Entries Published On October, 2012
Kaggle: Making Data Science a Sport
A few months ago, I stumbled upon an article that mentioned a cool site called Kaggle which hosts data-related “competitions”. Through this site, data problems collide with solutions as data-experts compete against each other for prizes (cash and/or bragging rights) to see who can come up with the most effective, elegant, efficient solution to each …
Interacting With Live Data via Power View During a Presentation: Worth the Risk?
Over the past few months I’ve delivered a few presentations for current clients (and potential leads) covering the “Sharepoint BI Portal”. The presentation is very demo-heavy and focuses on the self-service capabilities of the Micrsoft 2012 BI stack when integrated with Sharepoint 2010 and built upon a well constructed BI Semantic Model (BISM). This morning …
Value of Integrating Facebook Data For Customer Analysis
Unless you recently awoke from a coma, you probably noticed that Facebook filed for IPO earlier this year. The stock opened at $38/share valuing the company at ~$104 billion. Since then, the stock has gotten absolutely crushed as critics everywhere have come crawling out of the wood work with claims about Facebook’s mobile strategy (or …
Column-Stores For Wide and Sparse Data
Over the weekend I read a paper titled Column-Stores For Wide and Sparse Data by Daniel J. Abadi. Below is a quick summary of the points made by Abadi followed by some thoughts / application for SQL Server’s ColumnStore index. Wide Tables & Column “Elimination” I’ve already discussed (in a previous post) why ColumnStores are …