Doing IRR With SQL Server
How to do IRR with SQL Server
How We Saved £20,000 a Year by Leveraging Azure
The Problem: The client has a business partner who manages a particular application and its database for them. The client was relying on periodic data extracts for business intelligence and operational data. This was a real drag on business operations in an era when everyone expects near real-time information. We…
Cipher Feedback Encryption Woes on Windows
I had a problem with a private DSA key that was encrypted with DES-EDE3-CFB. CFB is a valid block cypher encreyption mode (you can read all about it here) but it is unrecognised by common Windows SFTP utilities such as FileZilla and WinSCP. When I tried to convert it by…
You need a data warehouse.
Says who? Says me! There is a received wisdom in the world of business intelligence that says you need a data warehouse in your business, but is this true? Why do you need a data warehouse? The most important reason is to get a single version of the truth, or…
BimlScript and Automated ETL Part 2
Implementing the Pattern Now that we have the requisite metadata it’s time to use it to create our Biml files. In order to handle the requirements of different feeds, i.e. different target dimension and fact tables, some files will require data to be unpivoted and some will contain multiple demographic…
Random thoughts on data
For as long as I can remember I have been intimately involved with data. Moving it, cleaning it, providing it to the business; either pre-aggregated for immediate consumption or the raw stuff for further analysis. Always I have been concerned with automating the pipeline so that the latest data is…
BimlScript and Automated ETL Part 1
Or a prescriptive pattern for automating the building of sophisticated data warehouses based upon a simple metadata store There are lots of Biml articles that discuss strategies for generating SSIS packages to load data warehouses that are essentially copies of the production DB. These strategies usually leverage the built in…