Common Data Service (CDS) – A Common Data Model. Accelerate your ability to provide insights into your business data
If you’ve been following Microsoft’s recent press releases, chances are you’ll have been exposed to the term “Common Data Service” (CDS). Read on as we shed light on the exact nature of CDS and what it can mean to your business. Back in November 2016, Microsoft released their Common Data Service to general availability. In […]
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European GDPR and its impact on Australian organisations. We give you the low-down from an analytic tool perspective.
Author: Etienne Oosthuysen What is the European GDPR and how will it impact Australian organisations? We give you the low-down from an analytic tool perspective. GDPR (General Data Protection Rules) is the European privacy and data protection law that comes into effect on the 25th of May 2018. This surely doesn’t affect Australian companies, right? […]
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A Power BI Cheat Sheet – demystifying its concepts, variants and licencing
Author: Etienne Oosthuysen Power BI has truly evolved over the past few years. From an add-on in Excel to a true organisation wide BI platform, capable of scaling to meet the demands of large organisations; both in terms of data volumes and the number of users. Power BI now has multiple flavors and a much […]
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Blockchain in bits – A technical insight
In our previous two articles, we articulated several real-life use cases for Blockchain implementations, and we have also elaborated conceptually how Blockchain differs from current/previous data storage architecture as well as other conceptual benefits of Blockchain as a platform. In this article, we touch upon the technical components of Blockchain networks and Smart Contracts, and […]
Read MoreBlockchain, lifting the lid on confusing concepts
In the previous article An Internet of Value – Blockchain, beyond the hype and why CxO’s must take note, we articulated why blockchain is more than just hype and provided some real-life use cases as to where/how blockchain is already helping businesses. But we want to dig deeper within this article, the second in a series […]
Read MoreAn Internet of Value – Blockchain, beyond the hype and why CxO’s must take note
Author: Etienne Oosthuysen A Blockchain, in its simplest form, is a distributed database system where there is no one master (primary) database, but many databases that are all considered primary. All parties participate in populating entries into the respective databases and receive the entries of the other participants. But how does this apply to your […]
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ETL as a Service – Lifting & Shifting your existing SSIS ETL to Azure
Author: Jake Deed Why a trend towards PaaS over IaaS ETL and how this relates to SSIS Businesses are moving more towards environments where infrastructure is invisible to the business; where Platforms as a Service (PaaS) are developed, deployed and managed in the cloud to reduce operational infrastructure overhead costs as well as increase the […]
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Chatbots – how the Azure bot framework is changing the AI game
Author: Etienne Oosthuysen What are Chatbots? Communication underpins intelligence. And language underpins communication. But language is complex and must be understood through the prism of intent and understanding. For example: Take the term, “thong” – in Australian slang this means flip-flops, a meaning lost on someone not familiar with Australian slang, as it means underwear […]
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Power BI Report Server – A Quick Walk Through
Just about any implementation of a reporting environment within an organisation will have different styles of reports for different purposes. These reports may be operational\paginated, self-service using Excel, and\or highly interactive and user-friendly Power BI reports. The central question then beckons, how do all our users access these reports within one location which is easily […]
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Game changing – see how Power BI models become Azure Analysis Services models
Author: Etienne Oosthuysen Businesses are increasingly embracing an empowered regime when it comes to data analytics and business intelligence. Subject matter experts inside business units are increasingly at the forefront of the creation of data models on which reports and dashboards rely. Various technologies (such as Tableau, Qlik and Power BI), now facilitate user-access to […]
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We test drive Azure Time Series Insights
Author: Etienne Oosthuysen In this video, we take Azure Time Series Insights for a test drive. It is the new “fully managed analytics, storage, and visualization service that makes it simple to explore and analyse billions of IoT events simultaneously”. We also importantly look at the differences between Power BI’s real-time visualisation capabilities and Azure […]
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We test drive Azure Analysis Services – the good, and the not so good.
Author: Etienne Oosthuysen Microsoft’s announcement of the release of Azure Analysis Services for SSAS Tabular solutions as a PaaS solution has come at just the right time. In the modern world of Advanced Analytics, Semantic Models rather than data warehouses will increasingly play the core role in corporate data landscapes – they are places where […]
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