When you start collecting data at scale, you need to decide when to invest in keeping “all the datas” and when to keep only a sample. When it comes to sampling, you need to ensure that the parts you discard and the parts that you keep are a truly representative sample. That means you need […]
The UK Government provides public datasets that can be used by the media or the public. One such dataset contains information collected for the Coronavirus pandemic and its impact on people living and working in the UK. The problem with this dataset, though, is that we weren’t able to record the data until after the […]
Sometimes you want to generate an INSERT script from existing data, perhaps with one or two values tweaked. It’s a pain to hand-crank the INSERT when you can see exactly what you want using a SELECT statement. It’s also a bit long-winded to use SQL import/export wizards or other tools. Sometimes, you just want to […]
For those of you still keen on using pie charts, let’s embrace those big blobs of colour and do something cool with them. We’re going to unpeel a bunch of them. So, what’s the use of unpeeling pie charts – and how do we do it? Before Unpeeling Before you unpeel a pie chart, you […]
I tuned into the Octopus Deploy and Clear Measure live stream on safe, automated, and drama-free database deployments and there was a flurry of really useful DbUp tips from Paul Stovell that I wanted to share. Use a Sequential Naming Scheme Use a numbered naming scheme to ensure scripts are sequential on the file system. […]
I know that I have a bit of a routine. It goes a bit like this… stumble across a pie chart, show how the information would be better handled by a simple column chart, repeat. Well this week I stumbled across the pie charts below, which answer the question “would you invest in this initial […]
I have been writing about pie charts since 2009 when I wrote how pie charts are bad and I haven’t stopped writing about pie charts since then. Rather than a critique of some random pie chart I have seen, or been sent, or been linked to by the Chicago Tribune – I wanted to talk […]
We are using live monitoring of our website pages, and of our website components, to find performance problems in our application. This means we know why our web application is slow as soon as anything breaches a threshold. Very often, we find something that is draining too much CPU from our servers. Brains are a […]
This pie chart example is based on an article posted yesterday on the Google Testing Blog, a very interesting article but with one mistake. No Yes Notes I have had to estimate the true values of the three items with no value label The most likely question the chart will be answering is “what are […]
It has been a while hasn’t it. However, it is sometimes a good thing to remind ourselves of why pie charts are best avoided. This particular example came from a great blog post. The chart describes version adoption for a particular piece of software. Despite the pie chart not following any of the best practices […]