The “State” of Stateful Kafka Operations
Apache Kafka has recently released version 2.5, which has brought its share of exciting new changes to the Kafka Streams DSL. A great time to look at our architectures, and determine how they can be…
Benefits of Business Intelligence Tools: What You Get For Your Dollar
Return on investment (ROI) is important in any tool, and business intelligence (BI) tools are no exception. If anything, showing the cold hard numbers is even more critical for a visualization tool since the true…
Automating Financial Reporting Using Alteryx
Log in to a health insurance carrier’s website. Select data fields and download. Repeat for the next set of data. Combine the downloaded data with policy information. Manipulate, format, and generate a financial report for…
Data Literacy: Can we Learn from a Pandemic?
It’s hard to imagine living through a global pandemic. Yet here we are. Some individuals choose not to have it deter their life and scheduled plans, others claim it’s fake, some isolate themselves and their…
NiFi vs. Kafka… Or Is It?
With all of the exciting new tools to analyze and look at data, it's easy to get swept up and forget about a very important part of the process. Getting data to those tools! That…
What Makes Insights-Driven Organizations Different?
If you can’t stand the heat Summer is finally upon us. After an eternal winter and classic spring indecisiveness, temperatures have reached what some would consider “warm” here in the midwest. And that means it’s…
Business Intelligence Tools: Starting with Power BI
With the continued growth of machine learning and artificial intelligence, there is a constant need for reports, dashboards, and other ways of visualizing data. Whether you are downloading CSV files or connecting to a complex…
TensorFlow: Introduction & Effective Implementation
In this post I will discuss some important points of TensorFlow; namely what is it, how it works, and how easily it can be used in production environments with Keras and eager processing. Enterprises that…
Eating the Elephant: Putting it All Together
We’ve seen how what has traditionally been thought of as “big data” has evolved to encompass techniques and technologies that can benefit any company and prepare them for the future. What could an example project look like?
Why All The Hype Around Cloud?
When you start down your cloud journey, all of the unanswered questions can be overwhelming. “How do I choose the right vendor? Do I just do a “lift and shift” on IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), or is it better to implement a PaaS (Platform as a Service) option?