Self Service BI needs Data Governance

Self Service BI I think is very important for businesses to implement and can greatly increase productivity of a business as a whole. Let me give you what I think Self Service BI. Self Service BI allows employees to conduct their daily analytics work with little to no IT intervention which increases productivity and gets […]

Data Governance 4 Your Business

What is Data Governance? Data governance refers to the overall management of the availability, usability, integrity, and security of the data deployed in your business. A healthy data governance program includes a governing group, a defined set of procedures (that are repeatable), and a well-designed plan to execute those procedures (documented). I always think of […]

Inner and Outer Joins

Outer and Inner SQL Joins

SQL is such a wonderful language and one question I get from people that I talk with is what is the difference between Outer and Inner Joins. Before we talk about that lets talk about what a Join is. A join is used to compare and combine — literally join — and return specific rows […]

Data Lakes vs Data Warehouses

Data Lakes versus Data Warehouses

What is a data lake? A data lake is a central repository that allows you to collect and hold all of your unstructured and structure data at any scale. What that sentence means is that you do not have to transform your unstructured data to store and then run analytics on it. You can store […]

Slow SQL

Speeding up Slow Queries inside of Postgres

If your tables are large and you are suffering from slow queries the number one place to start to look, is at the indexes on the tables they are usually the culprit. There are several tools that can help you investigate and dissect the problem you are having with your queries within your Postgres database. […]

Analyzing unstructured data

Before we start to talk about unstructured data (or unstructured information) lets define it. Wikipedia defines it as information that either does not have a pre-defined data model or is not organized in a pre-defined manner. Unstructured information is typically text-heavy, but may contain data such as dates, numbers, and facts as well. This results […]

Developing a data collection process and documenting

When building out your business intelligence solution an important step of developing data collection processes and documenting those processes is critical to your business and its success. Why develop a data collection process? Not only will creating a data collection process standardize the way you collect data for all the groups in your business but […]