Independent Data Consultancy
More excitement as another update is released! The more observant will notice that I didn’t publish anything about 0.32. Reason being, it was boring. Lots of very worthwhile changes under the hood, but nothing new to look at. 0.33 is much more interesting. The biggest change is the all new query interface. You can now […]
After running this site using WordPress on Windows for 5 years or so, it’s about time I offered some tips for WordPress on Windows. 1. Don’t do it2. Don’t do it3. Don’t do it It’s called LAMP for a reason. L=Linux, A=Apache, M=MySQL, P=PHP. There’s no mention of ‘W’ for Windows or ‘I’ for Internet […]
I’m like a child at Christmas when it comes to software updates. I can’t wait to try out all the new bits and push the new buttons. This enthusiasm has been dampened lately with Microsoft’s well documented problems and the glacial progress of SAP’s BI products. So it’s great to have a new release of […]
I’ve been working with Metabase for nearly a year now. Pleased to say that this is the biggest upgrade yet. There’s been a lot of work on security which means that Metabase is now suitable for larger organisations with more complex security requirements. There are more new features than I have time to write about, […]
After 7 months of working with Metabase Dashboards at customer sites, I though it was about time I started talking about it! Our product page is here, the product showcase will be along once time permits. With the demise of Crystal Dashboard (Xcelsius), I spent some time looking at alternative products. The obvious first choice […]
21 years ago, I was still working in the wine trade. At the time, the vast majority of wine was sealed with a traditional cork. Wines at the cheaper end of the market would often use agglomerate corks (bits of cork glued together). Some wines were starting to use artificial corks, but they were often […]
Since MS SQL Server 2005, there have been 5 releases (2008, 2008 R2, 2012, 2014, 2016). Each new release came with some interesting new features – for those on the Enterprise Edition. For the majority of users, on SQL Server Standard, there were updates to the user interface and some security patches, but nothing to […]
I’ve had an interesting month experimenting with Predictive Analytics using a customer’s anonymised recruitment data. First, I used SAP Predictivie Analytics. It’s a great product, but I found that I felt ‘too distant’ from the analytics process. While the end result is explained in statistical terms, I wanted more control over how the result was […]
Since my original post about the licensing updates, there has been further clarification from SAP. There are now two separate ways of licencing Crystal Server. The ‘old’ way of just buying some licences and paying an annual maintenance fee to a reseller, or the new way of signing a maintenance agreement with SAP as part […]
This all happened 6 weeks ago, but with holidays and work commitments, it’s taken until now for me to write. I’d hoped SAP would produce a nice simple guide that I could just link to, but that would be too easy. The only other mention I’ve seen is a rather fanciful interpretation by another reseller […]
