Fun things to do in 2014
It\’s that time of year, now that spring is in the air….
Scratch that – must have been a hangover from an earlier time. But, it *is* a New Year, and I thought I\’d jot down some thinks I\’ll be thinking about over the next 12 months. Because I can.
1. SQL 2014 (Hekaton)
There\’s been a whole lot of buzz over 2013 about the next release of SQL Server, now commonly called SQL 2014, but sometimes referred to as Hekaton.
The word Hekaton is derived from the greek word for ten-fold. Actually, I think it\’s a hundred-fold, but that doesn\’t seem to matter that much to those happy guys and gals at Microsoft. The inference from the name is that you get a *massive* performance boost using Hekaton as your core engine.
Not surprisingly, this is utter cobblers, and there\’s been quite a bit of back pedalling from MS on the subject. What you get in Hekaton is \’memory-optimised\’ tables, column-store indexes, Vertipaq, and X-Velocity structures right in the database. You also get natively compiled stored procedures, but more on that later, I think.
But it\’s certainly something we all need to be aware of – Hekaton is coming, whether we like it or not. I\’ll write a session up for sometime later in January. No, I WILL. I promise….
2. Big Data
Another buzzword of 2013 was \’Big Data\’. Yeah, right. Big Data isn\’t about having huge amounts of data that you need to do something with. It\’s more about finding out what data you currently capture but have no use for, and finding out what that data may be able to tell you.
For example, you know that new account openings are at an all time high, and that the average balance in Cash ISA is £1500. What we also capture behind these numbers are demographic and geographic data that can be plotted in any number of software packages and analysed to death, such as if you live in Surrey, your Cash ISA is likely to have a balance greater than one held in Sunderland.
Big Data can also be used to let you know there are things you don\’t know, and lets you ask business questions. Like *why* is there a low take-up of FlexPlus in Hampstead, yet the highest average Credit Card available spend is on the Wirral.
Again, there\’s a whole lot more to this, but I ask you to bear the following in mind:
“What can our data actually tell us, and how can we design our systems to support Big Data type analysis. “
It\’s all in the design – get that right, and your Big Data headache is less of a problem
3. Small Data
You know when you get a spreadsheet from someone that details some 2,500 servers with something wrong, but there\’s little or no supporting information to let you act quickly ? Don\’t you just hate that, to have to filter / sort / arrange the data before you can start working on what you need to do ?
Well, when you provide data to anyone, be that a project / support contact or a huge distribution list, have a think about what you\’re actually giving them, and try to imagine the way in which they\’ll use the data. Sometimes, formatting an Excel sheet as a table is the simplest yet most time saving thing you can do for others.
4. Information Flow
I know I\’ve not posted much on the blog recently. There\’s hods of useful stuff in our heads (presumably), so let\’s get it out there. I had an interesting discussion with a colleague the other day about deleting records through a view having a different, seemingly more efficient, execution plan.
Just writing stuff down helps you remember it as well !
5. Be nice to people. Sometimes.
OK, so I\’m not getting fluffy over this. It\’s hard to remain smiley all the time (for some people), and sometimes someone needs a slap. But I\’m trying to make the former my default response, not the latter.
So, Happy New Year, and watch this space for stuff. There\’s a lot of stuff about, and it\’s getting stuffier all the time. And if that\’s not your thing, try holding a chicken in the air and sticking a deckchair up your nose.
Back soon…
The Modern Dataist 