Intro The first sentence of each blog post is always the hardest. Whew! Glad that is out of the way. Movin’ on! Part of me wants to skip or delay this post – as I have it on good authority that the Italians are going to write this up for us. And they actually understand this, where I stumbled onto this and was completely confused, flabbergasted, perplexed, baffled and mystified! (I may have pulled out the thesaurus, but you can’t prove it). But, I can’t Continue Reading
Unique and Ugly Primary Keys of Doom
I’m currently working with a bunch of data about real estate. The properties are identified by an ugly string. Of DOOOM! There are quite a few relationships built on this ugly sucker, which led me to wonder… what if I mapped them all into a simple integer? I whipped up some totally bogus sample data to test this, using Property Ids that look like “WA534879” and “CA35849”. Properties have attributes like SqrFt, # of Beds, and what region it is in. And I hooked up a few million rows of Continue Reading
Power (Pivot) To the People!
If your read my blog, then you will go sign this. That is all. Continue Reading
Dollars, Cents and #PowerPivot
Quoting from my popular post on performance gotchas: You probably want to try to find a split that gives roughly the same number of unique values in each column, so don’t constrain your self to just “dollars and cents” or even first 5 digits, last 5 digits. This one… you have to test! The goal here is better compression by having less distinct values. What I was talking about is splitting a single column of dollars and cents, into separate columns that would each have less distinct values. Continue Reading