The Joys of Cardinality

When you start getting into multi-dimensional data analysis, you quickly run into something called the “Curse of Cardinality” (so yes, the post title is a geeky play on words). The gist of it is is that the more possible values there are for something, the quicker the index size grows…

Relationship Strength

The skunkworks project that I’ve been working on for the past month or so incorporates the idea of relationships between entities to enable automatic discovery and data recommendations

In said project there is a bit of code that watches the database for changes to…

Data Wormholes and Relationships

This is kind of an obscure topic, but I’ve been trying to figure out what the best way to count things is, and how to best identify boundaries and relationships between pools of data which may or may not be the same thing.

The Fundamental Shift in BI & Analytics

I’m probably biased because I’m working on this problem, but I think there is a fundamental change coming in business intelligence and analytics. And I think I’ve only heard one company talk about it: Google.

The Future Evolution of Software

I’ve been thinking lately about where software has gone in the last few years, and where it might go in the next. I tried to identify some major trends and transitions, and I wrote them down as a matter of habit. If you’re interested, here they are.

Data as a Renewable Commodity and Profit Center

Analytics and Outliers

In any given set of data there is:

• The norm
• And there are outliers

Most reporting and analytics tools are excellent at telling you the norm, but don’t help you find outliers, or give you extremely crude tools for…