Data Analysis. Random Thoughts

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Data Profiling White Paper
2010-07-16 10:52:00
We've just published our Data Profiling White Paper (PDF) Producing a white paper is something new for us, so any comments or suggestion on how to improve it would be most welcome. More details are available via our Data Profiling page. Drop me a line at david dot ross at citrustechnology dot com. And of course you can Subscribe via RSS read more

Open information
2010-07-09 14:02:00
Open Information is a gathering trend. Governments worldwide are all moving towards open information. But is this always a good thing? The both the US and UK governments are leading the way opening up their data (http://www.data.gov/ and http://data.gov.uk/). And this is something which I've welcomed in the past. But should all information be open? I'd argue that pretty much everything should be opened up, and that it's in the best interest off all concerned, but there are downsides and limits to how far can we go with open information. read more
More About: Open

database market share
2010-06-11 12:40:00
Current database market share figures are hard to come by, so here's my take on this. Included is a discussion of how we came up with these figures. read more
More About: Market , Database , Share

Free debug tool for OLE/ODBC connections
2010-06-08 18:12:00
Staggeringly, forgot to write that we have released a Free debug tool for OLE/ODBC connections. We use this internally to test connection strings for ODBC and OLE connections and to check out what serviced and features those connections expose. Great for checking out supported SQL functions and views. read more
More About: Tool

SQL Tutorial videos
2010-06-04 19:10:00
First in a series of SQL tutorial videos uploaded: Part 1: Background and Introduction to SQL Part 2: Selecting columns and using SQL Aliases read more
More About: Videos , Tutorial

Data Mining Competition
2010-05-27 14:08:00
Nice new website: http://kaggle.com/ for data mining competitions. If you have some data you want modelled you can create a competition online, then anyone can take the data and create a predictive model of it. The first competition will end this weekend. I'll post an update of the results. Okay prizes aren't quite of the Netfix scale, but as a bit of fun and to try out ideas it may be worth a go. read more
More About: Mining , Competition , Data , Data Mining

Ingres User Association (UK) Summer Conference 2010
2010-05-27 09:00:00
This year's Ingres User Association Conference will take place on 8th June 2010 at the Holiday Inn, Coram Street, London WC1N 1HT. For details/registration see http://www.iua.org.uk/ You can Subscribe via RSS http://help.tweetmeme.com/2009/04/06/twee tmeme-button/ -->
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More on website preformance
2010-05-26 13:26:00
Well there's been a lot of effort on everyone's part and we've addressed some of the core issues which were affecting our website's performance. Just want to let you know that things should be much better today. It's not over yet. We have other ideas, but with page loads now down to around 1.5 seconds we're hoping to have gotten on top of it. Any feedback or comments, let us know. You can Subscribe via RSS read more
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SAP to buy Sybase
2010-05-13 09:54:00
So Wall Street Journal says that SAP is buying Sybase. Not many independent database vendors left now. My thinking is that SAP want to be sure that they had control of the underlying platform, but then again that's what I thought MaxDB was for. Taking a quick look at http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/dbos and you can see that SAP supports a pretty varied collection of databases: Various flavours of DB2 Oracle SQL Server read more

Data Analysis & Data Quality Buzz?
2010-05-12 15:05:00
Everyone is looking to rank better and to be easier to find. Browsing Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog and they recommend creating buzz rather than links. Of course that's easier said that done. Know your target and give them what they want and they will tell everyone else etc. But it's not that easy to get to know what people want. We want you feedback read more
More About: Analysis , Data , Buzz