50 Free Social Media Tools You Can't Live Without

Tracking your social media campaign?  Here are some tools to look at.

A couple years ago, Jay Baer wrote a great blog post called ‘The 39 social media tools I’ll use today’ which was an all-in-one toolkit for social media marketers (and still is).

A lot has changed in the two years since that post was published so here is a ’2012 remix’ featuring 50 (mostly free) tools you can use on a daily basis.

Whether you are just starting out in the social media arena or have been at it for a few years, this will hopefully be a handy resource. So, let’s serve ‘em up

50 Free Social Media Tools You Can't Live Without

CanvasMap Prototype = HTML5 Canvas + Mapping

Looking for a Windows 8 / HTML5 map control?

CanvasMap is a JavaScript map visualization control (similar to Bing Maps or Google Maps) that is built entirely on top of using the HTML5 Canvas element to render the map. Currently, neither Bing Maps or Google Maps use the Canvas element to render maps, so I thought I’d do this to see how the performance might compare. I know there are a few alternatives already, but I thought I’d have some fun trying to build my own.

CanvasMap Prototype = HTML5 Canvas + Mapping

VDS Technologies - Map Data and GIS Tools

Excellent repository of shape files for maps.

VDS Technologies - Map Data and GIS Tools

The 2012 Microsoft Product Roadmap -- Redmond Channel Partner

One fork in the road may be a single platform for Windows Phone & Windows 8 apps, or the ability to run WP7.5 apps on Win8.

Which would be nice.  Kind of like running iPhone apps on the iPad.

The star of last year's product roadmap was Office 365. Microsoft this year looks likely to pivot from the public cloud to the private cloud, while also shipping staples like SQL Server and releasing major betas -- and possibly final versions -- of blockbusters including Windows 8 tablet, client and server, and Office 15.

The 2012 Microsoft Product Roadmap -- Redmond Channel Partner

Geocoding in Excel

Need a fast way of getting lat/long values for a batch of addresses in Excel?

A lot of folks have to geocode data that they get from various folks in their organization, and it often makes its way in to Excel.  Of course, you can batch geocode using Bing Maps Services, but in some scenarios it is a lot more convenient or reasonable to use Excel.

Westin's Technical Log

Another Data Mining Blog

Another Data Mining Blog:

Excellent examples of using R with SQL Server, from a milestone winner in the $3 million dollar Heritage Provider Network health prize.

'via Blog this'

Y2K 0229–Azure’s down?

Don’t forget to ensure that your test cases contain time-based events, like leap years and Daylight Savings.   Not that it would have helped much, since it was a cert expiry that caused the issue.  The moral of the story?  Ensure critical apps have a disaster recovery plan that doesn’t include a single source of failure (cloud provider).

When the clocks struck midnight, things quickly got janky, and a cloud-system domino effect took charge. A large number of Western Hemisphere sites and the U.K. government's G-Cloud CloudStore were among the many stopped cold by the outage. Microsoft has been retracing its steps in finding out what exactly happened and hasn't said very much yet, although it did report in an Azure team blog that the problem has "mostly" been fixed.

IT in Canada - Canada's Only Integrated Social Media News Network

SQL Azure Upgrade

SQL Azure Upgrade Advisor?  Here you go...

Get your SQL Server database ready for SQL Azure! - SQL Server Team Blog - Site Home - TechNet Blogs: "One of our lab project teams was pretty busy while the rest of us were taking a break between Christmas and New Year’s here in Redmond. On January 3rd, their new lab went live: Microsoft Codename "SQL Azure Compatibility Assessment". This lab is an experimental cloud service targeted at database developers and admins who are considering migrating existing SQL Server databases into SQL Azure databases and want to know how easy or hard this process is going to be. SQL Azure, as you may already know, is a highly available and scalable cloud database service delivered from Microsoft’s datacenters. This lab helps in getting your SQL Server database cloud-ready by pointing out schema objects which are not supported in SQL Azure and need to be changed prior to the migration process. So if you are thinking about the cloud again coming out of a strong holiday season where some of your on-premises databases were getting tough to manage due to increased load, this lab may be worth checking out."

'via Blog this'

Based on the recent training course I took using SQL Azure, the backend is a SQL 2005 "Express" style instance.  Lack of some key "newer" features that use the CLR (datatypes like spatial and xml) may quickly exclude some of your more complex databases from being migrated to the cloud.

Million Song Dataset | scaling MIR research

Looking for some Big Data to test out a project?  This one looks like fun.

Million Song Dataset | scaling MIR research: "The Million Song Dataset is a freely-available collection of audio features and metadata for a million contemporary popular music tracks.


Its purposes are:


To encourage research on algorithms that scale to commercial sizes
To provide a reference dataset for evaluating research
As a shortcut alternative to creating a large dataset with APIs (e.g. The Echo Nest's)
To help new researchers get started in the MIR field
The core of the dataset is the feature analysis and metadata for one million songs, provided by The Echo Nest. The dataset does not include any audio, only the derived features. Note, however, that sample audio can be fetched from services like 7digital, using code we provide.


The Million Song Dataset is also a cluster of complementary datasets contributed by the community:


SecondHandSongs dataset -> cover songs
musiXmatch dataset -> lyrics
Last.fm dataset -> song-level tags and similarity
Taste Profile subset -> user data


The Million Song Dataset started as a collaborative project between The Echo Nest and LabROSA. It was supported in part by the NSF."


'via Blog this'

NoSQL Data Modeling Techniques « Highly Scalable Blog

NoSQL, or DIY SQL is the most common technique for blasting out distributed data stores. 

This article is a great overview of the types of NoSQL designs out there, and ways to model the data.

NoSQL databases are often compared by various non-functional criteria, such as scalability, performance, and consistency. This aspect of NoSQL is well-studied both in practice and theory because specific non-functional properties are often the main justification for NoSQL usage and fundamental results on distributed systems like CAP theorem are well applicable to the NoSQL systems.  At the same time, NoSQL data modeling is not so well studied and lacks of systematic theory like in relational databases. In this article I provide a short comparison of NoSQL system families from the data modeling point of view and digest several common modeling techniques.

NoSQL Data Modeling Techniques « Highly Scalable Blog

Top analytic blogs and websites, with trending information - AnalyticBridge

I recently signed up for mailings from Analyticbridge, the social network for analytic professionals.   It seems like daily emails are the norm, which I’ll have to setup a rule to move someplace.  In the meantime, they just released a list of the top analytic blogs and websites.

Worth checking out.

Top analytic blogs and websites, with trending information - AnalyticBridge

Microsoft partnering with monitor manufacturers?

I wonder if MS will fix this resolution limitation in the release…

Laurent Bugnion experienced Windows Update hell when he got hit in the middle of a presentation.  The moral of the story?  Run Windows Update before the presentation, or turn off updates altogether.

His presentation looks really interesting.  Taking a Silverlight to WP7 & WP7 to Win8/WinRT.

What was the issue actually?

After reboot I tried again, and the same result happened: No Metro apps could be started. From the room, I got the suggestion that it was a resolution problem. And indeed: You cannot run Metro applications with less than 768 pixels vertical resolution. And because of the projector, I was running at 1280x720. So I thought OK, let’s try it, increased the resolution to 1280x768 and indeed I could start the Metro apps… but then the projector stopped showing the image!

Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft)

Windows 7 comes to the iPad with 1 gigabit internet speed

23 seconds to download a CD’s worth of content.  3 minutes to get a DVD?  Wow.

The news today is the new service, called OnLive Desktop Plus. It’s not free — it costs $5 a month — but it adds Adobe Reader, Internet Explorer and a 1-gigabit-a-second Internet connection.

That’s not a typo. And “1-gigabit Internet” means the fastest connection you’ve ever used in your life — on your iPad. It means speeds 500 or 1,000 times as fast as what you probably get at home. It means downloading a 20-megabyte file before your finger lifts from the glass.

You get the same speed in both directions. You can upload a 30-megabyte file in one second.

OnLive Desktop Plus Puts Windows 7 on the iPad in Blazing Speed - State of the Art - NYTimes.com

Download: Reporting Services LogViewer - Microsoft Download Center - Download Details

A log analyzer for Reporting Services, also try Log Parser Lizard

In this tool we demonstrate the best way to analyze the Report Server Service Trace Log and Report Server Execution Log that is useful if you are debugging an application or investigating an issue or event.

Download: Reporting Services LogViewer - Microsoft Download Center - Download Details

Data Mining Research - www.dataminingblog.com | Data Mining Blogs

Large Data Mining Blog list here.

Data Mining Research - www.dataminingblog.com | Data Mining Blogs

History of Sharepoint

Interesting article about the history of Sharepoint here.  Back in the day, I remember us building proof-of-concept digital dashboards in Outlook.  I remember Site Server having a really cool Silverlight-style 3D spiderweb visualization for looking at a web site map, and visualizing one of the largest web sites in Canada, analytics for Bell Canada.  I remember using a product called Corechange Coreport to build out portals that included both web and desktop apps. 

I remember cursing Sharepoint 2001's functionality when we were building out Project Server portals, and fighting with InfoPath xml and painfully slow document creation APIs to build out a workflow system for the largest insurance company in Canada.  Scaling out Sharepoint 2001 was an interesting affair...

Sample OData feed

Looking for sample data for PowerPivot?  Although Ocean Drilling isn't high on my list of environmentally friendly exercises, it could be an interesting source of data.

http://data.oceandrilling.org/

Killer Real-World PowerPivot Examples | Tech·Ed Australia 2011 | Channel 9

Killer PowerPoint examples – great video on how to create dashboards with PowerPivot.

Killer Real-World PowerPivot Examples | Tech·Ed Australia 2011 | Channel 9

Email Behavior Analyzer

Cool MS Outlook addin – find out how email conversations translate to emotions and behaviours.

Email Behavior Analyzer

Email Behavior Analyzer

SCD Type 2 Merge in Oracle

Oracle Slowly Changing Dimension using PL/SQL Merge.

If you require type 2 dimension updates in Oracle, this could help.

http://databobjr.blogspot.ca/2011/04/load-slowly-changing-dimension-type-2.html

Rob Farley : The SSIS tuning tip that everyone misses

Great tips for optimizing SSIS source queries.

Luckily, T-SQL gives us a brilliant query hint to help avoid this.

OPTION (FAST 10000)

This hint means that it will choose a query which will optimise for the first 10,000 rows – the default SSIS buffer size. And the effect can be quite significant.

Rob Farley : The SSIS tuning tip that everyone misses

Debugging SSIS Script Component « Code Reference

If you’re having issues with SSIS 2008 R2 logging in script tasks, it’s most likely because syntax has changed.

See this link on how to use ComponentMetadata.FireProgress instead of Dts.FireProgress.

Debugging SSIS Script Component « Code Reference

reportsync - sync SSRS report between two report servers - Google Project Hosting

reportsync - sync SSRS report between two report servers - Google Project Hosting: "reportsync
sync SSRS report between two report servers

Sync reports between two SSRS servers.
Download rdls from SSRS to local PC.
Upload files to a SSRS server
Attach datasources automatically on upload(Data source name given in the report must exist on server)"

there is an error in xml document (5, 2) rptproj - Google Search

---------------------------
Microsoft Visual Studio
---------------------------
The report definition failed to load: There is an error in XML document (5, 2)..  Verify the report definition conforms to the correct schema.
---------------------------
OK   Cancel  
---------------------------

If you get this, and are using Subversion for your Reporting Services development, you may have a corrupt data source file.  The xml involved has nothing to do with rptproj, it is actually an item within, in this case the data source.

XML and Visual Studio are my two least favourite things when dealing with bugs.

there is an error in xml document (5, 2) rptproj - Google Search

Business Intelligence Edition in SQL 2012 - Prologika (Teo Lachev's Weblog) - Prologika Forums

Teo outlines some of the pros and cons of the new BI edition of SQL 2012.

About $10k per server vs. over $50k for Enterprise Edition is the biggest plus.  It will provide all the features for Analysis Services previously found only in Enterprise, and gives a fully functional PowerPivot, Analysis Services & Reporting Services server to the SME’s.

From what I understand, the key driver for Microsoft making this change would have been the requirement of installing 2 separate instances of SQL for using both PowerPivot and Analysis Services (multidimensional or tabular) data stores.  For those clients wishing to install 2 separate environments for those, the cost will end up being about $20k anyway, not including Sharepoint and DW SQL instances.

One limitation is the 2-socket configuration limit.  Another is the per-user licensing scheme, which could leave companies with 50-200 users in a grey zone.  Enterprise or BI?

The licensing model for private clouds seems a bit more appealing from an ROI perspective.  Invest in SQL Enterprise and deploy an unlimited # of VMs.  The disadvantage is the need to license the entire server farm for SQL Enterprise + Software Assurance.

Business Intelligence Edition in SQL 2012 - Prologika (Teo Lachev's Weblog) - Prologika Forums

Microsoft also seems to be shutting out AMD with the new licensing scheme, and targeting Intel’s Q2 release of their new 2-socket chipset.

http://sqlserverperformance.wordpress.com/2011/11/10/sql-server-2012-licensing-and-hardware-considerations/

Now that MS has moved to a core licensing model + user vs CPU socket, will this change the R&D direction of CPU manufacturers? Will they now focus their efforts more on GPU processing?  What if a PC only had 1 core & 1 socket, but multiple GPUs and something else besides a CPU to handle the more precise calculations? 

Microsoft to enable Linux on its Windows Azure cloud in 2012 | ZDNet

Actually, it should be any O/S, if VMs are available… an interesting twist on cannibalizing their existing Windows Azure platform.

To date, Microsoft has been balking at customer requests to add persistent VMs to Azure, hoping to get customers to develop Azure apps from scratch instead. But the lack of the ability to host apps like SharePoint and other third-party business applications with persistence was a deal breaker for a number of business users who were unwilling to consider Azure until Microsoft added this support, one of my contacts said.

Microsoft to enable Linux on its Windows Azure cloud in 2012 | ZDNet

MDX Performance and LastNonEmpty

Trying to squeeze performance out of LastNonEmpty... by switching to LastChild in cube calculations.

http://www.artisconsulting.com/blogs/greggalloway/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=16

Multi-Value (Select All) parameter in Reporting Services | Microsoft Connect

 

One area Reporting Services falls down a bit is in the parameter selection process for the built-in Report Manager and integrated modes.  Usually this involves building custom parameter web parts or asp.net portals to get around.  There are some workarounds for issues related to multi-value parameters and the infamous ‘Select All’ checkbox that may help if your database is getting clobbered.

Multi-Value (Select All) parameter in Reporting Services | Microsoft Connect

SQL Server Reporting Services Team Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

Is Reporting Services going the way of the dodo, to be replaced by Power View (Project Crescent?)

No.

Comparing Power View, Report Builder, and Report Designer

Power View won’t replace the existing Reporting Services reporting products.

Report Designer is a sophisticated design environment that developers and IT pros can use for embedded reporting in their applications. In Report Designer they can create operational reports, shared data sources, and shared datasets, and author report viewer controls.

In Report Builder, IT pros and power users can create powerful operational reports, and reusable report parts and shared datasets.

Report Builder and Report Designer create RDL reports; Power View creates RDLX reports. Power View cannot open RDL reports, and vice versa.

Both Report Designer and Report Builder are shipping in Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Release Candidate 0 (RC 0) Reporting Services, along with Power View. For more information, see Tools (SSRS).

SQL Server Reporting Services Team Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

It is interesting that Microsoft is launching tools like PowerPivot and Power View, knowing that they will cannibalize their existing Analysis Services and Reporting Services products and roadmaps for future installations.

My question is, why don’t they just go all-in and build out these tools as replacements, instead of diverging paths?  Why not incorporate all the best features of Power View into Report Builder, and leverage the RDL language that is designed for reporting? 

Same goes for Analysis Services and PowerPivot.  Why have two separate servers for each product?  What is the value (other than licensing) of splitting up these technologies into 2 siloed environments?  The sum of the parts is much better than the individual. 

Still looking for some cohesion and sense of direction for the future of SQL Server reporting and BI tools… and hoping for a better 2012.

A deployment checklist for the new Denali / SQL 2012 tools

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh231687(v=sql.110).aspx

SQL Reports Scheduler|SQL Server Reporting Services|SSRS|Report Distribution|Business Intelligence|SQL-RD|ChristianSteven Software

The Swiss Army knife of Reporting Services tools.  From two men who both aren’t from Switzerland.  I’m not really sure what it doesn’t do.

SQL-RD is a Business Intelligence application for windows that saves time and money by making it easy to define single or packages of Microsoft® SQL Reporting Services reports, schedule and run them automatically, and send the reports to print, fax, disk, ftp, sms or email in a number of standard formats.

SQL Reports Scheduler|SQL Server Reporting Services|SSRS|Report Distribution|Business Intelligence|SQL-RD|ChristianSteven Software

technoblab

Day 23: Tips from Technoblab for Report Header/Footer, format codes, customizing the toolbar, working with images, etc

Lots of nice code examples here

A database field can neither be placed in a report header nor in the footer. This will throw an error "The Value expression for the textbox <fieldname> refers to a field. Fields cannot be used in page headers or footers".
There is however a workaround. Place a hidden textbox in the report body call it tb_hidden and assign to this the database field that you need in the header. Place a textbox in the report header and assign the hidden textbox's value to it
ex: =reportitems!tb_hidden.Value
This however as a drawback, the value will appear only in the first page. If your report runs into many pages then you need to take a different approach.
Pass the value to appear in the header as a parameter from your .aspx page call it database_field. Assign this to the textbox in the header.
ex: =Parameters!database_field.Value

technoblab

SQL Server Reporting Services Parameter Logging & Caching

Day 22: Auto-caching and logging of SQL RS parameters

The solution tracks the selected parameters from a report execution and uses them later for the next execution to take them as default parameters. This enables users to log parameters and inspect the execution statistics of reports as well as caching former execution parameters.

SQL Server Reporting Services Parameter Logging & Caching

Using SharePoint List data for Reporting Services (SSRS) parameter source « Dan English's BI Blog

 

Excellent article with how to filter distinct values from a list using SSRS and Sharepoint.

Using SharePoint List data for Reporting Services (SSRS) parameter source « Dan English's BI Blog

SSIS ReportGeneratorTask

Day 21 was probably part of Day 20 too.  Still worth a mention.   Code Generator for SQL RS reports

SSIS Task for SQL Server 2008 to create server reports or local reports from a recordset data source.

SSIS ReportGeneratorTask

SSIS Community Tasks and Components

Day 20: An aggregator of all the SSIS components on Codeplex and elsewhere

Anything and everything you ever need to do with SSIS is somewhere on this page.  Includes some Reporting Services functionality too.

This is a community project for developing additional tasks and components for SSIS, and identifying other CodePlex projects that do the same. 51 Integration Services extensibility projects exist on CodePlex - find them and over a hundred more from around the 'net right here.

SSIS Community Tasks and Components

Microsoft SQL Server Community & Samples

Day 17, 18, and 19: Whatever you want to do with SQL is somewhere in these samples…

Microsoft SQL Server Community Projects & Samples

Microsoft SQL Server Community & Samples

SQL Server 2008 & R2 Reporter

Day 16: One of the more useful tools out there – integration of Reporting Services with SSMS for exporting table data to a report!

Because the import/export wizard sucks.

SQLReporter enable you exporting table or view to Reporting Services Report , Then , you can export it to Excel & PDF. Quick & nice.

SQL Server 2008 & R2 Reporter

GUI Tool Reveals SQL Injection Vulnerabilities

SQL Injection attacks are probably the most common attacks on internet-facing SQL Servers due to their ease of use.  This tool helps expose vulnerabilities to end-users and non-IT executives, visually.

The reasoning is that most existing SQL Injection testing tools are executed from a command line and “lack an intuitive user interface”. In other words, if you can’t show the problem in a pretty web page, people won’t really believe it exists.

GUI Tool Reveals SQL Injection Vulnerabilities

SSRS Report Downloader

Day 15: Leech for Reporting Services

SSRS downloader is a tool to download all report files from a folder from Reporting Services at once. It uses reportservice2005.asmx endpoint web service to do this.

SSRS Report Downloader

SimpleDBExtension - SSRS extension for SimpleDB

Day 15: Amazon SimpleDB query extension for your cloud computing needs

If you’d like to tell your manager you’re running reports “off the cloud”, here’s one way to do it.

http://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/

This project is a SQL Server Reporting Services 2008 data processing extension that facilitates querying of Amazon's SimpleDB.

SimpleDBExtension - SSRS extension for SimpleDB

SSRS PowerShell Provider

Day 14: A Powershell provider for SSRS

Doesn’t look too current but probably still works…

A PowerShell provider for SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services). The provider allows for navigation of SSRS installations, management of reports, etc, all through a scriptable interface.

SSRS PowerShell Provider

Database Documentation Reports

Day 13: Self-service documentation

These are reports for MS SQL Management Studio and MS SQL Reporting Services for creation of database documentation with the use of descriptions from Extended Properties.
Reports contain the detailed information on tables, views and stored procedures etc. Use of reports engine allows exporting generated reports into Excel, Word, PDF etc. formats easily.

Database Documentation Reports

Sperm Report

Skipping the weekend again. 

Day 12: The unfortunately-named sperm report project, blowing out data from OLAP cubes with “Spermline visualization”

Essentially with these four reports you can create 400 user reports (actually as many as you like) Change what is displayed on rows, columns, filter or time by simply creating a new "linked report" and setting a new set of paramaters.

Sperm Report

RSBuild SQL Server Reporting Service Deployment Tool

Day 9: An automated build tool for SQL RS

RSBuild is a deployment tool for SQL Server Reporting Service. It currently supports two types of tasks: executing SQL Server scripts and publishing SQL Server Reporting Service reports and shared data sources. From version 1.1.0 onwards SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services is supported as well as all previously supported versions of SQL Server Reporting Services.

RSBuild SQL Server Reporting Service Deployment Tool

SQLCAT Community Projects and Code Samples

Day 9: Auditing in SQL from the SQLCat team (and Denny Lee)

This project is a place for the SQL CAT team to share their expertise with the community and collaborate with other community members outside Microsoft who wish to contribute code samples to enable more productive use of the SQL Server platform for high-scale,enterprise customers

SQLCAT Community Projects and Code Samples

RSToolKit

Day 8: RSToolKit, a tool for creating, moving, documenting, and exporting reports.

This could be very useful in a distributed, farm or DRP environment.

RSToolKit allows users to administrate different SQL Server Reporting Services with one application and has different methods to deploy reports. It supports all SQL Server Reporting Services versions which are using the ReportService2005 and the ReportExecution2005 SOAP API

RSToolKit

Drilltrough and filtering on SSAS-cubes in SSRS

Day 7: A framework for navigating an Analysis Services cube from SSRS

Basically the user-friendliness of the interface is achieved by allowing users to drill up/down on the different hierarchies by simply clicking columns or rows, and applying filters by clicking on icons in rows or columns.
The performance is achieved by only retrieving the necessary data from the cube.

Drilltrough and filtering on SSAS-cubes in SSRS

Reporting Services Tracer

Day 6 – A debugger for Reporting Services

Wouldn't it be nice to be able to peek under the hood and see what APIs Report Manager or a custom application calls? This is exactly what the Reporting Services Tracer (RsTracer) sample was designed to handle. RsTracer intercepts the server calls and outputs them to a trace listener, such as the Microsoft DebugView for Windows. RsTracer helps you see the APIs that a Reporting Services client invokes and what arguments it passes to each interface. It also intercepts the server response. Armed with this information, you can easily reproduce the same feature in your custom management application.

Reporting Services Tracer

And a utility mentioned above from my favourite Windows utility guy Mark Russinovich

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896647

SSIS Report Generator Task (Custom Control Flow Component)

Day 5 (sorry I skipped the weekend) – Report Generator for Integration Services ETL

As the name says it, this "Control Flow" custom component can be used render your SQL Server Reporting Services in files withe the following formats: PDF, Word, Excel, HTML 4.0, MHTML, CSV, XML

SSIS Report Generator Task (Custom Control Flow Component)

SSRS report deployment tool (SSRSBuddy)

Day 2 – SSRS Buddy

A quick fix to upload multiple report definitions to Reporting Services.

SSRSBuddy enables deployment of multiple reports and report models onto a SSRS2005 instance, using shared datasources

SSRS report deployment tool (SSRSBuddy)