The Sales Engineer

Yeah, we’re all watching it happen, trying to capitalize on it. More information is not better information. People more & more are lazy-ing themselves out of making any risky decisions. They want the same kind of assurances a conference room full of yes men and stakeholders would give them: Blame Management. As long as there is at least 1 person to blame if it is a bad decision (that is not you), then they say yes.

But now there is/are magnitudes more info (or rather data) for a single person to go through, and even the yes-men can’t go through it if pieced up-even if it could be pieced up. So what kind of decisions are there? 3 kinds, for us entrepreneur types:

1. Personal
2. Job/Productivity
3. Commercial

Personal: What products do I buy when filling up, or going to the grocery store? Think “consumer”.

Job/Productivity: What stock should I buy/sell? Which job is best for me to move to (a combination of Personal)? Where should I be investing? Is my 401k performing properly/well for this market?

Commercial: (think “provider”) Should I buy more widgets and stock-pile, or will their price go down in a few weeks and I should buy then? Is my company’s valuation going up or down? Where is productivity/efficiency (think “BI”, or “Green/Yellow/Red”, or “Executive Dashboard”, etc.)?

In all three “horizontals”, the data & information available to use in making these decisions is doubling every few months. It used to be that storage (cost) was the holdup, but now it is simply what some early adopters called “data mining”, which is a very poor way of going about it, but it is buzzword-worthy.

So what would you do (on any of the 3 levels) if you had all the information you needed, but it was somewhere in a mass of data that has more words than have ever been written by all humans across all time, and is getting bigger every day? You would want only one thing, and that one thing is the target of anyone ahead of this curve:

Making data into usable, actionable information.

If you didn’t know this 2-3 years ago, you’re already too late.

pat

:)

I was looking for a way to have all my tables have a unique GUID (Globally Unique ID) as well as a “Last Updated” column that would automatically update both on INSERT and on UPDATE.

Through a few hours of experimentation, I created the following:

CREATE TABLE dbo.testing
    (guid            uniqueidentifier    NOT NULL DEFAULT NEWID(),
     lastUpdated     datetime2(7)        NOT NULL DEFAULT GETDATE(),
     col1            nchar(10)           NULL,
     col2            nchar(10)           NULL)
GO
CREATE TRIGGER dbo.trLastUpdatedTesting
ON dbo.testing
AFTER UPDATE -- not insert!
AS
BEGIN

More »

I am going through an exercise where I’m trying to find a way to compute stock metrics (technical indicators). What I need is a way to iterate over the rows in a database, computing each technical indicator, then putting that value into the table’s row for that date.

I found an example, and modified it to work on SQL SERVER 2008 R2. I hope you, too, find this solution extremely interesting:

DROP TABLE #google_stock
GO
create table #google_stock
(
quote_date [datetime],
open_price [decimal](6,2),
close_price [decimal](6,2),
high_price [decimal](6,2),
low_price [decimal](6,2)
)
GO

More »

How to [Define, Describe, Classify, Group, Find] Everything?

Up to Now

I’ve been designing a software product seriously for coming up on three years now, and a further two before that just convincing myself it was possible. The product operates on collected data and creates interesting relationships between them. Really, that is all there is to it. But like any simple objective, the road has become longer and more circuitous that we could have ever imagined.

Big Picture

The idea isn’t new, but the tools available today make it practical. Those tools are computers. Computers, though, need things represented as numbers. They crunch those numbers, and out comes a number. Sound familiar Douglas Adams fans?

The problem for me was routine up until the point where I had to interpret, and establish as events, text. The problem of textual language represented in computers is actually much older than AI (Artificial Intelligence). More »

from: Forestalling the Coming Pandemic: Infectious Disease Surveillance Overseas

We are expanding NODS capabilities to automate the development and dissemination of reports. Our NBIC reports, to be distributed through the NOC-COP fall into three categories: real-time notifications, daily and weekly reports and situational reports. Notifications are short, factual summaries developed immediately following significant or newsworthy “bio-events.” Daily and weekly reports, highlight events of potential significance. Situation reports provide daily updates of ongoing domestic or international “bio-events.” Additionally, we have instituted a Pilot Biosurveillance Common Operating Picture (BCOP) that incorporates weekly Avian Influenza updates.

The Testimony of Dr. Kimothy Smith, Acting Director of the National Biosurveillance Integration Center before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Subcommittee on Oversight of Governmental Management, the Federal Workforce, and the District of Columbia mentions yet another piece of the event-driven puzzle whereby miltary systems like Magic Lantern and ECHELON.

What is interesting about this 10/4/2007 news release is that it talks about how the NBIC in terms of how it is a complete system of TIA, or systems of systems, as well as a combination of SMEs and systems:

• A robust information management system capable of handling large quantities of structured and unstructured information;
• A corps of highly-trained subject matter experts and analysts; and
• A clear establishment of a culture of cooperation, trust and mutual support across the Federal government and other partners.

There exists tremendous opportunity for those able to capitalize on emabling the governmnet’s mandate for a COP (Common Operating Picture). And all this time I thought it was TIA (Total Idiot Awareness) that was the most important!