Tableau have just announced that Tableau Public Premium will now be free. Tableau Public is a cloud-based service that makes is easy to analyze and visualize large data sets. Working with Tableau is akin to working with a spreadsheet. The premium services adds the following features: support for larger data sets---up to 10 million rows a storage limit of 10 gigabytes the ability to restrict … [Read more...]
Scala on the rise
The TIOBE Index (of programming language popularity) for April 2015 notes that: Another interesting move this month concerns Scala. The functional programming language jumps to position 25 after having been between position 30 and 50 for many years. Scala seems to be ready to enter the top 20 for the first time in history. Scala is the language in which the hugely popular Apache Spark … [Read more...]
Azure Data Lake
Microsoft have announced Azure Data Lake---a big-data repository for storing structured and semi-structure data in native formats. Data lakes can contain single files exceeding many petabytes or huge numbers of small files, so are equally suited to processing transaction logs or receiving data from many disparate "internet of things" sensors. As data lakes are compatible with the Hadoop file … [Read more...]
Visual Studio Code released
Microsoft have launched Visual Studio Code---a code-optimized editor for Windows, Mac, and Linux. It has support for over 30 languages, including JavaScript, C#, F#, Python and Markdown. I'd imagine there will immediate interest from developers who'd like to develop ASP.NET 5 applications on the Mac. Visual Studio Code is a lightweight, keyboard-centric editor with autocomplete, syntax … [Read more...]
UK general election predictions
FiveThirtyEight is publishing forecasts for the 2015 UK general election. The site was founded by Nate Silver who made a name for himself creating models that were successful in forecasting the results of recent US elections. Current predictions are for even closer parity between the Conservatives and Labour, with the SNP comfortably in third place (but not fully in control of the balance of … [Read more...]