Innovation + Product Development

[su_note note_color=”#fafafa”]I recently had to import various data sets as items into Sitecore. There are many tools one can use but I wanted something very simple, something readily available, and yet something powerful and flexible enough to build a reusable component. I figured I would use Sitecore Powershell Extensions.[/su_note] For a treasure hunt we need […]

In some aspects, the Spark engine is similar to Hadoop because both of them will do Map & Reduce over multiple nodes. The important concept in Spark is RDD (Resilient Distributed Datasets), by which we could operate over array, dataset and the text files. This example gives you some ideas on how to do map/reduce […]

[su_note note_color=”#fafafa”]I have recently found myself working on a project that needed federated authentication. While intrAnet sites could use SiteMinder agent, extranet sites could only do SAML via something like Shibboleth. Setting up a Service Provider with Shibboleth is fairly straightforward and well documented on their wiki. And it also works like a charm until […]

In early June, Apple released a new UI testing tool in WWDC 2015. I’ve tried this interesting tool in some of our internal projects during the past three weeks, and I’ve discovered some pros and cons along the way. I share my experiences below: What’s my environment: OS X Yosemite 10.10.3 Xcode 7.0 beta 2 […]

In terms of real-time messaging or event analytics on the distributed node, we think of Storm and Kafka, both famous Apache projects. Storm has been used in Twitter’s production for many years, so it proves to be powerful. On June 4, Twitter shared news that the company developed a new system called Heron to handle […]

Attribute Routing Rumor has it: you can use MVC attribute routing in Sitecore. It’s actually very easy to set up. John West posted it recently on his blog. Today I stumbled upon an interesting side effect of using this way of routes registration that may be important if your controllers generate user facing experiences that […]

Concept This blog is intended for novice to understand jQuery Ajax functionality and its integration with servlet by creating a simple project.  What is JQuery Ajax? Ajax (Asynchronous Java Script and XML) enables exchanging data between client and server and updating parts of web page without reloading the entire page. jQuery provides easy to use […]

Spark provides several ways for developer and data scientists to load, aggregate and compute data and return a result. Many Java or Scala developers would prefer to write their own application codes (aka Driver program) instead of inputting a command into the built-in spark shell or python interface. Below are some steps for how to quickly configure […]

Introduction SSAS 2012 provides three different approaches for creating a business intelligence semantic model: tabular, multidimensional, and PowerPivot. Tabular solutions use relational modeling constructs such as tables and relationships for modeling data, and the xVelocity in-memory analytics engine for storing and calculating data. Multidimensional and data mining solutions use OLAP modeling constructs (cubes and dimensions) […]

We examine SCD Type I and Type II here. Overview of Kettle transformation Here is overview of transformation. It will be loaded from excel source file and loaded into database.

In this blog we will talk about how to implement various types of slowly changing dimensions (SCDs) with Kettle in details. And I will introduce the examination of SCD Type I and Type II in Part2. Types of Slowly Changing Dimensions Following Kimball, we distinguish two main types of slowly changing dimensions: Type I, Type […]

[su_note note_color=”#fafafa”]This blog post is a response to a question over at SDN (here). It’s a prototype of a solution, please use at your own risk and make sure you harden the code properly. I intentionally simplified it for the blog post. If I spend a little more time on it I will publish it […]