MS BICOE All about data​: dig, distill, visualize, prognosticate & prescribe

If you see this post it means that BlogEngine.NET is running and the hard part of creating your own blog is done. There is only a few things left to do.

Write Permissions

To be able to log in, write posts and customize blog, you need to enable write permissions on the App_Data and Custom folders. If your blog is hosted at a hosting provider, you can either log into your account’s admin page or call the support.

If you wish to use a database to store your blog data, we still encourage you to enable this write access for an images you may wish to store for your blog posts.  If you are interested in using Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, SQL CE, or other databases, please see the BlogEngine docs to get started.

Security

When you`ve got write permissions set, you need to change the username and password. Find the sign-in link located either at the bottom or top of the page depending on your current theme and click it. Now enter "admin" in both the username and password fields and click the button. You will now see an admin menu appear. It has a link to the "Users" admin page. From there you can change password, create new users and set roles and permissions. Passwords are hashed by default so you better configure email in settings for password recovery to work or learn how to do it manually.

Configuration and Profile

Now that you have your blog secured, take a look through the settings and give your new blog a title.  BlogEngine.NET is set up to take full advantage of many semantic formats and technologies such as FOAF, SIOC and APML. It means that the content stored in your BlogEngine.NET installation will be fully portable and auto-discoverable.  Be sure to fill in your author profile to take better advantage of this.

Themes and Plugins

One last thing to consider is customizing the look and behavior of your blog. We have themes and plugins available right out of the box. You can install more right from admin panel under Custom. Also you can check out our high quality themes.

On the web

You can find news, tutorials, documentation, tips and tricks about BlogEngine.NET on the official website. The ongoing development of BlogEngine.NET can be followed at Github.

Good luck and happy writing.

The BlogEngine.NET team

Comparing to past 2 years, the latest published Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms has some very interesting changes.

There are only 3 big players stay in the first group: Tableau, Qlik and Microsoft. Given that the MS did a fantastic job on the new Power BI platform, I'm not surprising MS is waken up and rising in this space. I was surprised that Microstrategy, IBM, SAP and Information Builders are fallen out the first group. Particularly, Oracle is dropped off the radar.

This is getting more and more interesting and look forward to how all these players doing this year.

Slidify is an R package helps to create and publish beautiful HTML5 presentations from RMarkdown. Slidify package is fantastic for creating reproducible presentations.

slidifyLibraries contains external resources used by Slidify.

rCharts is an R package to create, customize and publish interactive javascript visualizations from R using a familiar lattice style plotting interface.

All of these three packages are created and maintained by Ramnath Vaidyanathan of McGill University.  Since all these three packages are not on CRAN and needs to be installed from github using the Hadley's devtools package.

library(devtools)

install_github('ramnathv/slidify')

install_github('ramnathv/slidifyLibraries')

install_github('ramnathv/rCharts')

library(devtools)

build("C:/packages/slidify/", binary=FALSE) # Change C:/packages/ to your folder name

build("C:/packages/slidifyLibraries/", binary=FALSE) # Change C:/packages/ to your folder name

build("C:/packages/rCharts/", binary=FALSE) # Change C:/packages/ to your folder name

# Change C:/packages/ to your folder name

install.packages("C:/packages/slidify_0.5.tar.gz", repos = NULL, type="source")

# Change C:/packages/ to your folder name

install.packages("C:/packages/slidifyLibraries_0.3.1.tar.gz", repos = NULL, type="source")

# Change C:/packages/ to your folder name

install.packages("C:/packages/rCharts_0.4.5.tar.gz", repos = NULL, type="source")

In business analysis, it is very common to break sales into different quantile groups and then it can be used for segmentation purpose. The most commonly used quantiles are:

• Quintiles which creates 5 equal size groups
• Deciles which creates 10 equal size groups

Occasionally, Ventiles (20 groups) and Percentiles (100 groups) will used.

Quantiling process is very powerful when 2 dimensional of sales data is available, like product sales and market sales. In business it is very common to use quantile matrix to perform the account segmentation. An example of segmentation definition can be based on a 2 X 2 deciling matrix like below:

Even this is a very common process, it is indeed not a straightforward simple calculation to get quantile values in SQL server. There are many ways we can do to calculate such, but I found that use window function in conjunction with CEILING function is the easiest way to calculate quantile value. Let’s try. I will use a deciling process to start with.

The first step to calculate decile value for a specific object (Account, Product etc) is to calculate cumulative values and then calculate the cumulative percentage.

This will generate the cumulative product sales value and its cumulative percentage. the top 10 records as below:

Now the question is how can we assign a decile value based on the cumulative percentage value? there are many ways to do it. But as I found that there is a very simple way to do it by using SQL CEILING function:

You can randomly check the results:

Based on this deciling calculation, we can generalize the quantiling calculation on any quantile number between 1 and 100.

I hope this tip is useful and please see the attached scripts if you want to have a try.

Thanks.

Power View Report embedded view is indeed a very nice feature and opens up a big opportunities for ISVs and companies and individuals to share data and visualizations. Please check this blog, Embed Power View Interactive Reports in Your Blogs and Websites, for more details about how to embed a power view report.

While this is great news, I also found that there are some frustrations. The embedded view is rendered nicely in IE 9 but there are issues with IE 11 and other main browsers. 

I have put together a few mains issues I found. If you have same issue and different issue please share your experience with me. Thanks.