Kostas Siabanis

Tech living recipes, occasionally business oriented

[ksiabani]

Salepi

This weekend we had a trip at Grevena, Maria’s hometown. Sitting in the family table her uncle mentioned that he collected “salepi” the previous day. Salepi is a “healthy” hot drink made from the bulbs of some orchid species. The word rang the bell for me. So, do you have orchids around here, I asked? I got a hesitant positive answer, followed by a short conversation which set an unofficial common ground on terminology. “Salepi comes from an orchid...”, “Orchid is a rare unique plant...” and so on and so it was clear my intentions were focused on the plant itself and not the bulbs. We agreed to visit Orchis mascula in situ next time, where I can admire it and shoot it.

I am pretty sure Salepi now looked more precious to uncle's eyes than before (did it?). What I am not confident about is the power of a short conversation to put up against a tradition of hundreds of years and how this pushes a species to distinction.

As far it concerns the health benefits of salepi, they are not much different from a simple recipe with hot milk and cinnamon...

[ksiabani]

Database administration vs database driven development

Using my car every day to get to work, doesn't really mean I use it well. Do I have to use it better? Or my goal is just to get to work? And if my car is broken one day because of misuse, how much will this affect my everyday life? How expensive is for me to have my car broken? And how long can I afford not to go to work? One day, one hour or one minute?

I use databases everyday as a DBA or a developer. I often find myself trying to manage user authentication and authorization from within an application and I question myself whether this management should be done with database tools instead. One thing is definite: If you ask a DBA he will tell you to do it with db management tools (e.g. for SQL Server, Management Studio or T-SQL), when if you asked a developer he will argue that you need to talk to a DBA for that.

Being in the middle, my opinion stands in the middle. There are certain cases where contacting a DBA to authenticate or authorize your user is an overkill, but there are other circumstances where the end product can benefit from clearly distinguish the roles of a developer and a database administrator.

[ksiabani]

ETL for small business

Most small business don't know they need an ETL tool as part of their everyday business and logic. Most small business don't know they do use ETL tools in one way or another, most of which they were forced to invent themselves. If you ever made a script that runs overnight for your company, most probably, you belong to this category.

On the other hand we got Microsoft's SQL Server Express 2014, which is great, because its free, but misses an ETL tool, the so called SSIS (SQL Server Integration Services) which is part of the standard version. Wouldn't that be great for small businesses, startups or small applications to be able to still use Express alongside with a great ETL tool?

Well that tool exists and it is Talend's Open Studio (TOS) for Data Integration (DI). TOS for DI is a great ETL tool and it's open sourced. You can use it with SQL Server Express for ETL purposes. Compared to SSIS, they have a completely different philosophy, but they get the job done the same effectively.

Furthermore, SQL Server Express 2014 includes reporting services, which basically means you can use that to report your results from the ETL process.

Books to get you started:

Rick Barton, Talend Open Studio Cookbook

Ross Mistry and Stacia Misner, Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2014

Links:

SQL Server 2014 Express Editions

Talend's web site