SQL, Code, Coffee, Etc.

11/19/2012
by Marlon Ribunal
1 Comment

Tools of the Trade

I needed to upgrade my tools. It was not a matter of “want” but of “need”. It’s no longer enough to have just the bare minimum, specially when you need to test or study about certain features of SQL Server that require multiple servers in a network environment.

My current tools setup is not perfect but it addresses my current needs. And I say that again, it’s not perfect. It fits well my agile and lean approach to learning SQL Server.

Workspace

Ok, this is not an upgraded workspace. Let me just make that clear. But this is better than the counter in the kitchen. I don’t work from home. I am a cubicle dweller in a cubicle farm. This little space, I consider as a home office, or office in the home. All my blogging and writing are done here. My side projects and writing projects are also done here. And I spend a lot of time studying SQL Server in this small desk.

Laptop

I have the Lenovo ThinkPad W530. This is a robust mobile workstation. It got an Ivy Bridge processor, i7-3720QM, and 16GB DDR3 RAM (up to 32GB). I don’t currently have SSD’s on it yet. I have the SSD on my To-Upgrade list.

I bought the laptop with Windows 7 Pro (64-bit) already installed on it but I upgraded to Windows 8 Pro (64-bit) after about a month of testing the new OS on a virtual machine. I love the new look and feel of the latest Windows OS. Plus, Windows 8 is more efficient than the previous versions performance-wise.

Hyper-V

One of the primary reasons why I upgraded to a sufficient laptop was to be able to run multiple virtual machines. Hyper-V is a built-in feature in the 64-bit version of Windows 8 Pro. With 16GB amount of RAM, I can run 8, or probably more, VM’s. With the VM setup on the ThinkPad W530 like this, I can play with the advanced features of SQL Server 2012 very easily.

Miscellaneous

Columbia Manifest II Technical Daypack. I love this backpack.

Yes, I do have SkyDrive and OneNote, but I still take some notes the old way sometimes. My eyes just get tired of staring at the computer screen the whole day.

09/06/2012
by Marlon Ribunal
2 Comments

SQLskills joining Pluralsight is a good news for all

Many can boast that they were trained by Paul and Kimberly Randal at SQLskills. That company is so highly regarded in SQL Server circle that having undergone training with them is considered a great privilege.

Not all of us will have the same privilege of sitting in an Immersion Event class (IE). Finance might not always be the problem. Many just couldn’t attend because of conflict of schedule or any other logistical concern.

However legitimate that reason might be, there’s no real excuse for us for not making ourselves available for such training, specially if it’s available online.

We owe it to ourselves to become better at our craft. That is true regardless of the industry we’re in.

That is why I was stoked to learn that SQLskills is joining forces with Pluralsight to deliver quality training content to SQL Server professionals.

SQLskills is a respected authority in SQL Server training. They are known for their Immersion Events and Microsoft Certified Master Training courses. Paul and Kimberly Randal, the founders, are elites in SQL Server mastery.

When you think of SQLskills training, you think of quality SQL Server training. These phrases are almost interchangeable. I’ve never gone to any IE class. I would want to, but I just don’t have the logistics to make that happen right now.

I’m so glad that, through the Pluralsigt-SQLskills strategic content partnership, I can now equip myself with quality SQL Server knowledge to gain new SQL Server skills to better prepare myself for opportunities down the road.

09/01/2012
by Marlon Ribunal
Comments Off on Demonstration of a simple dashboard created with the Tableau Software

Demonstration of a simple dashboard created with the Tableau Software

Like I said on Twitter, here’s the post about the dashboard I created using Tableau, a BI visualization software. I’ve been hearing good things about Tableau from different people and from the social networks. A couple of friends from Twitter encouraged me to try it and see if I like it.

I’m impressed! And I only used the Tableau Public version, a free low-level version of the software. I’m sure I can do more powerful visualization with its full version.

This is my first taste of Tableau. I found it very interesting. And I heard it’s fast if you’re feeding a lot of data. I couldn’t test that because I’m only limited to 100,000 records in the Public version.

I’ll be digging into this. But for now, take a look at this interactive dashboard that I created. I’d say it’s not bad for the first try.

Some info on the data set used in this “first try” demo:

Name of data set: “Aircraft Wildlife Strike Data”
Description: “It contains Information Regarding wildlife strikes on aircraft either in the air or on the ground.”
Source: Data.gov

I’ll be writing about this dashboard in detail in my upcoming posts. I’ll be doing a step-by-step on this. So standby for that.

I embedded the dashboard below but it doesn’t fit very well. Go to the Tableau Public website instead to see the whole dashboard. Link here.

Here are some notes:

The dashboard shows the total number of wildlife-related aircraft incidents per state in the last 10 years (2002-2012). If you click a “dot” (representing the total number of incidents in that particular state) in the Symbol Map (top left-hand graph), the two other graphs will show corresponding data. Drilling down, if you hover on a “green bar” (representing total cost of repair per state for that particular year), you’ll see the bottom graph changes to show month-to-month patterns (months corresponding to the year in the green bar).

Wildlife-Aircraft Incidents in the Last 10 Years