Tag Archives: Data Science

Toward an Analytics Code of Ethics

Leave a reply

In data management and analytics, we often focus on correcting apparent inability and unwillingness on the part of business leaders to effectively gather and capitalize on data resources. With that perspective, we often see ethics as a side issue difficult to prioritize given the scale and persistence of our other challenges.

At least that was my perspective, and my initial response when confronted recently by a family member on this topic. Her view from outside the field was that ethics should be a primary concern. As I’ve reflected on this conversation, I’ve come around to her point.

In recent years we’ve seen many examples of data misuse due to ethical lapses. Here’s a post that gives five examples, including police officers looking up data on individuals not related to any police business, an employee passing personal data including SSNs to a text sharing site, and Uber’s “god view”, available at the corporate level, which an employee used in 2014 to track a journalist’s location. Continue reading →

Fixing Tableau Desktop Blue Screen or Unresponsive

1 Reply

Tableau desktop (10.2.2 on Windows 7 at work) was consistently locking up my computer or causing a BSOD when I tried to start it. After struggling for a while trying to solve the problem, I found out it was because it used all resources when opening the log file, which had over time grown to 24gig. Apparently my version of Tableau desktop doesn’t periodically clean up the log files.

However, if the …/Logs folder isn’t there at Tableau startup, it just builds a new one and starts fresh, so whenever Tableau isn’t running you can just delete it. So, to make that happen automatically, I’ve added a batch file with these commands to my startup folder: Continue reading →

Leader’s Data Manifesto Annual Review: “It’s About the Lopez Women”

1 Reply

A year ago I recounted proceedings from the 2017 EDW World conference, which included release of the Leader’s Data Manifesto (LDM). Last week’s EDW World 2018 served as a one-year status report on the Manifesto. The verdict: there’s still a long way to go, but speakers and attendees report dramatic progress and emergence of shared values supporting data management’s role in enabling success and reducing risk.

To me the most compelling example of progress was the story of the Lopez women, told by Tommie Lawrence, who leads patient data quality efforts at Sharp Healthcare, a major San Diego, Ca, healthcare network. Ms. Lawrence’s team is responsible for data quality related to about six million patient records in the 40 highest priority of Sharp’s ~400 systems containing Patient Health Information (PHI).

A few years ago, Sharp Healthcare had two patients named Maria Lopez*, with birthdays one day apart. One suffered from kidney disease, the other had cancer. After a long wait a kidney was found, and the hospital called the Maria with kidney disease and asked her to come to the hospital for a transplant immediately. During operation prep, an assistant noticed that Maria had cancer, and put a halt to proceedings – it didn’t make sense to give the kidney to someone with cancer. Continue reading →

Escaping Teradata Purgatory (Select Failed. [2646] No more spool space)

6 Replies

If you are a SQL developer or data analyst working with Teradata, it is likely you’ve gotten this error message: “Select Failed. [2646] No more spool space”. Roughly speaking, Teradata “spool” is the space DBAs assign to each user account as work space for queries. So, for example, if your query needs to build an intermediate table behind the scenes to sort or otherwise process before it hands over your result set, that happens in spool space. It is limited, in part, to keep your potentially runaway query from using up too much space and clogging up the system.

After briefly setting the stage, this post presents the top three tactics I use to avoid or overcome spool space errors. For the second two tactics I’ll show working code. At the end of the post you’ll find volatile DDL that you can use to get the queries to run. Continue reading →

Data Quality, Evolved

Leave a reply

Data quality doesn’t have to be a train wreck. Increased regulatory scrutiny, NoSQL performance gains, and the needs of data scientists are quietly changing views and approaches toward data quality. The result: a pathway to optimism and data quality improvement.

Here’s how you can get on the new and improved data quality train in each of those three areas: Continue reading →

Tableau Rollout Across Five Dimensions

1 Reply

Standing up any new analytics tool in an organization is complex, and early on, new adopters of Tableau often struggle to include all the complexities in their plan. This post proposes a mental model in the form of a story of how Tableau might have rolled out in one hypothetical installation to uncover common challenges for new adopters.

Tableau’s marketing lends one to imagine that introducing Tableau is easy: “Fast Analytics”, “Ease of Use”, “Big Data, Any Data” and so on. (here, 3/31/2017). Tableau’s position in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant (referenced on the same page) attests to the huge upside for organizations that successfully deploy Tableau, which I’ve been lucky enough to witness firsthand. Continue reading →

Tableau Startup: First Lessons Learned

Leave a reply

XAs I mentioned in the February post, I’m new to Tableau, and as the tone of that post implied,enjoying it very much. Tableau is a robust and flexible solution for data delivery. Like Qlikview, which I worked with a while ago, it is supported by outstanding, and free, introductory training and a very active user community.

As I’ve made my first steps in Tableau I’ve been a frequent user community visitor, and generally have gotten the answers I’ve been looking for. However, like any tool there still have been a few surprises. I’ll run down the top few in this post:

  • Measures can have complex logic
  • Big extracts are tricky
  • Changing data sources is really tricky
  • Sorry, there are some things you just can’t do

Hopefully this post helps other novices negotiate those first few steps a bit more easily. Continue reading →

No Silver BI Bullet: Tableau Edition (It’s a good thing!)

1 Reply

For complex work, a very simple app requires a very smart user. That point was driven home to me in Tableau Fundamentals class this week. I don’t see that as bad news at all.

Not so long ago I wrote a piece that attempted to inject a bit of reality into the claims then made by some data visualization tool vendors. I cited unexpected challenges that those adopting such tools for their obvious and compelling data presentation abilities might face. The challenges included unexpectedly complex data integration, establishing solid reporting standards and practices, scaling report distribution as demand for the visualizations expands, and the conversion work that can result from version upgrades.

Although a Fundamentals class, the experienced and enthusiastic instructor and the small, intelligent student group combined to make the two days immensely valuable, going far beyond the basics on the program (more on specific lessons learned will appear in an upcoming post). The instructor’s focus on principles rather than recipes drove home this point: in order to effectively use Tableau you have to understand not only how to operate Tableau itself but also the underlying data management, usability, and statistics principles.

Could it be that adopting easy-to-use Tableau in place of, say, SSRS, Cognos, or SAS requires an upgrade in staff knowledge and expertise? Continue reading →

What is Big Data Creativity and How Do You Get It?

Leave a reply

Thomas EdisonIn a recent Smart Data Collective post, Bernard Marr cites creativity as a top big data skill, but what is creativity?

His point is, since big data applications are often off the beaten IT path, big data professionals must solve “problems that companies don’t even know they have – as their insights highlight bottlenecks or inefficiencies in the production, marketing or delivery processes,” often with “data which does not fit comfortably into tables and charts, such as human speech and writing.” Continue reading →

A Field Guide to Overloaded Data

1 Reply

BugAt the very first TDWI Conference, Duane Hufford described a phenomenon he called “embedded data”, now more commonly called “overloaded data”, where two or more concepts are stuffed into a single data field (“Metadata Repositories,” TDWI Conference 1995). He described and portrayed in graphics three types of overloaded data. Almost 20 years later, overloaded data remains rampant but Mr Hufford’s ideas, presented below with updated examples, are unfortunately not widely discussed.

Overloaded data breeds in areas not exposed to sound data management techniques for one reason or the other. Big data acquisition typically loads data uncleansed, shifting the burden of unpacking overloaded fields to the receiver (pity the poor data scientist spending 70% of her time acquiring and cleaning data!)

One might refer to non-overloaded data as “atomic”. Beyond making data harder to use, overloaded data requires more code to manage than atomic data (see why in the sections below) so by extension it increases IT costs.

Here’s a field guide to three different types of overloaded data, associated risks, and how to avoid them: Continue reading →