Just like last year, I’m a bit late with the obligatory “how was last year and what is this year supposed to bring” blog post. Anyway, here it is. Let’s start by wishing every one of you the very best for the new year. I hope 2015 may bring us many professional highlights, next to a fulfilling private life.
2014 was a great year professional wise: I had a long interesting project with interesting colleagues, I got to speak at two events and I did a webinar for the PASS BI virtual chapter. Because I got the ride the train to work, I got a little extra time to write articles, watch videos and read books. I got a nice list together in 2014:
- Star Schema The Complete Reference. If you haven’t read that book yet, buy it now and read it immediately. This is one of the best technical books I have ever read. In my opinion it’s better than the Kimball books.
- Master Data Services Not the best book around (might have needed a better editor), but it gets the job done.
- Thinking with Data
- Naked Statistics. A great humerous introduction to statistics.
- Tableau Dashboard Cookbook. It could have been a great book, but Packt Publishing managed to royally screw up the editing, unfortunately.
- Modeling the Agile Data Warehouse with Data Vault. A good introduction to the Data Vault methodology, but that’s about all I can say about it. Lacks technical detail.
- Tableau Data Visualization Cookbook. Way too basic, which makes the book a bit worthless.
- Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten by Stephen Few. A must-read for every BI professional who has to visualize data (even when using tables).
- Visualize This by Nathan Yau. Good introduction on how to make more dazzling graphics with R and Adobe Illustrator.
- Freakonomics. A great humerous book about how statistics, big data and data science can give an answer to insane questions. It makes you think of all the things that are possible by analyzing data. Recommended.
- I reread Microsoft SQL Server 2012 High-Performance T-SQL Using Window Functions by Itzik. It’s an amazing book and I even learned more the second time I read it. Recommended as well.
2014 also brought me some professional recognition which I’m very grateful for: I was nominated for Author of the Year at MSSQLTips.com and for Best Blog at the Tribal Awards. At the time of writing, the winners are not yet announced. Fingers crossed!
To close off, the currently most viewed article on this blog is Stupid me #3 – Building the script component for some strange reason. It has almost 80,000 views, so I guess a lot people people are curious about building script components?
Anyway, I hope I can welcome you again at this blog in 2015 and I’d like to thank you for reading.
Best wishes!
Koen
