Marketing automation means using software platforms and tools to conduct marketing strategies more efficiently and effectively by automating repetitive tasks and processes. Typical tasks marketers might automate include segmenting customers based on interactions with a website, and managing email campaigns.

Marketing automation is a constantly evolving field, and as technology advances further and faster, marketing automation best practices today may not be relevant in five or ten years..

Both the volume and velocity of data growth in recent years are unprecedented. An IDC report found that digital data more than doubles every two years and will reach 44 zettabytes by 2020, 37 percent of which will be useful when analyzed.

To get data-driven insights which drive smarter business decisions, enterprises that collect data from many sources must have somewhere to store it for analysis. Businesses also need to store data for other uses, such as..

Modern enterprises gather data from many disparate sources, including social media, websites, customer databases (CRM systems, sales records etc), customer support systems, and HR software.

Merely collecting lots of data isn't useful in itself—it's the insights you get from such data that can drive more informed business decisions. This post aims to teach you about the bedrock processes required for obtaining insights from your data—ETL and ELT.

We'll begin by discussing data integration, before moving on to two vital forms of data integration—ETL and ELT. When you're finished reading, you'll fully understand what ETL and ELT are, and which process is better suited to your business in terms of getting actionable insights from different data sources..  

Agile test metrics and KPIs are measurements that enable Agile teams to assess how effective their software tests are and whether their testing efforts help achieve specific business objectives. An important aim of Agile software testing is to get testing up to speed with development—metrics and KPIs can assess the efficacy of the Agile testing team in this context.

In this article, you'll find out about the important difference between a metric and a KPI, and why you need to distinguish between the two. You'll also get some examples of KPIs and metrics relevant to Agile software testing efforts. Finally, you'll learn exactly how KPIs and metrics can lead to overall improvement in software testing within an Agile framework in addition to understanding some important measuring pitfalls..

Data warehouse security is vital for organizations that take the huge step of collating all their important data in one place. Unauthorized access to data warehouses can have devastating consequences, ranging from compromised customer information to exposing of high-level business intelligence that gives an enterprise its competitive advantage.

This article introduces warehouse security, discusses some of the challenges involved in securing a data warehouse, and offers some best practices for data warehouse security, including the use of FIPS 140-2 certified software and hardware..

This article describes how CoolaData implemented Druid to provide a real time infrastructure for its behavioral analytics platform, and discusses some benefits and limitations of Druid..

Written by Yair Harel, Senior Software Architect at CoolaData

Imagine you need a report with data from an OLAP sales cube, and have to include data from a table of the relational data source, or from an external database.

With a linked server you can construct a MDX query in the SQLServer instance where you have the cube, joining with an external database to complete the data with information from tables of the relational database..

In 2007 when we hosted the first The Finance and Investment Forum event in Cass Business School in London the data centre and cloud industry was still, in a sense, in it’s infancy. Even then few predicted not only the sector expansion but the technological advances and energy innovation that would come to recent prominence..

With SQL Server, when we forget or we lose the password of the DBA user 'sa', and we are the administrators of the database, we have a little problem.

It's easy to forget this password because probably we have our own user administrator and don't use to log in with the sa account. We also could have inherited the administration of a SQL Server database, with any documentation about the sa account or we coul'd have installed a database and deleted the login with admin privileges without knowing the password of the sa user.

For all this situations there is a better solution than reinstalling the database..

We could need to access to MySQL from SQL Server.

An easy way to do it is creating a linked server that uses an ODBC connection..