With “Matrix Infographic” I simply mean those infographics FiveThirtyEight (site | Twitter), the website of statistic revelation Nate Silver, uses to display forecasts of World cup matches. An example: I was wondering if something similar could be built using SSRS. And yes, it is possible and it isn’t that hard. My starting point is a 10 by 10 matrix I downloaded from a blog post by Jason Thomas (blog | twitter).

Here is an overview of the articles I published in the second quarter of 2014. Intense School MCSE Prep: The Integration Services Package and Project Deployment Models—Part 1 MCSE Prep: The Integration Services Package and Project Deployment Models—Part 2 MCSE Prep (SQL) – Using Parameters in Reporting Services Reports (Part 1) MSSQLTips Improve SSIS data flow buffer performance Using the New OData Source in SQL Server Integration Services Semi-blocking Transformations in SQL Server Integration Services SSIS Sorting a dimension attribute by another dimension attribute in SQL Server Analysis Services Related posts:

DISCLAIMER I received this book through the O'Reilly blogger review program, which I already mentioned in the review of Thinking With Data. The actual publisher of the book is Packt Publishing, not O'Reilly itself. TABLEAU DASHBOARD COOKBOOK I guess most people who have been in contact with the SQL Server community have at least heard of Jen Stirrup (blog | twitter): she currently holds the PASS board seat for Europe, she has spoken at dozens of different events and has won the PASSion award in 2012.

I am absolutely delighted to share the great news that I have been selected as one of the speakers for the 2014 edition of the SQL Server Days in Belgium. It is one of the biggest SQL Server events in Europe and this will be the 4th time I am presenting there. A lot of great names of the #sqlfamily have also been confirmed, such as Grant Fritchey, Denny Cherry, Stacia Misner, Klaus Asschenbrenner, Marco Russo, André Kamman and many many other talented speakers.

Recently I’ve had the opportunity to review a number of different parallel C# methods that were performing work over a collection of items. Nearly all of them have used ++ to increment parent or global variables from inside threaded contexts. Unfortunately the ++ operator is not guaranteed to be threadsafe in C#. So let’s take a simple code example using ++ and convert it to a threadsafe one. The Wrong Way To Do It This is unrealistic example, I’m simply taking a list of work and sleeping for a random amount of time as a substitute for some real work.

This morning I wrote on how to install monodevelop and now I will make my first website using monodevelop. First thing to do when you work with monodevelop is to install the nuget-plugin. Now create a VB.Net ConsolApplication. And then we can go look for Nancy.Hosting.Self via Project > Add Packages Add that to your project. And now it is time for some code. First we make sure we start our host.

Last week I switched from Windows 8 to Ubuntu 14.04 because Win 8 was constantly freezing my machine and is a shitty Operating system for the desktop. So now was the time to play a bit more with mono and monodevelop. Here are my steps to get it working. Some of it I got from here and some from http://superuser.com/questions/309168/error-visual-basic-net-compiler-not-found-mono-2-6-7-first-mononet-app.sudo apt-get install git automake gnome-sharp2 mono-xsp4 git clone https://github.com/mono/monodevelop.git cd monodevelop sudo apt-get install libglade2.

Sometimes one comes up with the most silly of requirements. This time an external consultant wanted the documentation for my nancy services. I have that documentation as webpages made with razorviews in nancy. Only a very small part is dynamic, most of it is static. The consultant does not have acces to those pages so he needed them in a portable format. I could have used a webscraper, but those sites are blocked here at work.

I’m currently trying to quantify what it means to be good at a variety of technologies that we use day to day. Some I’ve put some thought into before (What does a Web Developer need to know?), but some are proving to be more difficult. Here’s my goal: I’m working with my team to build some tools that we can use to identify our skill levels, provide guideposts on how we can improve those skills, signs to indicate who on the team has more specialized knowledge in which areas, and also provide a guide for a plethora of other activities, like code reviews, design reviews, owners of sections of the internal wiki, etc.

ITPROceed 2014 is now a thing of the past, but is has been an awesome – and free! – event. A very big thank you and "well done" to the organizers. It has been a great gathering of the #sqlfamily, with superb sessions about Azure, restoring databases with PowerShell, Hekaton (yes yes In-Memory OLTP), Administration Intelligence (a new buzzword for marketing?), a glimpse into the new APS (Analytics Platform System, a blend of PDW and Hadoop that will knock your socks off) and of course my own session about data visualization.