SQL, Data Science and Life

Microsoft Power BI suite of tools have been expanding over the years. Power Pivot has been on the market for a while. Power View is relatively new.  Power Query requires a download from Microsoft: https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/download/details.aspx?id=39379 Power Map is still on preview:   http://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/download/details.aspx?id=38395 To enable these features, go to Excel -> File -> Options -> Add-Ins -> COM Add-ins -> Go http://powerbi.microsoft.com/  is still on preview, and the direction makes sense since all the desktop analysis (Excel Add-Ins) has memory limitation. The PowerBI.com doesn't have the constraints and can power very complex analysis and handle huge data size. Microsoft Power BI Designer is available for download from the site:  http://powerbi.microsoft.com/downloads And don't forget to check out PowerBI blog:  http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powerbi/

Got an error 12015 when opening Project Professional 2013.  Clicking the More info and it shows this: <detail><ServerExecutionFault xmlns="http://Microsoft.Office.Project.Interfaces/" xmlns:i="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"><Actor i:nil="true"/><LastError>12015</LastError><Message/><Source/><StackTrace/><TargetSite i:nil="true"/><ExceptionDetails><errinfo xmlns=""><general><class name="ActiveCacheUnsupportedProjectProfessionalVersion"><error id="12015" name="ActiveCacheUnsupportedProjectProfessionalVersion" uid="315f3c6b-46fa-e411-80d9-00155d106504" version="15.0.4569.1504"/></class></general></errinfo></ExceptionDetails></ServerExecutionFault></detail> and the second error message is: According technet ( http://blogs.technet.com/b/p

Web security is such a broad topic to talk about. There are numerous vulnerability scanning tools available these days that can check your application and provide comprehensive reports.  While it is impossible to know what next attack on your site will be, we need to be ready to deal with any possibilities. One of the preparation steps is to review the top vulnerabilities learned from history.   T he OWASP Top 10 provides a list of the 10 Most Critical Web Application Security Risks and for each Risk it provides: A description Example vulnerabilities Example attacks Guidance on how to avoid References to OWASP and other related resources

Microsoft SQL Server 2016 will be available for public previewing this summer (2015). Several new features are included: Always Encrypted - secures on-prem or in-cloud data Stretch Database - dynamically stretches your data to cloud Real-time Operational Analytics & In-Memory OLTP - extends in-memory processing Built-in Advanced Analytics, PolyBase and Mobile BI - Integrates Revolution Analytics & R         Native JSON support  Security enhancements for Row-level Security and Dynamic Data Masking  Check out the SQL Server blog here: http://blogs.technet.com/b/dataplatforminsider/archive/2015/05/04/sql-server-2016-public-preview-coming-this-summer.aspx

Today I signed up for a Coursera course: Process Mining - data science in action. https://www.coursera.org/course/procmin It has a very interesting view point where the process mines the data to reconstruct the model. For many years I have been working on creating model, building the application and then looking at the logs for testing or troubleshooting purpose only. The process mining goes the opposite route. In the IT support world, this process can be very useful for shared application support teams. Typically application support team is not involved in the design stage, and the team doesn't know a lot about the application architecture and model but has to support it. The process mining can be a very helpful tool to provide some inside info of the application. Another typical usage is to support 3rd party software and applications. In the business world, the usages are much wider and can really help to refine and optimize the business process.