Monthly Archives: February 2014

Reports of the PC’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. We’ve all heard that everyone’s just buying tablets and throwing out their keyboards and mice. But, if you live in the real world, you see people using PCs every day. The statistics show that PCs are still selling in large numbers and are used much more […]

Frequently, I have to create a ‘Date Dimension’ table for complex date logic. This is the first script I found on the internet.. that actually works.  Lots of other scripts required SQL 2008 or SQL 2012 notation..  most other scripts were about 20 pages long. This is a very elegant solution. http://mangalpardeshi.blogspot.com/2008/12/how-to-create-time-dimension-in-sql.html [Now, if only […]

Great article on transaction isolation levels.. had to share. http://www.reddit.com/r/Database/comments/1wd7kz/best_explanation_of_transaction_isolation_levels/

Great quiz on SQL indexing. http://use-the-index-luke.com/blog/2014-02/results-three-minutes-sql-performance-quiz

Two and a half years after offering a limited preview, Google has finally opened up Cloud SQL, its managed database service, to all comers. What’s more, it includes a service-level agreement — a sign Google wants users to think of this as a serious business product, not a toy for running a WordPress site. Many […]

If you’re an on-the-job analytics professional, you may feel the pressure starting to build. Big data playtime is over, and real work needs to get done — now. It’s a bit of a “big data shakeout,” in the words of Sarah Gates, vice president of research at the International Institute for Analytics (IIA). I talked […]

In a recent episode of Robin Williams’s sitcom “The Crazy Ones,” a client of his advertising firm forces him to bring on a “quant,” or quantitative analyst. Williams’s character has no idea what a quant is, but his daughter explains that they are an essential part of business nowadays. To me, this is just one […]

I’ve been on public record for decades criticizing the tendency, every few years, to declare a paradigm shift in data management, a “the world will never be the same” kind of change demanding “fundamentally new ways” of doing things that will progress humankind and improve life on earth. Every such “revolution” is accompanied by: Intensive […]