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Showing posts from May, 2015

Extending Microsoft Management Data Warehouse

Working with Management Data Warehouse, a reporting tool for Data Warehouses introduced in SQL Server 2008 and never changed since, makes a lot of limitations visible and also the lack of in-depth documentation by Microsoft. They tried to make the documentation better accessible in SQL Server 2012 but the product itself did not change.  What are the main limitations? MDW uses snapshots, which is actually a 'easy' way to handle all the issues involved in collecting ongoing activity. It is like taking 10 pictures per second of a dancing girl: you see the changes in every movement but if you want to know what is the total distance the girl covered then it can get rather complex. So you have for 1 minute of pictures and I bet you will break your teeth on that one. If you want to see the distance the girl danced in a week, month or year go for it! This gets us into the basic question of BI. Why are we collecting data? What do we want to do with it? Apparently taking 10 pictu

The problem with Android (and Apple iOS)

I have been using pure Android now since the Nexus 4. I am on a Nexus 5 now and before I was using Samsung Galaxy S3 and S both on various versions of CyanogenMod, the latest was 11.1. So I  have quiet some experience with the platform and it evolution. To make things very clear: pure Android on the Nexus 5 does not have a longer battery life than 3 hours!  Using your phone as a route planner with mobile data on and the GPS on makes it live barely 1 hour! These are from my real every day experiences.  That is when you watch a video or listen to music (!). The latter I find quiet amazing because processing a video and show it on screen is for sure not the same thing than having the device screen of and listening to music only. Strangely it does. And I used Google Play. Maybe that is the reason. If you put of WiFi and mobile data my Nexus 4 on Android 4 last for 7 days and the Nexus 5 several days only. The reason why their performance on battery life when active is so bad is