Shetland Data

Shetland Data is blog about business intelligence focusing on the not for profit world. In particular the charity and higher education sectors. Though for an interesting technical article we’re happy to go with the most tenuous of links. The articles are an eclectic mix of how to guides on topics from ETL to data visualisation and commentary on specific technologies and products.

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30th June 20212nd July 2021

Create a SQL Server Management Studio Extension

For years I’ve been using excel or dynamic SQL to generate SQL scripts to do data loads and updates and to generate IN predicates . For a small number of rows or values this is quicker than importing the required data into SQL Server. A few days ago I idly wondered how difficult it would be …

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14th June 202115th June 2021

Developing a Salesforce Download

About three years ago I was working on a Salesforce implementation for a campaigning charity. My role was to develop a SQL Server Operational Data Store that mirrored the data in their Salesforce instance. After considering a number of options we decided to develop our own download interface to regularly refresh the SQL Server database …

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7th June 20217th June 2021

Using the Google Maps Distance Matrix API in .Net

Knowing the distance between your staff and students’ locations and your institution has innumerable uses. From timetable planning to calculating the CO2 impact of your organisation. Given a person’s postcode calculating their straight line distance from an address is straightforward but not that useful. Actual driving, cycling or walking distances would be better. Here the …

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