Category: Business Analysis

If business analysts were just people who”analyze businesses” they would have, at most, a passive role that wouldn’t contribute to their organizations’ achieving their goals. The real role of the business analyst is a far more active one and provides the essential link between the organization’s goals and its IT projects. Wikipedia defines four kinds […]

What are Graph Tables? Amy J, a student in Learning Tree’s course 8463, Querying Microsoft SQL Server 2014 asks “I see SQL Server 2017 has a “graph database” feature. How does a graph differ from the old HierarchyID datatype?”. Good question, Amy. While the old hierarchyID datatype can represesnt, in a very simplistic way, an […]

The keywords Hadoop, Big Data, Machine Learning and AI no longer exclusively belong to the boardrooms of top IT companies. As the Advanced Analytics is becoming more mature, different types of businesses are trying to find ways to make use of it to improve their operations. Professional sports leagues were one of the early adapters […]

R Server is dead! Long live Machine Learning Server! The introduction of Microsoft R Server with SQL Server 2016 was tremendously exciting for data scientists and analysts working with “Big Data”. When SQL Server 2017 was released, many were shocked to see that R Server was gone. They were, however, relieved to discover that R […]

One critical aspect of brainstorming and other idea-gathering processes is that one must not judge the ideas as they are presented. After that gathering phase, though, the ideas are useless if no patterns or relationships can be discovered. One good solution for that is the Affinity Diagram. The process was identified in the 1960s by […]