Business Intelligence

Off the back of an interesting few weeks for Tableau Software, we are looking forward to when they roll into town to host their annual customer conference next week. Coupling the recent floatation success of the company on the NYSE with a sold out venue, we are expecting an Read More

The Scenario Anyone who has worked with Excel as a data source or destination in SSIS (SQL Server Integration Services) has probably found him/herself frustrated and fuming at how difficult it can be. Microsoft provided SSIS with a simple way to deal with the task of reading data Read More

What is it? VSTO (Visual Studio Tools for Office) is a great means of customising Office applications, especially the UI. VSTO allows us to customise task panes which is impossible with VBA (Visual Basic for Applications). It is much easier to customize ribbons in VSTO using Read More

Working as a BI Developer with the Microsoft stack of tools, I often deal with multiple sources of data, one of which being Excel, a very common data source in Data Warehousing projects. As some of you may be aware, working with Excel in SSIS (SQL Server Integration Services) can Read More

A quick walk-through Self-Service Business Intelligence with PowerPivot and SharePoint 2013 Business Intelligence (BI) is a big thing these days, research suggests that it is one of the key challenges businesses face today. When you think of BI most might think big data, SQL Read More

Having arrived early, we were greeted by a busy room and managed to avoid the large queue that grew in the run up to the `Data gets its day` presentation. Lynn Smith opens with some interesting Statistics – Tableau business has more than tripled in the UK over the past year Read More

Following on from my recent posts on the latest Key Stage 4 school results, this blog post looks at factors affecting educational achievement for KS4 and also UCAS university application success. The educational attainment I have chosen is the achievement of 5+ A*-C GCSEs Read More

Since traces of horse DNA were found in Tesco Value beef burgers the flood gates seem to have opened with the FSA surfacing many other products as contaminated. This has not been constrained to supermarket own brands but fast food chains and well known ready meal producers have Read More

Following on from last week’s blog post on the Key Stage 4 results for all schools in England, this one covers all the Key Stage 5 results for all schools, down to Subject level. The key stage 5 raw data can be found here. The most surprising aspect to this data, for me, was the Read More

The government has just released the latest Education data-sets containing the Key Stage 4 English School Results (KS4 Data) and Key Stage 5 (KS5 Data) exam results for 2012. Most education sites use this data to compile their version of School League tables, based on varying Read More