Whether you’re a Facebook user or not (I am not) it has been hard to avoid the furor recently over some of the changes the service is making. One article at Newsweek.com says:
The fear is that people are being lured into Facebook with the promise of a fun, free service, and don’t realize that they’re paying for it by giving up loads of personal information.
Why is Facebook in hot water now, when other Internet-based companies like Amazon have been collecting and using our personal data for years? Maybe it’s because Amazon doesn’t automatically add new apps to your profile if you browse other sites while logged into their service. (Facebook reportedly allows this, although some articles are now providing responses from Facebook that dispute exactly how this process is supposed to work.)
I’m not writing this post to bash Facebook (you can probably find plenty of that already). I’m writing this post because I wanted to share an interesting visualization that I found from an author named Matt McKeon. He shows how the privacy settings for Facebook have broadened over the years. He also admits that some of the data had to be “made up” because he does not have access to hard numbers from Facebook, so read the information with that in mind. Continue reading “Facebook: It’s All About the Data”
You can find articles about this all over the Internet, so I won’t bother linking directly to any particular one. Here’s a search link from Google that will help you get started.
Executive summary
SAP is going to be paying $65 / share for Sybase. They’ll pay some of it out of cash, and they are financing the rest. Kind of like buying a house.
Why are they buying?
SAP says they like Sybase because of their “mobile presence” and their in-memory database technology. Sybase IQ has offered in-memory column-oriented database architecture for years, and SAP makes use of the same concepts with their accelerated version of Explorer. So I can see where that part is coming from. I will admit that I am not completely up to speed on the mobile offerings from Sybase. In fact, I wasn’t even aware they had any. So I guess I have some research to do.
I have to imagine that one of the biggest “woots!” going on at SAP headquarters is coming from the folks that no longer have to sell Oracle database packages along with the SAP ERP. It’s probably hard to put a value on that.
The market has initially had a negative reaction to the news with SAP stock trading down in after-hours trading. Sybase is, of course, way up. Oracle is also down as this impacts them in a couple of ways.
I’m only skimming the surface of this, as I only found out a bit ago. My final thought: what does this do to or for Microsoft?
I got an email yesterday (May 11th, 2010) with the following information about a customer loyalty program coupon that I had earned:
Notice the date? The coupon is supposed to expire on April 12, 2010.
I got the email on May 11, 2010.
See the problem?
After a brief phone call with Best Buy, it turns out the coupon date is actually Dec 12th. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine what the actual report failure was. A clue: there is nothing wrong with the data. 😉
A few days ago I posted about my initial experiences with OnDemand.com, the software-as-a-service offering from SAP BusinessObjects. One of my frustrations was I was not able to compare year-to-year performance with the data set that I uploaded. I made the assumption that I could upload two data sets (one from each year) and merge them to obtain the desired result. The answer, I am happy to say, is yes. I made a few stupid mistakes along the way, but the end result is much closer to what I was trying to accomplish with my first attempt. Not only that, but I found out that I can merge data in two different directions. Continue reading “Exploring with OnDemand.com Part II”
Last week I signed up with an account at ondemand.com, a “software-as-a-service” offering from SAP BusinessObjects. I wanted to play around with Explorer for a bit, and we don’t yet have that product installed in house. It seemed like a good time to take advantage of their free demo account. I have no idea what is required to set up Explorer, or what sort of data issues I might encounter along the way. I am going into this experiment completely devoid of any knowledge of the product other than what I have seen in demonstrations. One of the selling points of the tool is that there are no training classes for this product; it’s supposed to be just that intuitive. It will be interesting to see how I do.
I first looked all over the site to find out what the restrictions are. Since I was going to be using a free trial account, I didn’t expect to be able to upload my entire two billion row fact table, nor would I want to. 🙂 However, I did want to stretch the system to show of what Explorer can do. I could not find anything, anywhere, that detailed the specific limits of the free account. I even tried to find out what pricing would be in the event that I decided to host more data, and I could not find that anywhere either. If anyone finds that information online, please post a link.
Other than these site issues, how did my initial exploration go? Continue reading “Exploring with OnDemand.com”
I am confirmed for the ASUG Annual Conference / SAPPHIRE next month in Orlando. It’s such a small conference, if you’re going I’m sure I will see you there. 😉
There have been quite a few questions about shortcut joins on BOB recently. I’ve finished a post on how and when to use that technique (and when not to) and it should be out shortly.
I got my reminder email from ASUG this morning about upcoming webcasts. There is one particular session that I have some interest in because I’m frequently asked the very same question. When do I use a particular tool?
I’m also pleased to say that earlier this week we integrated the ASUG event calendar with BOB. Twice a day the BOB server will poll the ASUG server and retrieve an updated listing of events and post them to the BOB calendar. So if you’re a visitor to BOB you can quickly and easily see what’s coming up with ASUG. The ASUG calendar is open for public viewing so you can get full details on the events that interest you. You will have to register (join) to be able to participate, but it does help being able to see the topics ahead of time and determine how valuable they are for you.
Continue reading “Upcoming ASUG Webcasts for April, 2010”
I’m going to be attending (and speaking at) the next North Texas/Oklahoma Chapter ASUG quarterly meeting later this month (April 16th to be exact). A couple of interesting and/or exciting things will be happening there that I want to preview. I don’t count myself as part of the “exciting” part; I will be reprising my session from the GBN conference last fall on recursive data models for universes. I hope to have everything updated to XI 3.1 prior to the session so I will at least be on the current release.
What is exciting is that this meeting will serve as the formal launch for the SAP BusinessObjects Ambassador program. Continue reading “North Texas/Oklahoma ASUG Chapter Meeting April 16”
On April 5 we can start submitting ideas (abstracts) for the fall conference. This year we’re not going to Dallas! 😀 The conference this year is October 4th through 7th and is located in Orlando, Florida. The host hotel is the Dolphin Hotel which is very near Walt Disney World. I have stayed at other hotels nearby, but never at the Dolphin (or the sister hotel the Swan). I’m looking forward to the opportunity to go.
The tracks topics this year are probably fairly predictable… there will once again be a track on Xcelsius, on Explorer, as well as old standards like Universe Design, Crystal, and Web Intelligence.
I hope to see a lot more about XI 4.0 too. 😎
Related Links
Yesterday I wrote a post about finding a virtual machine image for Teradata 13 that I could download and play with. I somewhat optimistically said the following:
I can get up and running with a “play” Teradata system in just a few minutes.
It turns out that was very optimistic. I finally did get the VM up and running, but it was far from a few minutes. Continue reading “Virtual Teradata Progress Report”
