Category Data architecture
Remove CSV text qualifiers within a field using Python
Have you ever tried to import a CSV into a database and found that it won’t load because one of your CSV fields has a text qualifier inside the field itself? In this post I look at how to resolve this issue using a few lines of Python code.
How to forward engineer SQL scripts from Microsoft Visio
Ever wanted to forward engineer a SQL script of DDL statements to automatically generate the tables based on a Visio entity relationship diagram (ERD)? In the steps below, I will explain what you need to do in order to install the Forward Engineer plugin for Microsoft Visio 2010, based on the original work by Alberto Ferrari.
Memory: how a computer stores and accesses information
How does a computer ‘remember’ something, and furthermore how is it able to recall some things but not others? In this post, we will explore the concept of memory, what it means and how a computer uses it.
How does a computer store data: text
In this post, we will look at how a computer is able to store and represent text – once again, using just ones and zeros.
How does a computer store data: numbers
We will examine exactly how data is stored by a computer. In this post, we will look at numbers.
UK General Election 2015 Special
Those clever folks over at Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight have been analysing the polling figures for the forthcoming UK General Election. More than any in the UK’s electoral history, this is set to be the most unpredictable ever, with a first-past-the-post electoral system unfit for a multi-party democracy likely to throw up all kinds of unexpected outcomes in […]
The world isn’t flat: and neither is your data
After you’ve worked with data for a while, there is a temptation to think about it purely in terms of the conventional way in which it is stored: rows and columns. That is, after all, how it appears on screen whenever you run a simple query; it’s very often how data is displayed in a report, […]
Review: Business unIntelligence (Barry Devlin)
To start with, this book was nothing like what I expected – but that proved to be no bad thing, far from it. Dr. Devlin cuts through all the hype about big data, the cloud, data science and the rest to present his thesis on what really matters when it comes to information management – […]
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