Drupal LDAP Authorization: Manage Your Users via Your Favorite Directory Service
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not an expert at directory services. Through my job’s history I’ve had logins to both Microsoft Active Directory and Novell Directory Services but that’s about the extent of my interaction. That being said, I can certainly see the value of maintaining your users in a single location. […]
Your 2013 Big Business Intelligence Strategy
With 2012 behind us, we charge full-speed ahead into the new era of Visual Analytics and Big Data. First, let me define these terms and discuss them briefly, then I’ll break down how to put together your Business Intelligence (BI) ecosystem and organization structure going forward. Visual Analytics The process by which data is consumed […]
DIY Google Drive Connectivity for Tableau
I’m enjoying the fire here in Telluride, Colorado and thought I’d put up a fun blog post while nursing my sore arms. I had the idea for this a few weeks back while working with a great new client in Columbus, Ohio and have finally found some time to work on it in between climbing Horsetail […]
Date Calculations in Tableau
Last week in Houston a student from another Tableau class submitted a question about how to properly create date calculations. For users across the experience spectrum, date calculations can be confusing and frustrating. Often students are intimidated by all of the available functions such as DATEDIFF, DATEPART, and DATEADD. This post will discuss the DATEDIFF […]
ShoreTel: Clearing Queue Monitor of a Caller No Longer Connected
Overview Call queuing is a great way for phone operators to manage high volume of calls. For ShoreTel systems version 12.x and lower on rare occasions a call will not fully disconnect and a received call will show as connected and use up one of the available ports even though the original caller has been […]
Source Code Control: SQL Server database (video tutorial)
In this video I describe the concept of Source Code Control and demonstrate how you can use source code control (in this case Redgate’s SQL Source Control) to manage changes in your SQL Server database. Are you using any form of source code control in your database? I look forward to hearing about the source […]
Vertica Quick Tip: Backslash Sequences in Strings
A common question I’ve received from new Vertica users is, “How do I enter newlines into a string literal, or use other backslash sequences like ‘t’?” This is especially common from users transitioning from systems like MySQL that do not use SQL standard-conforming string literals, or from users of older, pre-4.0 versions of Vertica (which […]
Killing Processes In Disconnected Terminal Service Sessions
Usually it is best to configure your terminal service policy to log out disconnected sessions, however there may be cases where you only want to kill specific applications when the user disconnects. This is easy to do with a PowerShell script that you run periodically as a scheduled task. The processes won’t be killed immediately when the […]
Google Announces Google+ Communities
In the past year, Google has been making strides to revive its social media platform, Google+. With over 235 million active users, participation in the social network has grown considerably over the past few months thanks to these efforts. The latest stride taken by Google in beefing up the platform was the announcement of the […]
Introducing the Python Tableau Data Extract API with a CSV Extract Example
After the amazing show Tableau Software put on for us at this year’s Tableau Customer Conference, the BI community was abuzz with excitement about the upcoming Tableau 8. Fortunately, we weren’t kept waiting long. Beta access is widely available at this point. My colleagues have already written about some of the great features in the […]
