How often do TechCrunch posts pertain to Twitter?

I too was curious, so I decided to find out. Clearly 2009 has been "The Year of Twitter" both in national press as well as TC's. What is also interesting (and a fact you may find in many a comment on such a post) is that MG Siegler is by far the top poster on Twitter related topics. Just in 2009 he has posted nearly 28% of Twitter posts from the beginning.


(click to enlarge)

The data was all gathered from http://www.crunchbase.com/company/twitter/posts.

Of course it was all manually scraped and put in the proper format. I'd love to get access to all of their data and see who tends to post about what, at what times, what days of the week, etc. Sometimes it's disturbing that mere data like this is "cool" to me.

HOW TO: Connect to SSAS in Excel via VPN

I recently had trouble connecting to Analysis Services in Excel via our companies Cisco VPN on my personal non-domain PC from home.

Making a shortcut with the following target fixed it for me:

%windir%\system32\runas.exe /net /user:YOUR_DOMAIN\YOUR_USERNAME "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\EXCEL.EXE"

HOW TO: Query SSAS 2008 Cube via Excel 2003

I searched high and low for this information and could not find it anywhere. I finally by chance figured it out in reading a few different forum posts on unrelated issues. I figured someone should post it somewhere.

To connect with an Analysis Services 2008 cube in Excel 2003, you will need the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services 10.0 OLE DB Provider:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=C6C3E9EF-BA29-4A43-8D69-A2BED18FE73C&displaylang=en#Instructions

The standard connector that comes with Excel 2003 will not work with SSAS 2008. Though I would highly recommend an upgrade to Excel 2007 if you will be doing a lot of work with SSAS.

Introduction

Hello - my name is Kyle and I am a Database Analyst at a local start-up in the Indianapolis area. This blog will serve as a location for me to post my thoughts, ideas, and findings typically pertaining to Pentaho Data Integration (aka Kettle or PDI). PDI is an open source ETL (extract, transform, load) tool I use on a daily basis to aggregate data into mini "data marts" or "data warehouses."

I hope that at the least I can help people through some of the initial hurdles in using ETL tools to their advantage.