Category: SQL Server

Shakespeare famously asked “What’s in a name?” A great deal, as it turns out, since the words used to describe things affects how we perceive them and think about them. Perhaps it’s the rapid rate of change that makes technology particularly susceptible to the effects of how we use words to describe things. Terms too […]

You probably thought that the chapter on binary number systems in your Intro to Computer Science textbook would never have to be opened again, especially now that you’re a report writer or a data analyst and generally don’t get too close to the silicon. SQL Server DBAs bump into binary numbers from time to time […]

Using Microsoft olapR to Bring Analysis Services OLAP Data Into R Online Anaytical Processing (OLAP) and the R statistical language are both children of the 1990s. However, for much of the intervening time they inhabited different worlds. OLAP, and its query language MDX, lived in the world of databases and queries while R was the […]

For me, one of the most valuable features of Power BI is the ease with which I can mashup data from a variety of different data sources. This, of course, requires importing data into Power BI’s internal xVelocity engine. For many others, however, it is critical to create Power BI reports and dashboards that reflect […]

Watson, IBM’s poster child for artificial intelligence, could not have been built using a single type of AI technology. This is hardly surprising. The intelligence needed to understand a question can differ quite dramatically from the intelligence needed to answer it. Indeed, upon understanding a question it takes intelligence to know what techniques are most […]