introduced a new feature of graph database in SQL Server 2017. This is not a new idea, graph platforms were on the market for a while now. I have decided to dive in to understand why graph databases are special and how they could be used in Business...

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....

For the first time I am on the project that has big enough Data Warehouse tables that could be partitioned. While many data warehouses are big, in my previous projects a single table has rarely exceeded a few million rows, which means it is too early to think about...

Chatbots are still a hot topic, and can be a great way to develop a more natural interfaces for our applications. They can be quite a interesting way to make a computer do fun stuff without the need to train users or assume knowledge, but as per usual with hot trends...

Ever needed to make sense of 13 million files?  Shaun did.  Where to start?  Start by thinking about the business, rather than the data.  Think about Who in the business Does What? My brief I was given complete discretion on how to turn millions of files into useful...

Data Warehouse solutions often include several copies of the same structure, I mean Development, Production and often Test and Pre-Production environments. When the Data Warehousing team works on the new piece of requirements, they don't want to put fully functioning...

I recently attended SUNZ 2018. Mike Frost - Director, Product Management at SAS, spoke on Getting Automated Outcomes in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.  As well as being a sassy dresser Mike spoke highly of AI and that it was the way of the future, but also had a...

MongoDB Atlas is a topic of conversation for many of the people who use MongoDB on a day-to-day basis, so I thought that I would quickly throw together a blog outlining what Atlas is and when/why you should use it. What MongoDB Atlas is MongoDB's managed MongoDB as a...

Imagine for a minute, a conversation between a database administrator and a data warehouse developer. DBA asks: "I could never understand what you folks actually do..?" - "Well, we create a single database called a data warehouse where the data from multiple other...

Quite often people ask me, "What's so good about Data Vault that I should immediately start using it instead of the Dimensional modelling I have been using for years?". This is an extremely tough question, so on this point I usually say "You shouldn't, if you are...

With the rise of Digital era more and more organisations want to exchange the data. I'm not talking about Facebook, but mostly about the government organisations I usually work with. One could think that it would be implemented as some sort of API allowing machines to...

MongoDB 3.6 has some awesome features, change streams being my personal favourite (see all the changes here), but what if we have an old MongoDB cluster running on 3.4 and want to use these cool features? Here is how! Note: This guide assumes you installed MongoDB...

Data warehouses are like ogres... and onions. They have layers. Any Data Warehouse architecture will have at least staging and business data layers, also there could be a raw data layer and a reporting layer. Layers, physical or virtual, should be isolated for...

When I had just started university at the beginning of the 21st century our software engineering teacher stood in front of my class of future mathematicians and stated: “Life will force you to learn to code”. So I learned to write good code while I studied maths. When...

MongoDB is a very popular database, in fact, we love blogging about it. But what is MongoDB? And what are the best things to do with it, and what shouldn't I do with it? I get asked this a lot so here are the answers to these questions. Don't worry if you're not a...