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How to Build a Flexible Developer Documentation Portal

October 8, 2020 Sisense

Developing analytic apps is a bold new direction for product teams. The Toolbox is where we talk development best practices, tips, tricks, and success stories to help you build the future of analytics and empower your users with the insights and actions they need.

When creating a resource and community to help developers get the most out of your product, it’s important to empower them to contribute to developer documentation and not just have all your content coming from product or tech writers.

If you haven’t read how we overhauled our developer portal recently, check out our prior conversation with Moti Granovsky, Sisense’s Head of Developer Relations. In this second part, we will take a deeper dive and share how we built a new system from the ground up to both deliver great information and be flexible enough to allow for continued evolution and growth.

Let’s kick off our journey into the rebuild by understanding what our requirements were and how we went about meeting them.

How to Build a Flexible Developer Documentation Portal

Building instead of buying

Shruthi Panicker: Why did we choose to build the portal on our own from scratch and not just use one of the many great products out there?

Moti Granovsky : There are great products out there focused on developer documentation, which are used by many companies successfully. When we set about rebuilding the portal, we knew we wanted engineers to contribute to our developer documentation. We also wanted to auto-generate some of the content, especially API references (which are very dry; there’s no “writing” necessary). Our product has so many APIs (rich and large) that writing and maintaining them is very time-consuming. We didn’t want tech writers to waste time repeatedly updating tables and tables of parameters.

We wanted to invest our time in generating content that is more engaging and valuable, like tutorials, open-source demos, cool features, and so on.

Make your requirements specific

SP: What were you asked to do?

MG: Our requirements were, in essence:

The platform should allow us to separate styling from content. We wanted to make sure that unlike the old website, it looks great, matches the Sisense brand, and keeps on looking great even as more content is added. This means not only did we want to white-label and design the content, we wanted to separate the layout and design from the content. (Remember, the people who are writing documentation are not necessarily experts at visual design.)
The format should be accessible to developers (aka Markdown-based). Besides an UI-based editor, some content management systems have their own specific language to programmatically format content. However, oftentimes nobody knows enough about these languages, and they’re not very intuitive either. Instead, we looked at the most common way for developers to write content — Markdown. It is used by Git itself and all Git providers. Even readme files for projects are written in Markdown. Every developer knows this syntax, and it has this benefit of separating design from content. Markdown content will also allow us to auto-generate content. If you look around, most API tools like Swagger, for example, have the ability to generate Markdown content.
Our customers should be able to contribute to docs (eventually). If a customer finds a typo or a mistake or they want to add some detail, we want to make that possible. For that, we should be able to store the content somewhere public, such as a GitHub repository. Markdown makes this possible since it’s text format and can be easily shared in GitHub. But we need the content to be separate from the website itself (something that is publicly available). If we were to write HTML pages and put them on a server, then a customer can’t contribute to that. But if those pages are generated from something that is publicly accessible like a GitHub repository, then we can solve this challenge.
We should go beyond just the documentation. We wanted the new website to be a true developer portal — a hub of knowledge and information for developers with which they can find all the resources they need. We want to make sure that, in the future, it includes a blog, playground, links to community, etc. that are not necessarily documentation. We want to create a home for developers where they can come and find anything that they need to do their job.

We looked at products in the market, and none of them met all of these requirements combined. Additionally, they were relatively costly because they include hosting, but documentation is generally static content so it is cheap and easy to host. There was no reason we couldn’t build it ourselves since we have the technical know-how to do it in-house.

sisense blog Embedded Trends 20191218 bl blog banner How to Build a Flexible Developer Documentation Portal

Choose the right framework

SP: So what tools did you decide to use to build the new portal?

MG: We found out some companies (and a huge shoutout to the developer relations team at Okta whose approach to developer docs inspired us) have taken this different approach and built their own websites using different tools. There are frameworks that can generate websites from Markdown. We looked at different ones and picked one that fit the Sisense technology stack (in terms of languages that developers are familiar with. Since most of our developers are JavaScript developers, we wanted one that used that and not Python, for example).

We found one called VuePress that did exactly what we needed. It has all the flexibility in the world. It is an open-source framework built and used by the Vue.js project. It allowed us to build exactly the type of website we had in mind in terms of look and feel while avoiding a lot of the effort involved compared to starting from scratch.

We invested effort in creating a great design and refactoring a lot of the existing content we had into Markdown from the old format. However, this process let us build the new portal from the ground up exactly the way we want without any compromises.

While it took a lot of effort initially, in the long term it will all pay off. First, the hosting is very cheap. Second, if we have to add new content, we don’t have to design anything. It will only be as expensive as writing that text. Anyone can just write text in a notepad and have beautiful content up on the website.

New portal, new options

SP: What can users expect to find in the new portal that they couldn’t in the old one?

MG: As a result of the new design, there are a few big changes in the new Sisense developer portal:

Separation of API reference and documentation: Developers can find a dedicated API reference section that is well organized and structured. They can quickly access the exact information they need. It is a lot more detailed and a lot more standardized than what we previously had, and they don’t have to scroll a bunch of text to access what they need.
More code samples right within the documentation: Code can be easily copied with a copy code button. It is nicely formatted, and the syntax is highlighted according to the language, making it much easier to read.

portal1 How to Build a Flexible Developer Documentation Portal

A lot more cross-referencing and links than we used to have: When something is mentioned, it is always linked right there, or you can find the relevant link at the bottom of your page. You can navigate through and gain all the knowledge to accomplish a task without breaks in the thought process.

Improved search: You can quickly see search pages and headers within pages. You can quickly jump into specific areas within a page.

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Responsive mobile experience: We also optimized all pages for mobile consumption.
New and refactored content: Much of what’s been added to the portal is entirely new, plus we refactored a lot of existing content, revalidating and updating it.
Broad range of content types: We added a lot of external references to our GitHub account, webinars hosted on Vimeo, and a playground built in conjunction with the developer portal.

Overall, the content now is not just a block of text but part of an ecosystem of knowledge that developers can utilize. Everyone has a different learning process. Some prefer to read, some prefer to see a demo, some like to watch a video while others prefer to just dive right in and learn through experimentation. We are trying to provide different ways to help no matter what a person’s approach to learning is.

In addition, we also have features that cover:

Developer release notes and release notes for the website itself so you can track what has changed
More about the DevX team, why we exist, and and how to get in touch with us
Ability to reach the playground, blog, and forums from the portal directly

In the future, we are looking at adding a developer-focused blog within the portal directly. We are also continuously working on more video content and documentation for some of the APIs that aren’t covered yet.

How you can improve your own documentation

SP: Lastly, how can an organization decide if building its own developer documentation site ground up is the right approach for them?

MG: Take into consideration these points to decide if this approach is good for you:

You need engineering capability to build the website.
You need to make sure that the people who are writing documentation are comfortable with the format. For example, if the people writing documentation in your organization are technical writers who are comfortable with Markdown, then great, use this approach. Or maybe they want to learn, then that is great as well. If they do not want to learn, they may need another platform that is what-you-see-is-what-you-get.
Make sure you have the ability in terms of IT to host and maintain the site. If you can’t assure that it will be up globally and available 24/7, then you are going to have problems. Since this is the largest interface with the largest surface area, fault or downtime will have a huge negative impact.

It all boils down to capacity and need. If your current documentation website works and customers are happy with it, and all you need to do is to enhance and update the content, then do that. Don’t waste your time and money on building something new. But if you have a lot of room for improvement like we did, and you want to use the opportunity to upgrade and overhaul the user experience, then this is a viable solution that should be considered.

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Shruthi Panicker is a Sr. Technical Product Marketing Manager with Sisense. She focuses on how Sisense can be leveraged to build successful embedded analytics solutions covering Sisense’s embedding and customization capabilities, developer experience initiative and cloud-native architecture. She holds a BS in Computer Science as well as an MBA and has over a decade of experience in the technology world.

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Build Your Smart City with TIBCO

September 22, 2020 TIBCO Spotfire

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Smart Cities Are the Future

With the rise of COVID-19, many countries are realizing how a smart city framework could help ease the spread and control of the pandemic. For example, sensors to track contacts and monitor those under quarantine have helped keep the spread under control in places like South Korea.

So, if a connected, responsive, data-driven city can help improve people’s health and well being – why don’t we have this tech everywhere? The answer: it’s hard to do.

Why Are Smart Cities Hard?

First, you need to note that a smart city is a system of systems. For instance, you have assets (let’s say cars or temperature tracking cameras) and those assets need to be able to run updatable software to make them ‘smart’ and then connected to individual systems. All of these individual systems are incredibly complex systems to build and, to make a true smart city, the many individual systems also need to be interconnected, which makes it even harder.

Plus, remember, there are lots of different applications of these interconnected systems: from economic development and civic engagement to sustainable urban planning or intelligent transportation. You might want to target data-driven public safety or focus on resilient energy and infrastructure. It can be challenging to address all these different use cases.

Thankfully, TIBCO has the capabilities to enable the smart cities of the future, with solutions that can:

Seamlessly connect systems and application sources all the way out to the edge where data is collected on IoT devices.
Unify disparate datasets, both static and real-time, so you have well controlled access to trusted, well-governed data.
Use that data to confidently predict outcomes with real-time data-driven machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI)I.

TIBCO provides all these capabilities and is already powering smart city components around the world. Let’s look at some examples in just one area: intelligent transportation.

Making Intelligent Transportation Possible

In the intelligent transportation realm, TIBCO is helping CargoSmart look at over 5500 vessels using visual analytics and data science capabilities to optimize their journeys to save fuel and manage arrival times. As a result, CargoSmart developed a vessel speed and route monitoring application that analyzes the vessel’s speed and distance against a complex variety of factors. The application has helped ocean carriers reduce fuel consumption by up to 3.5% over the past two years.

Another great example comes from an Australian Capital city that used TIBCO for a quick win pilot to track real-time car park occupancy and notifications as well as car park optimization and parking anomaly detection. These solutions are, more and more, being powered by data science, AI, and Machine Learning that is able to recognize moving objects – such as cars – and then use that to track traffic going into, or out of, different places such as car parks. Staff from the TIBCO office in Sydney, Australia, recently demonstrated just how that might work using a public webcam looking out on the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

One last example is seen in how Aeroporti di Roma uses TIBCO to integrate and correlate all its information sources, in order to effectively analyze passenger flow & behavior, improve customer experience, and support operational awareness to better mitigate problems. In 2018 and 2019 Rome Airport won EUROPE Best Airport Award in the ‘over 25 million passengers’ category.

Need More?

To learn more about how TIBCO is enabling cities of the future and how these capabilities can help your business, please download the How to Build a Smart City & Smart Nation whitepaper, watch the “How to Build a Smart City in 40 Minutes (or Less)” on-demand webinar or contact us today.

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How to Build Business Resilience From a Responsive Architecture

September 1, 2020 TIBCO Spotfire

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Today’s markets are shifting rapidly due to several different disruptive forces. So, it begs the question: Is your business built for agility so that it is resilient as well as innovative in times of rapid change?

Agility is the flexibility to adapt elements of your business very rapidly in response to changing market conditions, such as your processes, supply chain, and even the products and services that you offer. And since your business is likely operating more with software and data than documented processes, agility is largely created through architectural agility. So business agility is now a business imperative, and an agile architecture will lead to an agile business.

Agile architecture is built on many modern technologies, including cloud-native applications. These apps take advantage of the elasticity provided by cloud platforms. New applications should be built with a cloud-native approach, and existing applications can be reengineered into cloud-native apps. Existing apps are often difficult to maintain, scale, and adapt because they are large and complex, thus they are called “monoliths”. A cloud-native architecture built with technologies such as microservices allows for more rapid adaptation and horizontal scaling, and ultimately faster time to market, happier customers, and streamlined operations.

A focus on architecture alone will not create maximum agility. You also need to align your IT strategy with your business goals, evolve your processes, and adopt best practices from across the industry. For example, in the past, the lines of business always needed to rely on IT. Nowadays the typical business user is much more tech-savvy than in the past. If you want to be agile, you need to realize that not everything can be built and maintained by a small IT team. That said, you want to give your people the tools they need to empower them to build integration or application with ease, such as a no-code or low coder integration platform that allows anyone to create and build integrations. This creates employee synergies that unlock productivity, efficiency, and agility, allowing your business to operate faster.

Let’s take a look at a few industry examples of where business agility is crucial to success.

Manufacturing

Manufacturers need to be more agile to adapt operations as well as their products. This can include product development, supply chains, logistics, and distribution. Business resilience and agility can only be achieved by quickly adapting the digital platform that supports these processes.

Retail Banking & Finance

Open banking allows banks to extend their services into adjacent markets, which enables new customer-centric business models for innovative value-added services. Responsive architectures can help to transition from closed traditional business models to a collaborative business model where products, services, and data are shared with third-parties and where agility is key.

Retail

Over the last 6 months, the retail industry has been going through rapid changes. Retailers have had to learn how to continue to generate business when they have far fewer customers in their stores. Modern architectures allow retailers to reach customers in new ways, for example through online promotions and satisfy their needs through different types of operating models, such as online ordering, on-site pickup, and delivery. This results in real-time notifications across multiple applications (logistics, inventory, billing) and inventory management. Lastly, it allows retailers to scale horizontally to support any online holiday season sales or online orders.

Is your business built for agility so that it is resilient as well as innovative in times of rapid change? Click To Tweet

Watch this webinar with RTInsights to learn how you can boost business resiliency with a responsive application architecture. Also, read this eBook on TIBCO’s Responsive Application Mesh for a more in-depth look.

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What are the ‘7 Steps to Build a Successful Business Case for MDM Programs’?

August 9, 2020 TIBCO Spotfire

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Master data management (MDM) program teams often struggle to build business cases. Part of this struggle stems from simply not having the data to back up the value of MDM. In fact, “90% of companies recently surveyed for the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Master Data Management Solutions lack formal metrics to measure the financial value contributed by an MDM solution” (1).

Without formal metrics, organizations are often left with vendor-led “proof of value” programs as validation of technology rather than demonstrations of how the right technology addresses the requirements and metrics, financial and otherwise, demanded by the stakeholders in your organization. This approach is incomplete as it doesn’t look at the technology as a w9hole and may limit the organization’s success in the long term.

What are the ‘7 Steps to Build a Successful Business Case for MDM Programs’? — *Figure 1: Percentage of organizations that measure the value of their master data* (2)

We’d like to address that gap in the enterprise software industry and shift how organizations buy enterprise infrastructure technology by providing clear-eyed, well-documented point-of-views on how technology can meet business requirements while creating financial value.

Gartner’s 7 Steps to Build a Successful Business Case for MDM Programs

We believe educating buyers on the value of technology is a critical first step. So, make sure to check out Gartner’s most recent MDM report, “7 Steps to Build a Successful Business Case for MDM Programs,” written by esteemed analysts and MDM experts: Malcolm Hawker, Simon Walker, and Sally Parker (3). This report provides a seven-step process that data and analytics leaders can use to gain and maintain buy-in for MDM from key business stakeholders. It can help you put together a business case that demonstrates value with measurable key performance indicators (KPIs) and outlines a long-term roadmap for MDM as a key part of your analytics strategy.

Informed and active stakeholder support greatly increases the likelihood of an MDM program succeeding. Download this report to learn more about how to gain support and reach your MDM program goals.

Informed and active stakeholder support greatly increases the likelihood of an MDM program succeeding. Click To Tweet

And when you’re ready, we urge you to reach out to our team. Have that deeper discussion, not just on the technology, but also, on all the ways the technology—and TIBCO’s market-leading MDM capabilities—can address your business needs and create unique value for your organization.

(1) 2019 Gartner Vendor Survey for the Magic Quadrant of Master Data Management Solutions
(2) This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document.
(3) Gartner, 7 Steps to Build a Successful Business Case for MDM Programs, Malcolm Hawker, Simon Walker, Sally Parker, 7 April 2020

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How to Build Resilient Supply Chains with a Digital Nervous System

July 20, 2020 TIBCO Spotfire

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Supply chains, which increasingly rely on global connections, have had a number of disruptions over the past 12 months, requiring greater resiliency and adaptability.

Buying intentions and stock inventory can change overnight, and many supply chain systems may not be ready for rapid shifts in purchasing patterns. And even the most intelligent companies with the most sophisticated analytics may not be able to keep up without real-time data.

This ever-changing market landscape has created a need for greater collaboration and increased information flow along the entire supply chain. Lack of cross-function support, limited workforce engagement, and lack of robust technology make it hard for organizations to achieve their supply chain goals.

Lack of cross-function support, limited workforce engagement, and lack of robust technology make it hard for organizations to achieve their supply chain goals. Click To Tweet

To solve these challenges, your organization needs a smart, real-time, data-driven supply chain management solution that delivers: real-time visibility, continuous data, streaming artificial intelligence, early warnings, risk predictions, advanced analytics, and collaboration. All the elements needed so your company, suppliers, and your entire supply chain can adapt quickly to today’s changing conditions.

That said, think of this intelligent supply chain like a “digital nervous system” that combines leading technologies including: visual analytics, data science, streaming apps, data virtualization, metadata, and integration. All of these tools work together to create a seamless, intelligent supply chain, making full use of all the data generated.

How to Build Resilient Supply Chains with a Digital Nervous System

One example of an intelligent supply chain nervous system made possible by TIBCO is Bayer Crop Sciences. Its approach implemented enterprise-scale data integration, data virtualization, 14,000 visual analytics users, steaming image analytics, and AI and edge computing to drive precision planting and farming.

This enabled the company to:

Share collaborative analytics for added agility and flexibility in precision agriculture use cases
Blend image data from drones with traditional sources (soil, irrigation, and fertilization) without moving or altering source data
Synchronize and replicate high-scale data integrations between crop profiles and its CRM

Join us for this webinar with RTInsights to learn how you can implement TIBCO Connected Intelligence solutions to build a resilient supply chain with a digital nervous system. Also, read the paper on TIBCO’s Supply Chain Nervous System for a more in-depth look.

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Using a Public Web Service to Consume SQL Server Build Numbers

June 18, 2020 BI News and Info

During my time as a professional DBA, I have been responsible for quite a few SQL Server instances, all with their own set of characteristics, including different versions and patching levels, the topic of this article.

One of the primary duties that DBAs have is making sure that the SQL Server instances are patched and up to date, as Microsoft makes available all the corresponding Service Packs and/or Cumulative Updates. This responsibility, of course, applies for the on-premises deployments of SQL Server. Microsoft manages most database services for you in Azure, however, you will still be responsible for keeping Azure Virtual Machines up to date.

With this said, how can you make sure that your set of SQL Server instances are patched up to the latest available release by Microsoft? One obvious way is to manually check the current releases of SQL Server and compare that list against what you currently have, making a note of the current status of your environment and pointing out any differences. However, doing this can consume a lot of time, especially if you have quite a handful of instances to check.

I found that I wanted to know if my instances were up to date, but, eventually, I didn’t have enough time on my hands to be constantly checking for the available updates. I previously created and tried a solution that consumed and parsed a website to gather the information about the SQL Server build numbers. However, I decided to put that solution to rest because I realized that I don’t want to depend on the availability of an external site to keep things working fine for me.

After failing at many attempts to find a solution to automate this effort, I decided to build a public service that can surely help any SQL Server DBA fulfil this important duty.

Choosing the technology to build the public service

After several hours of thinking, I chose Azure (a solid decision by the way) by combining two of their “serverless” offerings, to help me reduce the overall costs. This article in no way is a deep dive into the technologies picked, so with that out of the way, let me explain why I picked Azure Serverless Functions and Azure SQL Database Serverless.

One of my first options was to spin a Virtual Machine, install a web server, a database, point a custom domain to the public IP assigned to the Virtual machine, and develop the service. However, by going this route, even if there’s no activity going on in the server, you still have to pay a minimum amount for the storage and virtual network assigned to your Virtual Machine.

With the serverless options, you can get a cost-effective and very convenient solution simply by paying for it when your stuff is really used.

Azure SQL Database Serverless

Nowadays, there’s an offering from Microsoft, for your Database-as-a-Service solution, called serverless. A convenient feature from this option is that, if your database hasn’t been used for a continuous amount of time (1hr is the minimum you can pick, up to 7 days), then it will auto-pause itself and, you guessed it, you will only be charged for the storage assigned to your database. Under normal conditions, Microsoft charges for the storage and compute resources used by your Azure SQL Database.

There is one important detail that should be kept in mind, and it is the fact that if your database is in a paused state, and a request tries to hit the database, then it will require some time (usually it’s several seconds) for it to “wake up” and serve the request. Therefore, there might be times where it seems that your service is slow, but it is very likely that it is just the database “waking up”. You can find more information here.

Azure Serverless Functions

Azure functions are an excellent option for quickly developing microservices, without worrying about the underlying infrastructure that powers them to run; hence the addition of the term serverless. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t require a server to run behind the scenes. There are different service plans and configurations for your functions, but the convenient part for me is that there are free grants covered by month, and so far, I haven’t spent a single dime in Azure functions.

You can find more information here.

Details and usage of the public service

Before detailing the structure and usage of the service, I would like to express one important fact, and it is that, as of the time of this writing, the usage of this public service is entirely free for the end-user. I am personally financing the resources described in Azure (even if it’s a tiny bit currently) and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future unless something prevents me from doing so.

To consume the service, you have to issue an HTTP request, either through a web browser or programmatically through a script, in order to get the json response with the data. As of this writing, there is no restriction upon who can consume this service; however, this can eventually change if any maliciousness is detected, such as trying to bring the service down.

NOTE: You have to be 100% sure that the machine from where you trigger the request has internet access. It might be an obvious thing, but I have seen cases where the service seems to be failing, and it is just that extremely simple detail.

Here is the structure of the URL:

http://www.sqlserverbuilds.info/api/builds/{version:regex(2019|2017|2016|2014|2012|2008R2|2008|all)}/{kind:regex(first|latest|all)}

As you can see, there are two sections of the URL within curly brackets {}. The first will tell the service about the information that the user is actually targeting:

{ version:regex(2019 | 2017 | 2016 | 2014 | 2012 | 2008R2 | 2008 | all) }

In here you specify, as a parameter, the particular SQL Server version for which you wish to know the released/available build numbers. If you specify all, then all the build numbers I have collected in the database are going to be returned. I have only populated the database with build numbers starting from SQL Server 2008. I know that there are many systems out there still running SQL Server 2005 and below, but I just thought that SQL Server 2008 would be a good starting point; perhaps in a future revision/release of this project, I might add even older versions.

The next part looks like this:

{ kind:regex(first | latest | all) }

In here you specify, as a parameter, how granular you want the information to be returned by the service.

First: tells the service to return only the very first build number for the specified SQL Server version.

Latest: tells the service to return only the latest build number for the specified SQL Server version.

All: tells the service to return all the build numbers found for the specified SQL Server version.

Output Examples:

Here are some examples of the call to the service and the results. Note, as I stated earlier, if you experience either a blank json object as a response or general slowness overall, it means that the database was in a paused state and it is “waking up”.

Retrieving the first build number for SQL Server 2019.

URL: http://www.sqlserverbuilds.info/api/builds/2019/first

Result: [{ “sp” : “RTM”, “build_number” : “15.0.2000.5”, “release_date” : “2019-11-04″ }]

Retrieving the latest build number for SQL Server 2019.

URL: http://www.sqlserverbuilds.info/api/builds/2019/latest

Result: [{ “sp” : “RTM”,“cu” : “CU4″, “build_number” : “15.0.4033.1”, “release_date” : “2020-03-31″ }]

Retrieving all the build numbers for SQL Server 2019.

URL: http://www.sqlserverbuilds.info/api/builds/2019/all

Result: [

{ “sp” : “RTM”, “cu” : “CU4″, “build_number” : “15.0.4033.1”, “release_date” : “2020-03-31″ },

{ “sp” : “RTM”, “cu” : “CU3″, “build_number” : “15.0.4023.6”, “release_date” : “2020-03-12″ },

{ “sp” : “RTM”, “cu”:“CU2″, “build_number” : “15.0.4013.40”, “release_date” : “2020-02-13″ },

{ “sp” : “RTM”, “cu” : “CU1″, “build_number” : “15.0.4003.23”, “release_date” : “2020-01-07″ },

{ “sp” : “RTM”, “extra” : “GDR”, “build_number” : “15.0.2070.41”, “release_date” : “2019-11-04″ },

{ “sp” : “RTM”, “build_number” : “15.0.2000.5”, “release_date” : “2019-11-04″ }

]

Retrieving the first build number of all the SQL Server versions stored in the database.

URL: http://www.sqlserverbuilds.info/api/builds/all/first

Result: [

{ “sp” : “RTM”, “build_number” : “15.0.2000.5”, “release_date” : “2019-11-04″ },

{ “sp” : “RTM”, “build_number” : “14.0.1000.169”, “release_date” : “2017-10-02″ },

{ “sp” : “RTM”, “build_number” : “13.0.1601.5”, “release_date” : “2016-06-01″ },

{ “sp” : “RTM”, “build_number” : “12.0.2000.8”, “release_date” : “2014-04-01″ },

{ “sp” : “RTM”, “build_number” : “11.0.2100.60”, “release_date” : “2012-03-06″ },

{ “sp” : “RTM”, “build_number” : “10.50.1600.1”, “release_date” : “2010-04-21″ },

{ “sp” : “RTM”, “build_number” : “10.0.1600.22”, “release_date” : “2008-08-07″ }

]

Retrieving the latest build number of all the SQL Server versions stored in the database.

URL: http://www.sqlserverbuilds.info/api/builds/all/first

Result: [

{ “sp” : “RTM”, “cu” : “CU4″, “build_number” : “15.0.4033.1”, “release_date” : “2020-03-31″ },

{ “sp” : “RTM”, “cu” : “CU20″, “build_number” : “14.0.3294.2”, “release_date” : “2020-04-07″ },

{ “sp” : “SP2″, “cu” : “CU12″, “build_number” : “13.0.5698.0”, “release_date” : “2020-02-25″ },

{ “sp” : “SP3″, “cu” : “CU4″, “extra” : “CVE”, “build_number” : “12.0.6372.1”, “release_date” : “2020-02-11″ },

{ “sp” : “SP4″, “extra” : “CVE”, “build_number” : “11.0.7493.4”, “release_date” : “2020-02-11″ },

{ “sp” : “SP3″, “extra” : “GDR”, “build_number” : “10.50.6560.0”, “release_date” : “2018-01-06″ },

{ “sp” : “SP4″, “extra” : “GDR”, “build_number” : “10.0.6556.0”, “release_date” : “2018-01-06″ }

]

Structure of the JSON response

Once you get back the JSON response, you’ll need to interpret the information:

[

{

“sp” : “RTM”,

“cu” : “CU4″,

“build_number” : “15.0.4033.1”,

“release_date” : “2020-03-31″

}

]

sp: The Service Pack level of the build number

From SQL Server 2017 and up, this will always have “RTM” as Microsoft shifted to Cumulative only releases.

cu: The Cumulative Update level of the build number.

When this field doesn’t come in a particular response, it means that the build number is in its base RTM/SP level without its first Cumulative Update.

build_number: The actual build number of the specific release.

release_date: The date when Microsoft release the specific build number to the public.

Sometimes, there are rare cases where Microsoft pulls a particular build number from public availability (due to bugs, errors reported). When I find cases like these, I usually pull them from the database as well.

extra: When this field appears in a particular response object, it means that the build number is a special case release, either a General Distribution Release, a Hotfix, or an On-Demand update.

Bonus script to interact with the public service

Since the spirit of this public service is to allow the fellow DBAs to programmatically consume the service, let me leave you a PowerShell script that you can use as a “stepping stone” for you own particular use case.

Something that has been very helpful to me (and it might be to you as well) is the use of this service to store the build numbers information in a central repository that I can keep up-to-date and use it to determine if my list of instances are up-to-date. Of course, you would have to craft that solution and apply some sort of automation to it.

Code

$ response = Invoke-WebRequest -URI http://www.sqlserverbuilds.info/api/builds/2019/first -UseBasicParsing

$ json = ConvertFrom-Json $ ([String]::new($ response.Content))

#This means that an option that targets multiple build numbers was sent

if($ json.length -gt 1){

foreach($ item in $ json){

$ item

}

else{

$ json

}

Output Examples

Fetching one build number for a particular SQL Server version.

Using a Public Web Service to Consume SQL Server Build Numbers

Fetching all the build numbers from a particular SQL Server version.

Using a Public Web Service to Consume SQL Server Build Numbers

Fetching all the build numbers stored in the database.

Using a Public Web Service to Consume SQL Server Build Numbers

Conclusion

I really hope that this personal initiative can be valuable to any SQL Server DBA out there facing the same situation that I once faced. Keep in mind that there is a chance that you might find errors while attempting to consume the service, and it wouldn’t be that surprising as the version I’m presenting within this article is v1.0.

I personally will be updating the database with every new release that Microsoft makes public, and any ideas, comments, suggestions, complaints will always be welcome in favor of improving this service in any possible way, so feel free to drop a comment and I will try my best to address it.

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Hailo partners with Foxconn to build edge device for AI inference

May 13, 2020 Big Data

AI startup Hailo today announced that it’s teaming up with Foxconn and system-on-chip provider Socionext to launch BOXiedge, an edge computing processing solution for video analytics. If the companies’ claims bear out, BOXiedge could deliver “market-leading” energy efficiency for AI inference, benefiting applications like industrial internet of things, smart cities, and smart medical.

BOXiedge is the successor to a mini server Foxconn teamed up with Network Optix to launch in January, which confusingly shares the same name. Unlike the previous server, this new BOXiedge can perform image classification, detection, pose estimation, and other tasks on footage from up to 20 cameras simultaneously thanks to SocioNext’s SynQuacer SC2AA chip and Hailo’s Hailo-8 processor, which features an architecture that consumes less power than rival chips while incorporating memory, software control, and a heat-dissipating design.

Under the hood of the Hailo-8, resources including memory, control, and compute blocks are distributed throughout the whole of the chip, and Hailo’s software — which supports Google’s TensorFlow machine learning framework and ONNX (an open format built to represent machine learning models) — analyzes the requirements of each AI algorithm and allocates the appropriate modules.

Hailo-8 is capable of 26 tera-operations per second (TOPs), which works out to 2.8 TOPs per watt. In a recent benchmark test conducted by Hailo, the Hailo-8 outperformed hardware like Nvidia’s Xavier AGX on several AI semantic segmentation and object detection benchmarks, including ResNet-50. At an image resolution of 224 x 224 pixels per inch, it processed 672 frames per second compared with the Xavier AGX’s 656 frames and sucked down only 1.67 watts (equating to 2.8 TOPs per watt) versus the Nvidia chip’s 32 watts (0.14 TOPs per watt).

VB Transform 2020 Online – July 15-17: Join leading AI executives at the AI event of the year. Register today and save 30% off digital access passes.

The edge AI hardware market is anticipated to be worth $ 1.15 billion by 2023, and Hailo — which raised $ 60 million in March — is hoping to beat rivals to the punch. Startups AIStorm, Esperanto Technologies, Quadric, Graphcore, Xnor, and Flex Logix are developing chips customized for AI workloads. Mobileye, the Tel Aviv company Intel acquired for $ 15.3 billion in March 2017, offers a computer vision processing solution for autonomous vehicles in its EyeQ product line. Baidu in July unveiled Kunlun, a chip for edge computing on devices and in the cloud via datacenters. And Chinese retail giant Alibaba launched an AI inference chip for autonomous driving, smart cities, and logistics verticals in the second half of 2019.

Foxconn is one of Hailo’s first publicly disclosed customers after NEC and ABB Technology. Previously, the startup said it’s working to build Hailo-8 into products from OEMs and tier-1 automotive companies in fields such as advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) and industries like robotics, smart cities, and smart homes.

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How to Build an Outcomes-Focused Data Strategy

May 5, 2020 Sisense

Money never sleeps and neither does your data. In Monetizing Your Data, we look at digital transformation: the ways of turning data into new revenue streams and apps that boost income, increase stickiness, and help your company thrive in the world of Big Data.

The first waves of digital transformation started decades ago and the ripples of this trend continue to be felt to this day. However, what exactly a digital transformation looks like varies widely from company to company. One common theme among many transformations, however, is trying to make better use of data, whether to build analytic apps to unlock new revenue streams or to make smarter decisions internally (or both).

While these are worthwhile applications, one blind spot that many teams charged with these projects share is that they look at the data they have on-hand before figuring out what kind of problems they wish to solve with it.

“I recommend starting your data strategy with a right-to-left approach, focusing on the desired business outcomes first, instead of the data, to support those outcomes,” says Charles Holive, Sisense Managing Director of Data Monetization and Strategy Consulting. “And there are primarily three areas that industries across the world look to improve: the top line, the bottom line, and customer satisfaction.”

sisense blog BI Trends 20191218 bl blog banner1 How to Build an Outcomes Focused Data Strategy

Define your desired outcome — before you start building

Every company knows they need to digitally transform in order to survive and excel in the modern era. However, many organizations fail to define their goals for this process before they start, and predictably encounter obstacles or outright failures instead of paving a path for future success.

Business goals should be defined at the very beginning of the digital transformation in the “right-to-left strategy” that starts by answering this question: What is the organization specifically looking to solve or improve? Understanding the details is key, otherwise “digital transformation” will be merely a corporate buzzword that causes headaches, heartbreaks, and lost money instead of producing measurable improvements.

From there, rather than trying to accumulate and house the company’s entire dataset, the digital transformation team should identify the specific actionable insights and associated data needed to solve for (and measure) agreed-upon outcomes.

“Not every dataset is made equal; some are more valuable than the others. So being outcome-focused is a way that can you stack-rank the data sets that are most important. Your team can then begin moving that most-important data into your warehouse.”

Experiment to guide a winning data strategy

Just as the waterfall method of software development—the strategy of gathering all the requirements upfront and then building and releasing a complete application—has fallen out of favor for agile methods, the same thing should happen when creating an outcome-first data strategy: Rather than trying to build a complete data warehouse right from the outset, approach data strategy as an “innovation factory.”

“Identifying the exact data you need to solve a singular problem results in a perfect candidate to go into your warehouse on the first cycle. This is because you know exactly what the business is going to do with that data set,” Charles explains. “It’s powerful because it’s already informing or measuring a specific business outcome.”

And when this data is warehoused and accessible to business partners to make key decisions, you already have a chance to quickly prove this outcome-first data strategy. You’ve immediately created an experiment to win.

Another piece of advice that Charles talks about in his “Hacking the Analytic Apps Economy” video series is where the innovation factory should live. Namely, not in a mature business unit, but in an agile, fast-reacting department that reports to a Chief Innovation Officer or similar highly-placed exec. This team can deliver on new ideas quickly and won’t get bogged down in pre-existing frameworks or goals that don’t work for what the new data experiments are trying to achieve.

[embedded content]

Create an innovation factory at your company

“Creating an innovation factory for your company results in faster innovation. You can do these smaller experiments more cost-efficiently, saving money over the traditional data strategy. This also should help your team prioritize projects for the data warehouse that deliver the greatest value, as opposed to the department that screams the loudest.”

And while any experiment can fail, but here are some solid tips to help improve your likelihood of success and to maximize the impact of triumphant experiments:

Start by listening to the frontline employees who use the data to make decisions—this will improve the odds of success for your experiment out of the gate.
If your experiment works, find other departments that can benefit from that same data—this is where it is key to have a good semantic layer on top of your data warehouse (courtesy of your data analytics software) so you can repurpose the same dataset for different ends.
If your experiment fails, see if you can tweak the dataset or use case to apply elsewhere in the company.

Regardless, approaching data strategy with a focus on business outcomes will put you on the right course.

“Everything else in the company is business-centered. It just seems counterintuitive not to approach data strategy in the same way.”

packages CTA banners BI and Analytics1 How to Build an Outcomes Focused Data Strategy

Jack Cieslak is a 10-year veteran of the tech world. He’s written for Amazon, CB Insights, and others, on topics ranging from ecommerce and VC investments to crazy product launches and top-secret startup projects.

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The need for Collecting Cash Fast to build a Successful Recurring Business

March 30, 2020 CRM News and Info

Accounts Receivables processes can take up valuable time and energy in any organization. This is why “Collecting Cash fast” is one of the key metrics for building a successful recurring business. Very often the longer it takes to collect cash the higher the risk of collecting that cash correctly. You need to ensure that you are collecting the payment as quickly as possible.

Work 365 supports the typical billing frequencies – Monthly, Quarterly, and Annual billing. Some of the data we see with users of the application and the billing frequencies:

More than 70% of the invoicing is on a monthly basis. Monthly billing is the most common way of billing CSP and cloud services. Annual billing tends to be used by ISV’s and other solution providers that bundle their products or package their solutions through CSP.

Collecting cash through automated systems lowers the risk of non-payment, and reduces your DSO (Days of Sale Outstanding).mUsing manual processes like check payments is not practical for monthly payments. Typically, you want to keep your DSO to 30 days and lower than 7 days for monthly billing contracts.

Work 365, maintains the schedules for your billing relationships and using the integrated payment solutions can provide a convenient way to collect cash either through credit cards or direct debit solutions through Global leaders in payment solutions like Stripe, Authorize.net, and GoCardless.

[embedded content]

The video above demonstrates how you can leverage these integrated payment providers directly into Work 365.

So, what’s your DSO? Let us know your thoughts schedule a demo to discuss these options.

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Use Power Automate to build an email recipient list and sending in Outlook vs Dynamics connector

March 26, 2020 Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Have you been wondering how you can build a dynamic list of email addresses that can be used to generate a new email? Below, we will take a look at how to build this list using Power Automate. We will also look at how to send this list using the Outlook connector and will then compare this with sending an email directly from Dynamics using the Common Data Service(Current Environment) connector.

Let’s get started.

First, choose whichever trigger is necessary for generating the email recipient list. For this walk-through, I am simply using a recurrence trigger so that I can trigger it manually.

pastedimage1584997010699v1 Use Power Automate to build an email recipient list and sending in Outlook vs Dynamics connector

Once you have your trigger specified, you want to choose the Initialize Variable action for your recipients list, which will be built as an array

pastedimage1584997010708v2 Use Power Automate to build an email recipient list and sending in Outlook vs Dynamics connector

You can get your list of recipients from any data source available, but in this case, I am building a list of the top 5 Contacts that have an email address for demonstration purposes. This is using the Common Data Service (Current Environment) connector. To keep this simple, I am returning the top 5 Contacts where the Email Address field is NOT NULL.

pastedimage1584997010715v3 Use Power Automate to build an email recipient list and sending in Outlook vs Dynamics connector

You will need to iterate through each Contact record by choosing the Apply to Each action. Within the Apply to Each action, add the Append to array variable action to add the email address value to the array. In this case, I pull in the emailaddress1 using dynamics values from the returned Contact records.

pastedimage1584997010730v4 Use Power Automate to build an email recipient list and sending in Outlook vs Dynamics connector

Outside of the Apply to each loop, you need to join all of the array values with a semicolon. Select the Join variable action. Specify the outputs of the array values and enter a semicolon to join the values.

pastedimage1584997010743v5 Use Power Automate to build an email recipient list and sending in Outlook vs Dynamics connector

You can run the current configuration to test your results. When you look at the results of Join, you will see the following

pastedimage1584997038401v6 Use Power Automate to build an email recipient list and sending in Outlook vs Dynamics connector

You will see the inputs of the array and the outputs into a string of email addresses.

To send this using the Outlook connector, select Send an email (v2) action. Specify the Output of the Join function in the recipients line

pastedimage1584997038411v7 Use Power Automate to build an email recipient list and sending in Outlook vs Dynamics connector

After you send, you will see the recipients listed and sent successfully.

pastedimage1584997038425v8 Use Power Automate to build an email recipient list and sending in Outlook vs Dynamics connector

pastedimage1584997038431v9 Use Power Automate to build an email recipient list and sending in Outlook vs Dynamics connector

Now, if you want to achieve the same thing, but send directly from Dynamics, you will run into some complications. Dynamically building a list of recipients and adding to an email like we did in the Outlook connector, is not yet possible. Let’s take a look.

Below, I have selected Create a new record using the Common Data Service (Current Environment) connector. For the entity name, select Email Messages.

As you can see below, you must individually specify each recipient value. Meaning, you would need to know the entity type and number of recipients. It requires the format as /entitylogicalname(recordid) in the Activity Party Attribute field. Unfortunately, you cannot specify multiple values in a string like we do with Outlook. There is a product enhancement suggestion to vote on here. Ability to dynamically build recipient list for Create Email Message in CDS (current environment) action

pastedimage1584997038436v10 Use Power Automate to build an email recipient list and sending in Outlook vs Dynamics connector

Stay tuned for the next post on creating and sending an Email from Dynamics using Power Automate.

Aaron Richards

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Hailo partners with Foxconn to build edge device for AI inference

How to Build an Outcomes-Focused Data Strategy

Define your desired outcome — before you start building

Experiment to guide a winning data strategy

Create an innovation factory at your company

The need for Collecting Cash Fast to build a Successful Recurring Business

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