Wed 24 September 2014 | -- (permalink)

Boston Data Con uploaded the video of my MPP talk to You Tube. The quality is really good. My thanks to everyone who put the conference together.

Sun 14 September 2014 | -- (permalink)

I gave a talk on Big Data and MPP Databases at Boston Data Con today. A couple of people asked for a copy of the slides. So I've put them up here MPP Slides. Please let me know if they are helpful for you.

Fri 04 July 2014 | -- (permalink)

Last year I did a project analyzing volunteer data.

Tue 21 January 2014 | -- (permalink)

Did you know green plum doesn't support ENUMs? Apparently they were added to Postgres in 8.3 (right after Greenplum forked).

However you can create a domain to get some of the same behavior.

CREATE DOMAIN weather

VARCHAR(10) CHECK (VALUE IN ('rain', 'snow'));

You don't get the storage space benefits but you can use it to enforce constraints. The other option is to use a lookup table.<

Sun 04 August 2013 | -- (permalink)

I finally got iTunes Home sharing working after WAY too many hours. I love apple but the one thing that drives me crazy is the "silent failure" where since "every thing just works" when it doesn't, there are no tools for debugging. In case this helps anyone here are some resources if you are having trouble. Obviously you should try the troubleshooting guide at apple first: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2972

But if that hasn't worked get: http://hobbyistsoftware.com/bonjourbrowser which is available for windows and iPhone. This was what allowed me to prove to myself that the problem was at the router and not in windows somewhere.

After installing on windows I could see that the service was available at the computer, so I installed it to my iPad and ... no iTunes sharing.

So googling for "bonjour router actiontec" brought me to this page: http://yabfog.com/blog/2012/09/14/making-fios-actiontec-router-and-apple-bonjour-services-play-together Which had the exact problem and the solution of disabling the IGMP proxy. I don't know what an IGMP is or why it needs a proxy so I guess we can disable that, right :)

Thanks Yabfog!!

Tue 02 April 2013 | -- (permalink)

I'm doing an analysis of volunteer data and I set up an aws instance with Postgres to act as a database for the project.

I thought it might be helpful to document the steps I took to set this up.