Data Warehouse Consultants · Blog
News, project stories, and practical ideas from Data Warehouse Consultants.
Insight
The Q-integrate tool creates an easy-to-install listener for real-time integration from Qualtrics into your cloud or on-premise database environment. The tool catches event notifications that you subscribe to using your Qualtrics account, and make full integration with their web platform seamless with your other internal tools.
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PITTSBURGH (April 15, 2024) – Data Warehouse Consultants (DWC) is hosting the third annual Bill Randall Memorial Golf Outing August 26 at Shannopin Country Club. Our friend, Bill, was taken too soon on April 5, 2021, after a long battle with Huntington’s Disease. He led a normal life until his college years when he was […]
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Insight
The Allegheny Intermediate Unit (AIU) was in need of a process that would allow it to expand its efforts and reach within Allegheny County. They were in search of a solution that easily blended all organizations involved. The sections below provide a glimpse into the story and development of the solution.
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Allegheny County Department of Human Services provides hundreds of millions of dollars for mental health services within the county. This allows a lot to occur – services, programs, care, etc. The county was searching for more information on how those dollars were being used and who was being served for mental health (MH) services.
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Insight
The Allegheny County Department of Human Services uses a data warehouse to collect information from over 185 sources and providers with many being external. It’s used to improve the services offered to clients as well as support management decision-making. It’s vital that this data is correct, clean and organized.
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Insight
Hello Baby was created for Allegheny County families with newborns to help aid and connect them to resources and services. As a network of supports, Hello Baby was crafted to meet families’ individual needs and interests. The county was in search of a solution to help organize this vast data and ensure seamless coordination among […]
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Allegheny County, like many across the country, faces some levels of gun violence. The Community Violence Reduction Initiative (CVRI) aims to reduce the amount of gun violence that tears communities apart. The CVRI team desired a mechanism for making a difference.
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Insight
Do you know what duplicate, incorrect, missing, inconsistent, and otherwise ‘bad data’ is costing you? Most organizations don’t. The costs are surprisingly high. Fortunately, improvements are achievable. Poor quality and inaccurate data (“bad data”) is a source of financial and brand losses for most organizations today. On average, organizations spend 3-5 ti
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Insight
PITTSBURGH (6/26/2023) – Data Warehouse Consultants (DWC) is hosting the second annual Bill Randall Memorial Golf Outing August 28 at Shannopin Country Club. Our friend, Bill, was taken too soon on April 5, 2021, after a long battle with Huntington’s Disease. Since being diagnosed at birth, he led a normal life until his college years. […]
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Insight
PITTSBURGH (7/5/2022) – Data Warehouse Consultants (DWC) is hosting the Bill Randall Memorial Golf Outing August 29 at Shannopin Country Club. Our friend Bill was taken too soon on April 5, 2021, after a long battle with Huntington’s Disease. He led a normal life until his college years, when the disease he had since birth […]
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Insight
The following press release was taken from Partner4Work. PITTSBURGH – The Department of Human Services (DHS) and Partner4Work (P4W), the workforce development board for the Pittsburgh area, announced today that Allegheny County is one of seven jurisdictions selected to take part in the Pathways Forward Challenge. The Challenge, overseen by the Heartland Alli
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Insight
PITTSBURGH (April 25, 2019) — Data Warehouse Consultants equips Allegheny County Department of Human Services with an updated Outcomes Tool application, enabling advanced analytics across 25+ human services data sources as of February 1. The Outcomes Tool is a web-based analytic application that allows authorized users to compile data for evaluation. The pur
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Insight
PITTSBURGH (April 4, 2019) — With the help of Data Warehouse Consultants, the Allegheny County Department of Human Services recently launched an updated QuickCount Tool application. QuickCount is an online, easy-to-use interface that allows journalists, policy researchers, grant writers, nonprofit leaders and community agencies to obtain counts of participan
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Insight
Here we feature a few methods for loading files into an Oracle or SQL Server database. There are many methods for accomplishing this, but over the past few projects, and after implementing most of the methods discussed, I documented some of my experiences. Here I focus on developing an application or process to load data […]
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Insight
This article features some methods that I have used to load data within a C# application. The methods discussed are an Insert Loop (with bind parameters), the DataAdapter.Update() method, and a custom method of passing the table to a stored procedure. For this article, a simple website demo was setup that accepted a 6-column CSV […]
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Insight
Data Warehouse Consultants is constantly investing in our staff to learn new technologies and offerings. The summary below was published by our analyst Mukesh Thangadurai regarding the use of the Azure SQL Data Warehouse, which is Microsoft’s current cloud offering focusing on the data warehousing space. For more information on this prototype or similar work
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Insight
Data Warehouse Consultants is constantly investing in our staff to learn new technologies and offerings. The summary below was published by our analyst Mukesh Thangadurai regarding the use of the Azure HD Insight product, which is Microsoft’s current Hadoop offering. For more information on this prototype or similar work we can do for your company, […]
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Insight
The Cloud offers many advantages and many organizations are looking to utilize Cloud solutions. But how easy is it to move an existing Data Warehouse to Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services? To gain insight and better advise our clients, Data Warehouse Consultants has begun two research projects to identify the benefits and pitfalls of […]
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Insight
Data Warehouse Consultants is focused on the Western Pennsylvania market and encourages our consultants to support the local institutions here. Bob Brichacek, a senior consultant for the firm, moonlights as an adjunct professor at the Carnegie Mellon University Heinz Graduate School. Bob teaches a graduate course in Data Warehousing and acts as a regular spo
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Insight
We have been encountering a new issue with Microsoft Excel and one of our clients had it today. It took a little while to figure out, so we want to help out others in this situation. Issue – Excel External/Web Content is Blocked: In most of our interactive applications, we allow for exporting data (either to […]
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Insight
Pittsburgh, PA: The Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC this week was named the 2015 HIMSS Enterprise Davies Award recipient for two innovative solutions designed and implemented by Data Warehouse Consultants. The Davies Awards program promotes electronic health record-enabled improvement in patient outcomes through sharing of case studies and lessons
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Insight
Unix (all-caps UNIX for the trademark) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, developed in the 1970s at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others. From the power user’s or programmer’s perspective, Unix systems are characterized by a modular design that […]
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The .NET Framework (pronounced dot net) is a software framework developed by Microsoft that runs primarily on Microsoft Windows. It includes a large class library known as Framework Class Library (FCL) and provides language interoperability (each language can use code written in other languages) across several programming languages. Programs written for .NET
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Google Apps for Work (formerly Google Apps for Business) is a suite of cloud computing productivity and collaboration software tools and software offered on a subscription basis by Google. It includes Google’s popular web applications including Gmail, Google Drive, Google Hangouts, Google Calendar, and Google Docs. While these products are available to consu
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Amazon Web Services is a collection of remote computing services, also called web services, that make up a cloud computing platform offered by Amazon.com. These services are based out of 11 geographical regions across the world. To learn more about Cloud Computing please click here. The following are some resources to learn about Amazon […]
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Insight
The radiology department of a top 10 Children’s Hospital began using a customized on-line patient tracking board created for them by Data Warehouse Consultants this week. This new application significantly reduces the phone calls and coordination that nurses, physicians and staff must do to efficiently move patients through the radiology department. The impl
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Insight
I was working on a project last week to load data into a HDFS-based Hive database. This was essentially a periodic load so Sqoop appeared to be the best tool for the job. My small project consisted of the following goals: – Connect Sqoop to SQL Server and/or Oracle instances – Export a set of […]
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Insight
Pittsburgh, PA: Allegheny County Department of Human Services (DHS) approved Data Warehouse Consultants to build business intelligence and web applications beginning in September 2014. This provides Data Warehouse Consultants the opportunity to fulfill projects for the Department of Human Services on an as needed, project-by-project basis. Of the company’s r
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Insight
On a client project today we had the need to create a table from an XML data file sent in a hierarchical format. The XML file contains multiple orders. Each order is for a particular store which is provided inside a header tag. Each store can order multiple items which are provided via sub tags […]
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Insight
I have received the following .NET error several times in the past when developing nested databound controls. I have found the solution does not have good coverage on the Internet. The curious thing about this error is that it does not appear until 2nd or 3rd postback on the page. [box]The SqlDataSource control does not […]
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