Jeff Pries

SQL Server, Power BI, and other Business Intelligence and data technologies

Month: February 2014

Digging Out of the Snowstorm (Again)

February 14, 2014 /

Digging Out of the Snowstorm (Again)

Living in Georgia, snow is a pretty rare thing.  Even rarer is snow that actually sticks to the ground for more than one day.  Twice now within the last month, we’ve had major snow and/or ice events and even been the subject of some pretty funny news coverage.

We’ve had comparisons to the Walking Dead:

Source:  http://i.imgur.com/TMCSBfo.jpg

Due to people literally abandoning their cars on the roads and interstate due to them being impassable:

Source:  http://imgur.com/a/uREXR

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Geocaching Analytics – Part 3: GCInsight Data Preparation

February 7, 2014 /

Geocaching Analytics – Part 3: GCInsight Data Preparation

At this point, we’ve gotten our data downloaded from the Geocaching.com website and we’re sitting on a local treasure trove of data…but the data is contained within a proprietary program (GSAK) which limits our ability to make use of the data.  So, it’s time to work on extracting the data and getting it into a usable format.

The GSAK application will be our primary data source for acquiring Geocaching data as well as future updates to the data.  That being said, the data is not particularly easy to work with in its GSAK format.  Fortunately, GSAK stores its geocache data in a SQLite database, which is a compact database which runs as an application on command rather than a service.

In order to fully utilize the data, we’ll be building a process to export the GSAK data from SQLite into a SQL Server database.  Once the data is exported to SQL Server, we can perform any number of transformations and summarizations.

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