Business-Intelligence

I spend quite a bit of each year working with spatial data (i.e. mostly mapping data but sometimes other data). One of the constant challenges is where to find the spatial data. Another challenge is where to find services that can help you to work with the data. For Australian data, if you haven’t considered Mappify.io, I think you should take a look. You need to create an account before you start but it’s free to create an account to try it out.

2019-11-12

There are many things I like about Snowflake. How they handle case and collations is not one of them. There are currently no rich options for handling case like you have in SQL Server, with detailed options around both collations, and case sensitivity. I’ve previously written about how I think that case-sensitivity is a pox on computing. I see absolutely no value in case-sensitivity in business applications, and a significant downside.

2019-09-27

Like most products, Snowflake comes in a number of editions, and you can see the current editions in the main image above. (Keep in mind that they could always change at any time and to check their site for the current options). First thing I need to say is that I really like the way that most of the SQL code surface is pretty much identical across editions. I wish that was complete coverage but it currently doesn’t include materialized views.

2019-09-06

I’ve been in the IT industry a long time. I see trends come and go. (Mostly they go). At this point, I think I’m an OK judge of what’s going to fly and what isn’t. (Far from perfect but OK). One thing that always puzzles me though is the way the word Modern is used as a put-down for things that aren’t modern, as though it’s a synonym for the word Better.

2019-09-03

I mentioned in my last post in this series, that the Compute layer of Snowflake is basically made up of a series of Virtual Warehouses (VWs). Each VW is an MPP (massively parallel processing) compute cluster that can comprise one or more compute nodes. The number of nodes in the compute cluster is called its “size” and the sizing options are made to resemble T-Shirt sizing, as you can see in the main image above.

2019-08-30

When I was doing some Snowflake training recently, one of the students in the class asked what utility they should use on Windows for splitting a large file into sections. They wanted to split files for better bulk loading performance, to be able to use all available threads. On Linux systems, the split command works fine but the best that most people came up with on Windows was to use Powershell.

2019-08-23

The first thing to understand about Snowflake is that it has a very layered approach. And the layers are quite independent, including how they scale. Cloud Provider Services The lowest level isn’t part of Snowflake; it’s the services that are provided by the underlying cloud provider. As a cloud native application, Snowflake is designed to use services from the cloud provider that they are deployed to, rather than providing all the services themselves.

2019-08-22

Over the last few months, one of my Kiwi buddies (and fellow member of both the MVP and Microsoft Regional Director programs) Reza Rad has been organizing a bunch of us to write a book that’s a collection of ideas from a number of MVPs. It’s the Power BI MVP Book. There are a whole lot of authors from a whole lot of different countries: Reza Rad, Anil Maharjan, Indira Bandari, Liam Bastick, Ken Puls, Jesus Gil, Thomas LeBlanc, Ike Ellis, Matt Allington, Leila Etaati, Markus Ehrenmüller, Ashraf Ghonaim, Eduardo Castro, Manohar Punna, Treb Gatte, Gilbert Quevauvilliers, Michael Johnson, Shree Khanal, Asgeir Gunnarsson, Greg Low, Gogula Aryalingam.

2019-08-16

In recent years, I’ve done a lot of work in software houses (Microsoft calls them ISVs or Independent Software Vendors). Many of these software houses have worked out that they won’t be able to just keep selling their on-premises applications because their customers are asking for cloud-based solutions. And more importantly, the customers want the software houses to manage the applications rather than themselves. So, many of the software houses start trying to turn their on-premises applications into Software as a Service (SaaS) applications.

2019-08-15

A few months back, I started noticing that many of our clients had started to mention Snowflake. In recent years, I’ve been in lots of planning and architectural meetings where there was already a presumption that AWS was being used rather than Azure. I put that down to a great selling job by the AWS people who got corporate IT folk locked into large enterprise agreements early. And so no matter what the technical question is, the answer will be something that runs on AWS.

2019-08-09