Well, i was one of the speaker at Colombo Big Data Meetup which was held yesterday and i spoke about Google's bigquery. Hence i have decided to write a blog on that so that you could get benefited if you are a BigData Fan.

What is Big Data?

There are so many definitions for Big Data , let me explain what does it really mean? In the near feature, every object on this earth will be generating data including our body.We have been exposed to so much information everyday.In vast ocean of data, complete picture of where  we live where we go and what we say, its all been recorded and stored forever.More data allows us to see new , better different things.Data in the recent times have changed from stationary and static to fluid and dynamic.we rely a lot on data and thatch is  major part of any business.we live in a very exciting world  today, a world where technology is advancing at a staggering pace, a world data is exploding, tons of data being generated. 10 years before we were measuring data in mega bytes, today we are talking about data which is in petabyte size, may be in few years we are going to reach zetabyte era, that means the end of English alphabets.Does it means the end of Big Data? .No . If you have shared a photo or post or a tweet on any social media,You are one of them who is generating data, and you are doing it very rapidly.

Once you have decided to use bigquery there are certain things you need to know before using for optimizations and less cost.

Do not use queries that contains Select * , which is going to execute entire dataset and hence it will result in a high cost.

Since bigquery stores values in nested fields it is always better to use repeated fields.

Store in multiple tables as possible since it is recommended not to have JOINS

Bigquery also supports extensions such as ebq and dry run to encrypt the data and for executing the query to actually check how much resources that actual query is going to consume, which makes lot of developers and data analysts job easy.

I will be writing two separate blogs in the coming days on how to integrate with Bigquery and How to ingest the data into bigquery.

You can find the slides of the presentation from here

Business Intelligence and It's impacts:

Hello! I am back, after what I realized was my first extended blog break in four years. This time something technical, which is very much relevant to the product which i am currently working on. First of all, what is Business Intelligence?  It is the process, tools and infrastructure for generating insights from raw data is collectively called Business Intelligence.

Every organization generates data as part of its operations. Every organization also has access to some form of external data. But in order to analyze and take informed decisions, the data has to be processed and turned into information, and the information has to be presented in a meaningful way to be able to identify patterns or to see key performance indicators (KPIs), and thereby generate insights out of the information.          

This blog mainly describes the importance of BI in an insurance industry since i have to do my final project  where a BI solution can be used and come up with a solution with a collection of tools.

BI Solution for an Insurance Industry:

With rising globalization and growth, Business intelligence has become important for many firms. Business Intelligence solutions help these firms to transform into a dynamic enterprise through actionable intelligence. One of the important sector in this modern world is the insurance firms. In terms of technology, insurance companies are generally not at the forefront of technology and their systems are way behind. I have taken this domain as my project with some of the open source and commercial business intelligence tools that could help this sector.

The Organization i picked was HNB assurance PLC, it is a leading Sri Lankan Insurance corporation which provides Life Insurance solutions for Sri Lankan citizens.

The following are the Analysis that i have performed on the sample data that i have collected.

Classification of their Customer profiles using Decision tree and plotted in GeoMaps
Sentimental analysis of the company's Facebook Page
Various insights for their Insurance Claims
Sales forecasting – Dashboard

BI Tool that i have used : 

DigIn 

DigIn is the only true end-to-end analytics platform that allows you to easily visualize your structured and unstructured data in one place.Also it has On-demand data ingest capabilities and in-memory caching allows anyone to access data from anywhere at anytime from any device.

Conclusion: 

Use of business intelligence and analytic tool/solution is very vital for any insurance company wanting to succeed in an increasingly competitive industry. The ability to turn large volumes of raw data into actionable insights represents a significant value proposition for these businesses. These insights can be priceless in terms of the limitless opportunities they can unearth across the business with the help of social media analytics. Hope, This BI tool that i have suggested for this organization is a wonder not a
blunder.

You could find the slides that i have used for my presentation Here

Time has gone extremely fast, and I can still recall the day that I joined Duo. I can safely say that Duo is an awesome place to work at since I have had the opportunity to work with awesome, highly motivated people who loves the company. I never had much trouble with work life balance as I only worked more when I felt like it, rather than someone telling me to do. It truly is a different experience working for a Product Company which gives you an environment (Innovation engine) and Core focus on developing cutting-edge components.

Unlike most of the top IT firms in Sri Lanka, Duo gives  much importance to innovation and out of the box thinking. If you have something new and substantial to offer, trust me you are going to go a long way. It is a great place to start your career. Work culture is very positive and is full of energy. Talents are recognized and appreciated. Most importantly, one of the places which gives importance to work life balance!

Why I think it’s a great place to work?

Flat Hierarchy and Freedom of Ideas:

One of the things I love about Duo Software is that there's no sense that management is hiding somewhere making decisions and then condescendingly telling you what to do without listening to input. From CEO to the person who provides tea is constantly asking for input from everyone in the company and is available for discussing where we should go. It is a company, still at a size where you can get to know everybody and things still feel like a family. And it's exciting to watch the company itself evolve and grow.

Great Learning:

Duo Software has a lot of smart, hard-working people. The best engineers I have ever had the privilege of working with. For developers out there it’s a company that uses “GoLang”, a fun new language, as well as Couch Base, Redis, AngularJS and a range of other cool new technologies that will be good to know for the rest of your career.

Here at Duosoftware,

“Developers don't need dress code,

                                          They do write best code!”

Awesome office:

Some heavy metal music to keep you awake, a pool table which is free to be used by the team whenever they like, a reception hall with a pretty receptionist, a group of crazy people from different places belonging to one family. What more  could you ask for?

More Opportunity and Responsibility:

As of my knowledge, DuoSoftware is producing an exciting product that is constantly evolving and exploring the cutting edge, thereby a developer can become a full professional stack developer.

The Best “CEO”:

Last but not the least, one of my inspirations Mr.Muhunthan Canagey. As an aspiring tech entrepreneur, I think his best asset and what led him to success was being optimistic. He sees the problem in many perspectives and he thinks of solving the problem in many dimensions. An outstanding human being, that any employee  would be proud to to have as CEO.

Finally, my journey with Duo Software is remarkable, and I hope the upcoming days will be equally fulfilling and challenging, towards my next goal. I hope this blog will also serve some help to new members of team Duo  or laterals willing to join Duo Software.

I am not a great programmer, but i love coding and trying my best to become a good coder, there are few things i got to know when i made a research on how to become an efficient programmer.

1. Search for a problem that's really annoying you that's tractable to being solved by some way of automation.

 2. Made a Google search for programmatic solutions to these kind of problems. Make a research on which languages are most commonly used and scalable to satisfy your wider needs. In all ways.

  3. Start trying to solve the problem by breaking down the problem down into smaller and smaller chunks and trying to find ways of implementing a solution in the language which you have chosen from the above step

4 .Code all the time, continuous practice whenever you have time. Keep trying to solve your problem- where you get stuck, follow people who seem to know what they're doing on github,stackoverflow and post their solutions. Ask whatever questions may be even if its not practical on stack overflow(If you don’t care about vote downs). Buy and read lot of books. Get over the "monkey-see-monkey-do" approach, especially when getting issues. Learn from your issues  by going fixing the immediate issue  to learning what class of conditions the error deals with.

5.Subscribe to online education sites like Codecademy, Peepcode, Udemy, CodeSchool. Copy, imitate, fail, bang and scream the desk. Smash your keyboard if code you wrote does not work, try again. Feel the elation of getting a small chunk right.  

6. Every problem has (n+1) solutions,where n is the number of solutions that we try and 1 is that we have not tried. Every developer love that feeling when they’ve been coding something for a while, and it finally works. Yes, it is daunting. Yes, the learning curve is ridiculously steep. But you will only learn by doing and not being afraid to get it wrong.Whenever you write code always try to comment, so that other users who use your code will have an idea on what have already written. When you find a technique that works  or solve your problem generalize it and keep your own utility library.This makes yourlife and others easy.

 7. Learn to refactor your code.Whenever you get time try to improve the code.Whenever you Get confused with all your changes,  pick up git,tfs,svn or another version control system. Collaborate on others projects. Refactor again with what you've learned.  

I’ll finish with two quotes:

“Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.”- Brian Kernighan

“Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.”- Rick Osborne

Well, I have decided to write on technologies finally. It was one of the good sessions from the SQL meetup held at Microsoft Sri Lanka this month. I learned some useful and simple SQL functions in SQL Server 2012.

SQL Server 2012 introduces many new rich built-in functions that offer more solutions to common T-SQL challenges. Some of the main functions which I am going to write about are:

Conversion functions

• PARSE (Transact-SQL)
• TRY_PARSE (Transact-SQL)
• TRY_CONVERT (Transact-SQL)

Date and time functions

• DATEFROMPARTS (Transact-SQL)
• DATETIMEFROMPARTS (Transact-SQL)
• DATETIME2FROMPARTS (Transact-SQL)
• SMALLDATETIMEFROMPARTS (Transact-SQL)
• DATETIMEOFFSETFROMPARTS (Transact-SQL)
• TIMEFROMPARTS (Transact-SQL)
• EOMONTH (Transact-SQL)

Logical functions

• CHOOSE (Transact-SQL)
• IIF (Transact-SQL)

String functions

• CONCAT (Transact-SQL)
• FORMAT (Transact-SQL)

In SQL 2008, to find a trend, we were using CTE functions. For example, to find the trend in 2008:

WITH CTE AS (  
    SELECT rownum = ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY WorkOrderID), OrderQty 
    FROM [AdventureWorks].[Production].[WorkOrder]
)
SELECT CASE 
           WHEN CTE.OrderQty - PREVCTE.OrderQty > 0 THEN 'UP'
           WHEN CTE.OrderQty - PREVCTE.OrderQty <= 0 THEN 'NA'
       END AS Trend
FROM CTE 
LEFT OUTER JOIN CTE AS PREVCTE ON PREVCTE.rownum = CTE.rownum - 1