Tag: SQL
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Using Excel 2016 to unpivot data
Normal people, by which I mean those who don’t process data all day will often create data that is present in a crosstab table. This is a poor structure for storing and processing information. We say that its “denormalised” because the three different columns “Europe”, “USA”, “Asia” contain information of the same type – “budget…
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Create the Union of two tables in Excel revisited
In 2013 I published a technique to create the union of two tables in Excel. This post is still very popular and so I am revisiting this topic. Excel 2016 (and possibly Excel 2013 but I have not tested) has this capability built-in and the new method should always be preferred to the one that…
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Understanding Formidable Forms and WordPress
I have been using Formidable Forms with WordPress on and off for about 3 years. I have a conventional SQL and web programming background and I have found understanding the Formidable framework difficult. Today I had the insight that Formidable “views” are really just HTML fragments that contain data fetched by a simple SQL statement working…
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Recreate views after changing datatypes in referenced tables
I recently came across a problem that was difficult to diagnose. After I had changed the datatype in a table from varchar(256) to varchar(512) my Access 2013 reports show data truncated to 256 characters. It turned out that the views that I’d created against the base table were truncating the field. After changing the datatype…
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“Big data” on AWS – Redshift
“Big data” is hot, hot, hot (Gartner hype cycle) and now supported by Amazon Web Services. Although pitched as “Big data” it will be very interesting to see the tools offering. I provide services to small to medium-sized enterprises and I am interested in how AWS can support the data warehousing requirements of these organisations.…
Dr James Bayley 