Search Results

Search found 295 results on 12 pages for 'darren cook'.

Page 2/12 | < Previous Page | 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12  | Next Page >

  • BI Survey 14

    - by Darren Gosbell
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/darrengosbell/archive/2014/05/23/bi-survey-14.aspxIt's BI Survey time again :) If you haven't done this before here is a little background on it from the guys that run it: The BI Survey, published by BARC, is the world's largest and most comprehensive annual survey of the real world experiences of business intelligence software users. Now in its fourteenth year, The BI Survey regularly attracts around 3000 responses from a global audience. It provides an invaluable resource to companies deciding which software to select and to vendors who want to understand the needs of the market. The Survey is funded by its readers, not by the participant vendors. As with the previous thirteen editions, no vendors have been involved in any way with the formulation of The BI Survey. Unlike most other surveys, it is not commissioned, sponsored or influenced by vendors. Here is a link to the survey: https://digiumenterprise.com/answer/?link=1981-ZYQSEY8B If you take the survey you will get access to a summary of the results. By helping to promote the survey here I'll get access to some more detailed results including some country specific analysis so it will be interesting to see the results.

    Read the article

  • Making meetings much more efficient

    - by John Paul Cook
    Water. Yes, it’s that simple. There needs to be a rule that whoever convenes a meeting be required to drink water. Half a liter of water when the meeting begins and another half a liter every half hour thereafter. That simple rule will motivate the meeting organizer to find closure quickly – and the exit. What day did I post this? Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!...(read more)

    Read the article

  • Making meetings much more efficient

    - by John Paul Cook
    Water. Yes, that’s simple. There needs to be a rule that whoever convenes a meeting be required to drink water. Half a liter of water when the meeting begins and another half a liter every half hour thereafter. That simple rule will motivate the meeting organizer to find closure quickly – and the exit. What day did I post this? Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!...(read more)

    Read the article

  • Poll: Foreign Key Constraints

    - by Darren Gosbell
    Do you create foreign key constraints between dimensions and facts in your relational star schemas? I don't want to bias the results in any way, so I won't post my opinion just yet. But a recent discussion got me thinking about the following question and I'm interested to hear what other peoples approaches are. Follow this link to get to the online poll Feel free to post comments if you want to explain the reasons for your answer.

    Read the article

  • Poll Results: Foreign Key Constraints

    - by Darren Gosbell
    A few weeks ago I did the following post asking people – if they used foreign key constraints in their star schemas. The poll is still open if you are interested in adding to it, but here is what the chart looks like as of today. (at the bottom of the poll itself there is a link to the live results, unfortunately I cannot link the live results in here as the blogging platform blocks the required javascript)   Interestingly the results are fairly even. Of the 78 respondents, fractionally over half at least aim to start with referential integrity in their star schemas. I did not want to influence the results by sharing my opinion, but my personal preference is to always aim to have foreign key constraints. But at the same time, I am pragmatic about it, I do have projects where for various reasons some constraints are not defined. And I also have other designs that I have inherited, where it would just be too much work to go back and add foreign key constraints. If you are going to implement foreign keys in your star schema, they really need to be there at the start. In fact this poll was was the result of a feature request for BIDSHelper asking for a feature to check for null/missing foreign keys and I am entirely convinced that BIDS is the wrong place for this sort of functionality. BIDS is a design tool, your data needs to be constantly checked for consistency. It's not that I think that it's impossible to get a design working without foreign key constraints, but I like the idea of failing as soon as possible if there is an error and enforcing foreign key constraints lets me "fail early" if there are constancy issues with my data. By far the biggest concern with foreign keys is performance and I suppose I'm curious as to how often people actually measure and quantify this. I worked on a project a number of years ago that had very large data volumes and we did find that foreign key constraints did have a measurable impact, but what we did was to disable the constraints before loading the data, then enabled and checked them afterwards. This saved as time (although not as much as not having constraints at all), but still let us know early in the process if there were any consistency issues. For the people that do not have consistent data, if you have ETL processes that you control that are building your star schema which you also control, then to be blunt you only have yourself to blame. It is the job of the ETL process to make the data consistent. There are techniques for handling situations like missing data as well as  early and late arriving data. Ralph Kimball's book – The Data Warehouse Toolkit goes through some design patterns for handling data consistency. Having foreign key relationships can also help the relational engine to optimize queries as noted in this recent blog post by Boyan Penev

    Read the article

  • Running 32-bit SSIS in a 64-bit Environment

    - by John Paul Cook
    After my recent post on where to find the 32-bit ODBC Administrator on a 64-bit SQL Server, a new question was asked about how to get SSIS to run with the 32-bit ODBC instead of the 64-bit ODBC. You need to make a simple configuration change to the properties of your BIDS solution. Here I have a solution called 32bitODBC and it needs to run in 32-bit mode, not 64-bit mode. Since I have a 64-bit SQL Server, BIDS defaults to using the 64-bit runtime. To override this setting, go to the property pages...(read more)

    Read the article

  • BI Beginner: Excel 2013 Power View Maps

    - by John Paul Cook
    If you know how to use Excel, you can be productive in minutes with the new features of Excel 2013. Don’t be intimidated. Follow these simple steps and produce something snazzy! The Excel file used in this example comes from the following SQL Server query which was run against the AdventureWorks2012 database: SELECT Purchasing . Vendor . Name , Person . Address . City , Person . StateProvince . Name AS State FROM Purchasing . Vendor INNER JOIN Person . BusinessEntityAddress ON Purchasing . Vendor...(read more)

    Read the article

  • Oracle Solaris 11.1 Blog Post Roundup

    - by Larry Wake
    Here are a few recent posts about the also-recent Oracle Solaris 11.1 release: Title Author What's New in Solaris 11.1? Karoly Vegh New ZFS Encryption features in Solaris 11.1 Darren Moffat Solaris 11.1: Encrypted Immutable Zones on (ZFS) Shared Storage Darren Moffat High Resolution Timeouts Steve Sistare Solaris 11.1: Changes to included FOSS packages Alan Coopersmith Documentation Changes in Solaris 11.1 Alan Coopersmith How to Update to Oracle Solaris 11.1 Usingthe Image Packaging System Peter Dennis svcbundle for easier SMF manifest creation Glynn Foster Controlling server configurations with IPS Bart Smallders You can also see Markus Weber's list of interesting posts about Oracle Solaris 11 from last year, or take a look at my shortcut on how to search for Solaris posts by tag. If that's not enough, don't forget to register for next Wednesday's Oracle Solaris 11.1 and Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.1 webcast with a live Q&A. It's November 7th, at 8 AM PT. The last time we did this, we got almost 300 questions, so for Wednesday, we're making sure we've got lots of engineers with fingers poised over their keyboards, ready for action.

    Read the article

  • PowerShell One Liner: Duplicating a folder structure in a Sharepoint document library

    - by Darren Gosbell
    I was asked by someone at work the other day, if it was possible in Sharepoint to create a set of top level folders in one document library based on the set of folders in another library. One document library has a set of top level folders that is basically a client list and we needed to create the same top level folders in another library. I knew that it was possible to open a Sharepoint document library in explorer using a UNC style path and that you could map a drive using a technique like this one: http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2007/11/16/can-i-map-a-document-library-as-a-mapped-drive/. But while explorer would let us copy the folders, it would also take all of the folder contents too, which was not what we wanted. So I figured that some sort of PowerShell script was probably the way to go and it turned out to be even easier than I thought. The following script did it in one line, so I thought I would post it here in my "online memory". :) dir "\\sharepoint\client documents" | where {$_.PSIsContainer} | % {mkdir "\\sharepoint\admin documents\$($_.Name)"} I use "dir" to get a listing from the source folder, pipe it through "where" to get only objects that are folders and then do a foreach (using the % alias) and call "mkdir".

    Read the article

  • New BIDSHelper Release - 1.4.3.0

    - by Darren Gosbell
    Today we released an update for BIDSHelper which you can download from here This release addresses the following issues: For some people the BIDS Helper extensions to the Project Properties page for the SSIS Deploy plugin was not available. Copy and Paste in errors in SSIS packages Updates to Parent-Child Dim Naturalizer The following features are new in this release: Analysis Services Many-to-Many Matrix Compression Roles Report General Preferences   If you are interested to find out what else BIDSHelper can do, full documentation of all the features is available on the project website here: http://bidshelper.codeplex.com

    Read the article

  • 32-bit ODBC on Windows Server 2008 R2

    - by John Paul Cook
    Heterogeneous data access requires having the right drivers. If you have to use 32-bit ODBC drivers, you won’t find then when you start the Microsoft ODBC Administrator because it is 64-bit. The 32-bit ODBC Administrator is found here: C:\Windows\SysWOW64\odbcad32.exe You might want to make a shortcut for it to make it easy to find. You’ll need to use it when make 32-bit ODBC data connections. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!...(read more)

    Read the article

  • Best way to use GIT to maintain web application template

    - by Darren
    I am a sole developer and I have a web application template that I have created in Visual Studio. I am using GIT for source control, but only on my development machine. Presently I have a master and I create branches for new features, merging them back in to the master as I complete the features. I am at a point now where I am ready to use the template for deployments, and of course I want to continue adding new features via branching/merging. My question is: what would be the typical/recommended way for me to create application deployments based on the master? Should I clone the repository into a new directory that is for a particular web application? Or should I also use branching to do project development based on the main project? The projects would never be merged back into the master. However, it would be nice if I could merge future features into the master and have the ability to incorporate them into previously completed projects if desired. For more specific details of my environment: I am using TortoiseGIT in Windows 7, Visual Studio 2012, ASP.NET Web Pages. Obviously the main differences between deployments would simply be differing pages, CSS files and jQuery scripts. I found this post as I was writing this one. In order to do this should I clone the master repository and checkout from it?

    Read the article

  • Justification for learning/implementing newer Microsoft technologies

    - by Darren
    I work at a large healthcare organization as a mid-level software developer. I have over 10 years experience in the IT industry using Microsoft technologies (ASP.NET & SQL Server). When I go to conferences, code camps, .net user group meetings, I hear of all kinds of new tools and technologies: MVC, LINQ, Entity Framework, WCF Web Services, etc. I guess you could say I'm in my comfort zone using the same old stuff from asp.net 2.0. I use typed datasets for my data access layer. I use web forms and feature rich server controls with master pages. I know how to use plain old SQL and create queries in my typed datasets to get at data my applications need. Throughout my career, I'm always sensitive to not become obsolete with my skill set. What I currently use works fine and my development time is fast. But I'm concerned that if I were to be laid off, I would be asked in interviews how many MVC apps I've written. Or how I am with LINQ or WCF web services. I know that it doesn't matter how many conferences, books, or videos I watch on some new technology...I have to implement/use it or it simply won't sink in. Also, managers who interview don't care how much someone reads up on something, only real use and experience with a technology. I have a new project to write. I've gone to my manager and have asked for additional time for the project for learning/implementing technology I may not be familiar with. Our organization encourages its employees to "learn and grow" and to continue are education. But I always get resistance when I ask for more time to ramp up on something new to implement. My manager is asking for concrete business reasons for implementing these new technologies. I don't have business reasons. My reasons are because I don't want to become obsolete. I could say it would make the project more maintainable in the future by other developers since at some point people could stop using these older technologies, but that' about all I can think of. Does Linq/Entity Framework/MCV apps perform better? So much so that the customers (users in departments I'm creating this app for) need? I doubt it. I'm interested in you guy's thoughts on this. Do many of you have similar plights with trying to use newer upcoming technologies? I doubt I'm on the bleeding edge of technology, either. Are there "business reasons" that you would bring to light for using these technologies? Thanks in advance! Sorry for the long wall of text.

    Read the article

  • Oracle Linked Servers on Windows Server 2008 R2

    - by John Paul Cook
    Oracle hasn’t yet released versions of its client software for Windows Server 2008 R2. If you need to create an Oracle linked server, that’s a problem. You’ll see this installation block when attempting to install the Oracle client software for Windows Server 2008: It’s very simple to fix. Check the first checkbox to make the installer ignore the version check. Click Next and ignore the warning you’ll see. The installation should complete successfully. Windows does offer various strategies for mitigating...(read more)

    Read the article

  • .htaccess - lose the file .html extension

    - by Darren Sweeney
    I'm having a bad .htaccess day! I want a user to be able to type the URL mysite.com/about instead of mysite.com/about.html On .htaccess file I have: RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ /$1.html [NC,L] But this simply does not work? I will add though that if i try this further inside the site e.g. mysite.com/pages/contact Works perfectly whether I have the above code in the .htaccess or not What am I doing wrong?

    Read the article

  • Project Idea - Android

    - by Darren Young
    Hi, I am trying to come up with some project ideas for my final year at University, and I think that I have one that would offer be a (massive) challenge, and something I could potentially make money from. I just want to check something. Is it possible(from a photograph), to be able to determine somebodys face and the individual parts of that face - eyes, ears, nose, etc? This will probably be via Android. Thanks.

    Read the article

  • Conways Game of Life C#

    - by Darren Young
    Hi, Not sure if this is the correct place for this question or SO - mods please move if necessary. I am going to have a go at creating GoL over the weekend as a little test project : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life I understand the algorithm, however I just wanted to check regarding the implementation, from maybe somebody that has tried it. Essentially, my first (basic) implementation, will be a static grid at a set speed. If I understand correctly, these are the steps I will need: Initial seed Create 2d array with initial set up Foreach iteration, create temporary array, calculating each cells new state based on the Game of Life algorithm Assign temp array to proper array. Redraw grid from proper array. My concerns are over speed. When I am populating the grid from the array, would it simply be a case of looping through the array, assigning on or off to each grid cell and then redraw the grid? Am I on the correct path?

    Read the article

  • Root cannot access /dev/urandom

    - by Darren Newton
    I am trying to generate a GPG key, and I cannot generate enough entropy. So I installed rng-tools and tried following these instructions: http://serverfault.com/questions/214605/gpg-not-enough-entropy When I am logged in as root, and try to run rngd -r /dev/urandom I get the following error: can't open /dev/random: Permission denied I find this disturbing as I am root. This is Ubuntu on a virtual server (via Parallels I believe.)

    Read the article

  • MDX needs a function or macro syntax

    - by Darren Gosbell
    I was having an interesting discussion with a few people about the impact of named sets on performance (the same discussion noted by Chris Webb here: http://cwebbbi.wordpress.com/2011/03/16/referencing-named-sets-in-calculations). And apparently the core of the performance issue comes down to the way named sets are materialized within the SSAS engine. Which lead me to the thought that what we really need is a syntax for declaring a non-materialized set or to take this even further a way of declaring an MDX expression as function or macro so that it can be re-used in multiple places. Because sometimes you do want the set materialised, such as when you use an ordered set for calculating rankings. But a lot of the time we just want to make our MDX modular and want to avoid having to repeat the same code over and over. I did some searches on connect and could not find any similar suggestions so I posted one here: https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/651646/mdx-macro-or-function-syntax Although apparently I did not search quite hard enough as Chris Webb made a similar suggestion some time ago, although he also included a request for true MDX stored procedures (not the .Net style stored procs that we have at the moment): https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/473694/create-parameterised-queries-and-functions-on-the-server Chris also pointed out this post that he did last year http://cwebbbi.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/iccube/ where he pointed out that the icCube product already has this sort of functionality. So if you think either or both of these suggestions is a good idea then I would encourage you to click on the links and vote for them.

    Read the article

  • Unity GUI not in build, but works fine in editor

    - by Darren
    I have: GUITexture attached to an object A script that has GUIStyles created for the Textfield and Buttons that are created in OnGUI(). This script is attached to the same object in number 1 3 GUIText objects each separate from the above. A script that enables the GUITexture and the script in number 1 and 2 respectively This is how it is supposed to work: When I cross the finish line, number 4 script enables number 1 GUITexture component and number 2 script component. The script component uses one of number 3's GUIText objects to show you your best lap time, and also makes a GUI.Textfield for name entry and 2 GUI.Buttons for "Submit" and "Skip". If you hit "Submit" the script will submit the time. No matter which button you press, The remaining 2 GUIText objects from number 3 will show you the top 10 best times. For some reason, when I run it in editor, everything works 100%, but when I'm in different kinds of builds, the results vary. When I am in a webplayer, The GUITexture and the textfield and buttons appear, but the textfield and buttons are plain and have no evidence of GUIStyles. When I click one of the buttons, the score gets submitted but I do not get the fastest times showing. When I am in a standalone build, the GUITexture shows up, but nothing else does. If I remove the GUIStyle parameter of the GUI.Textfield and GUI.Button, they show up. Why am I getting these variations and how can I fix it? Code below: void Start () { Names.text = ""; Times.text = ""; YourBestTime.text = "Your Best Lap: " + bestTime + "\nEnter your name:"; //StartCoroutine(GetTimes("Test")); } void Update() { if (!ShowButtons && !GettingTimes) { StartCoroutine(GetTimes()); GettingTimes = true; } } IEnumerator GetTimes () { Debug.Log("Getting times"); YourBestTime.text = "Loading Best Lap Times"; WWW times_get = new WWW(GetTimesUrl); yield return times_get; WWW names_get = new WWW(GetNamesUrl); yield return names_get; if(times_get.error != null || names_get.error != null) { print("There was an error retrieiving the data: " + names_get.error + times_get.error); } else { Times.text = times_get.text; Names.text = names_get.text; YourBestTime.text = "Your Best Lap: " + bestTime; } } IEnumerator PostLapTime (string Name, string LapTime) { string hash= MD5.Md5Sum(Name + LapTime + secretKey); string bestTime_url = SubmitTimeUrl + "&Name=" + WWW.EscapeURL(Name) + "&LapTime=" + LapTime + "&hash=" + hash; Debug.Log (bestTime_url); // Post the URL to the site and create a download object to get the result. WWW hs_post = new WWW(bestTime_url); //label = "Submitting..."; yield return hs_post; // Wait until the download is done if (hs_post.error != null) { print("There was an error posting the lap time: " + hs_post.error); //label = "Error: " + hs_post.error; //show = false; } else { Debug.Log("Posted: " + hs_post.text); ShowButtons = false; PostingTime = false; } } void OnGUI() { if (ShowButtons) { //makes text box nameString = GUI.TextField( new Rect((Screen.width/2)-111, (Screen.height/2)-130, 222, 25), nameString, 20, TextboxStyle); if (GUI.Button( new Rect( (Screen.width/2-74.0f), (Screen.height/2)- 90, 64, 32), "Submit", ButtonStyle)) { //SUBMIT TIME if (nameString == "") { nameString = "Player"; } if (!PostingTime) { StartCoroutine(PostLapTime(nameString, bestTime)); PostingTime = true; } } else if (GUI.Button( new Rect( (Screen.width/2+10.0f), (Screen.height/2)- 90, 64, 32), "Skip", ButtonStyle)) { ShowButtons = false; } } } }

    Read the article

  • Windows 8 SDK and Orca

    - by John Paul Cook
    The Windows 8 SDK has a new version of Orca for those of us who edit msi files. The download is for a small executable, sdksetup.exe which causes the following dialog box to appear. If you only want Orca and you don’t want to install the SDK, override the default and download all of the files to the location of your choice. In this example, the files are downloaded to D:\Media\Windows8\SDK Figure 1. Downloading the Windows 8 SDK to D:\Media\Windows8\SDK instead of installing it. Click the D ownload...(read more)

    Read the article

  • [OT] Gates Millenium Scholars scholarship program

    - by John Paul Cook
    Here's a notice about scholarship opportunities that many students may miss because of being out for the holidays. If you know a bright, deserving student, please alert him or her to this outstanding scholarship opportunity. Here is what I want for Christmas from you, my readers. I want to see LOTS of comments about how you informed a student about this scholarship or otherwise got the word out. Dear Student, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation proudly announces the 2011 Gates Millennium Scholars...(read more)

    Read the article

  • Auditing database source code changes

    - by John Paul Cook
    Auditing changes to database source code can be easily implemented with a database trigger. Here’s a simple implementation of stored procedure auditing using an audit table and a database trigger. It assumes that a schema named Audit already exists. CREATE TABLE Audit . AuditStoredProcedures ( DatabaseName sysname , ObjectName sysname , LoginName sysname , ChangeDate datetime , EventType sysname , EventDataXml xml ); Notice the EventDataXml column. Using an nvarchar column to store the source text...(read more)

    Read the article

  • The Singleton Pattern

    - by Darren Young
    Hi, I am a new programmer (4 months into my first job) and have recently taken an interest in design patterns. One that I have used recently is the Singleton. However, looking at some comments on this thread Overused or abused programming techniques .......it has some bad feedback. Come somebody explain why? I have found it useful in some places, however I could probably have achieved the same without it using a static class. Thanks.

    Read the article

  • When the obvious answer is obviously wrong

    - by John Paul Cook
    This post is about how simple math in T-SQL can produce undesirable results, but first we begin with a math quiz. Answer the following as quickly as possible: You just read pages 100-300 of a book. How many pages did you read? QUICKLY NOW! For those of you who answered 200 pages, I have a new question: Which page did you not read? There were 201 pages to read. If you read 200 pages, you skipped a page! What your answer be if I asked you how many pages did you read if you read pages 1-3? Three pages!...(read more)

    Read the article

< Previous Page | 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12  | Next Page >