Ryan Robitaille

I’ve been messing around with Tableau Public for a few nights, and I must say that it is damned impressive, and I’ve used a LOT of Reporting / Analysis / Business Intelligence tools in my day.

I needed to do a proper test / POC; the question was – what kind of data do I use to give it a proper test drive?

Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a huge Metallica fan, hell for as long as I can remember, that’s just been “one of my things” (as many current, ex-girlfriends, and ex-wives can attest to)…

Just a recent article I wrote for the C&C Computer Solutions site / blog. Great stuff. Here’s a bit of the intro, but for the MEAT of it, you’ll have to go to the C&C site and read it yourself…

I’m sorry – but who the fuck cares that you can recite X, Y, and Z off the top of your head. Is its relevant and useful? Generally, no. Are you helping the situation, project or issue? No. There is a word for out-of-context over-information like that… Banal Minutiae. Google search makes glorified know-it-alls obsolete. […]

Now any Python duct-taper integrate-anything junkie like me has a need to schedule their things (in production) every once in awhile. Usually this is not a problem – Unix / Linux cron jobs handle this nicely – but for a client or job that runs on a Windows server – the built-in “Scheduled Tasks” just […]

Business Intelligence. I hate the term as an IT buzzword. So sick of hearing Business Intelligence-this, Business Intelligence-that, Business Intelligence-expert-my-ass. But, hate it or not “Business Intelligence” shiz isn’t going anywhere – in fact, its been here in one way, shape, or form since the first caveman traded a sharp rock for some unsanctioned cave-nookie.

TrueBlood. Killer show. Let’s face it. It really is a weird-ass perfect storm of timing, promotion, and just straight up quality storytelling. Don’t even dare to compare it with those Justin-Beiber-esque-Saved-by-the-Bell-type-Vampire-Twilight-Movies that are currently sweeping the minds and loins of young teens these days. They are an inferior product – vamprires (fictional or not) do […]

A few months ago, I showed how you can do simple back and forth ETL task with python scripts – this time I’m going to take it one step further and show how with an extra python module we can actually export data to a usable Excel format as well. I often use this method […]

I think that ‘data wrangling’ takes a special kind of problem solving mentality. Keeping data current, cleaning it, merging it, aggregating it, and creating summary (or data warehouse) tables for reporting purposes… For MANY years I used Express installations of SQL Server 2000 as my ultimate data Swiss Army knife. It was like a secret […]

In the Data Transformation Services (DTS) / Extract Transform and Load (ETL) world these days we’ve got a LOT of expensive ass products. Some are good, some are marginal, and some are pieces of over-complicated (and poorly performing) java-based shit. But, hey, enough with the negativity – I digress, I just want to show you […]