A Danish company named ‘Uncle Grey‘ tried to recruit new employees by using In-Game advertising!
Sponsoring big players, In-Game advertisements and who knows what else 🙂
Monthly Archives: August 2012
What is Social Analytics? (Social Business Intelligence)
Social Media Analytics: Monitor, Measure and Manage Your Reputation on the Wild Wild Web of Social Media.
Social Media Analytics is a must-have for campaigns and organizations eager to track, understand and measure word of mouth in the ether of blogs, social networks and micro-blogging applications.
(Wikipedia is terrible btw)
A couple of populair terms about Social (Media) Analytics:
How does it work?
What will be the result of this kind of analysis?
Want to read more?
Actionable Social Analytics
What is Big Data?
Big Data – Definition
There is no universal definition of what constitutes “Big Data” and Wikipedia offers only a very weak and incomplete one: “Big data is a term applied to data sets whose size is beyond the ability of commonly used software tools to capture, manage, and process the data within a tolerable elapsed time”.
IBM offers a good, simple overview:
Big data spans three dimensions: Volume, Velocity and Variety.
Volume – Big data comes in one size: large. Enterprises are awash with data, easily amassing terabytes and even petabytes of information.
Velocity – Often time-sensitive, big data must be used as it is streaming in to the enterprise in order to maximize its value to the business.
Variety – Big data extends beyond structured data, including unstructured data of all varieties: text, audio, video, click streams, log files and more.
Bryan Smith of MSDN adds a fourth V:
Variability – Defined as the differing ways in which the data may be interpreted. Differing questions require differing interpretations.
Google Trends on Big Data:
Below is a figure from Google Trends showing the growth of search interest for “big data” as compared to “web analytics” and “business intelligence”:
Big Data Terms / Tags:
Want to read more about Big Data?
Marc Smith from Social Media Research Foundation Speaks on Big Data
Gartner’s 2012 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies
Gartner published it’s annual ‘Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies‘ last week and (like it always does) it inspires!
Read the full article here.
Here it is, this year’s Hype Cycle!
And like you would have guessed, the hot topics this year are:
Big Data
3D Printing (Lara Croft example)
Sculpture and Wire Frames by Spike_Wolf.
Want to see more? Click here (Dutch technology website)
Social Analytics
The newcomers!:
Holographic Displays
3D Bioprinting
Gartner’s 2011 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies
Updated my Curriculum Vitae (CV) / Resume!
As we speak, I’ve updated my Curriculum Vitae (CV) / Resume!
Was about time 🙂
If you’re interested, you’ll be able to view it anytime on my personal website (here).
SSRS Default Date Parameter values (cookbook special)
Today I caught myself re-typing these so very common pieces of code…but there won’t be a next time!
CTRL+A…CTRL+C…TAB…CTRL+V…CTRL+S 😀
Current date:
=CDate(
CSTR(YEAR(NOW()))+"-"+
CSTR(MONTH(NOW()))+"-"+
CSTR(DAY(NOW()))
)
Previous week (-7 days):
=DateAdd(DateInterval.Day,-7,
CDate(
CSTR(YEAR(NOW()))+"-"+
CSTR(MONTH(NOW()))+"-"+
CSTR(DAY(NOW()))
)
)
First day of the current month:
=CDate(
CSTR(YEAR(NOW()))+"-"+
CSTR(MONTH(NOW()))+"-01"
)
First day of the previous month:
=DateAdd(DateInterval.Month,-1,
CDate(
CSTR(YEAR(NOW()))+"-"+
CSTR(MONTH(NOW()))+"-01"
)
)
Last day of the previous month:
=DateAdd(DateInterval.Day,-1,
CDate(
CSTR(YEAR(NOW()))+"-"+
CSTR(MONTH(NOW()))+"-01"
)
)
BumbleBI launched service provider: SQL Hotel – Shared and dedicated hosting of SQL Server databases and solutions
BumbleBI launched a new service provider called:
SQL Hotel – Shared and dedicated hosting of SQL Server databases and solutions.
Our servers are hosted in EasyNet’s datacenter at Schiphol-Rijk (Amsterdam, The Netherlands) which is directly connected to one of the world’s fastest internet hubs: Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMS-IX).
Ideal for smaller databases without paying the expensive licensing costs.
Or for the large corporations for world-wide database access for free usage of Excel, PowerPivot, Power View and/or tablet apps.
Our Microsoft Business Intelligence (BI) consultants can support deploying your data to this cloud-environment (near realtime of by a daily import job).
The databases of these software suites can be made available in our SQL Hotel environment for analysis, reporting, data mining and more:
Interested? Check one of our websites:
– SQLHotel.nl
– SQLServerDatabaseHosting.com
Spread the word!
How to log all SQL Server and SQL Agent starts
SQL Server
To log all SQL Server starts, simply execute the T-SQL code provided below to create a new table and Stored Procedure (SP) to log this event:
USE LoggingDB
GO
CREATE TABLE dbo.SQLServerStartTimes
(
LogId INT IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
StartTime DATETIME NOT NULL
CONSTRAINT DF_ServerStartTimes_StartTime DEFAULT GETDATE()
)
USE master
GO
CREATE PROCEDURE dbo.sp_LogSQLServerStart
AS
BEGIN
SET NOCOUNT ON
PRINT '*** LOGGING SERVER STARTUP TIME ***'
INSERT INTO LoggingDB.dbo.SQLServerStartTimes DEFAULT VALUES
END
GO
To trigger/execute this SP once SQL Server starts, use this statement (more on MSDN about this built-in Stored Procedure)
EXEC SP_PROCOPTION sp_LogSQLServerStart, 'STARTUP', 'ON'
GO
Result:
SQL Agent
For SQL Agent starts, simply execute the T-SQL code provided below to create a new table and SP to log this event:
USE LoggingDB
GO
CREATE TABLE dbo.SQLAgentStartTimes
(
LogId INT IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
StartTime DATETIME NOT NULL
CONSTRAINT DF_SQLAgentStartTimes_StartTime DEFAULT GETDATE()
)
USE master
GO
CREATE PROCEDURE dbo.sp_LogSQLAgentStart
AS
BEGIN
SET NOCOUNT ON
PRINT '*** LOGGING SERVER STARTUP TIME ***'
INSERT INTO LoggingDB.dbo.SQLAgentStartTimes DEFAULT VALUES
END
Now, since all coding is done…we still need to setup a new SQL Agent job to execute this SP once SQL Agent starts.
Create a new job in SQL Agent and click on Schedules, select
Result:
Special thanks to Armando Prato for the inspiration!
Chrome Experiment: Arms Trade / Globe
I stumbled upon this very nice graphical representation by Google about the global arms trade: Here
Google has created an interactive visualization that shows patterns and trends in imports and exports of small arms and ammunition across the world, which it says is an $8.5 billion industry.
The graphic, which Google built using the open source WebGL Globe on Google’s Chrome Experiments site, shows the earth with fiery lines that indicate countries’ imports and exports of ammunition and small arms, such as revolvers, assault rifles, and light machine guns. The United States is white hot with activity—in 2010 it imported $995,769,657 and exported $606,577,243 worth of munitions. That’s up from $272,612,334 and $455,520,281, respectively, in 1992.
The visualization is interactive in that you can manipulate it and zoom in and out of the globe, click on various countries to change the perspective, and use a timeline at the bottom to see trading patterns over the years.
“You can see, for example, that the scale of the global trade in ammunition rivals the scale of trade in actual weapons, an insight underexplored by policymakers today in conflict prevention and resolution,” writes Scott Carpenter, deputy director of Google Ideas, in a recent post on Google’s official blog.
The interactive visualization is part of the Google Ideas initiative on illicit networks and was produced by Google’s Creative Lab team working with the think tank Igarape Institute. The groups used more than 1 million data points garnered from the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) small arms database.
(Full source of the story can be found here)
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 2 (SP2) was released!
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 2 (SP2) was released last week!
SQL Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 2 (SP2) is now available for download. SQL Server 2008 R2 service packs are cumulative and can be used to upgrade all releases of SQL Server 2008 R2 to Service Pack 2. SQL Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 2 contains Cumulative Update 1 to 5 from SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1. The package can be used to upgrade the following SQL Server 2008 R2 editions:
SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Computing Edition
SQL Server 2008 R2 Datacenter Edition
SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition and Developer Edition
SQL Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition
SQL Server 2008 R2 Web Edition
SQL Server 2008 R2 Workgroup Edition
SQL Server 2008 R2 Express Edition
All relevant URL’s:
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 2
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 2 Express Edition
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 2 Feature Pack
A great overview of all SQL Server Builds can be found here.
Clint Huijbers' Blog 