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Exsilio Solutions is proud to introduce our new blog! Not only is this forum completely integrated with all our social networks, but it is also 100% responsive. Now, you can take Exsilio with you on your phone, tablet, and desktop - redefine what you thought possible!
Bots are computer programs that do automated, repetitive, and predefined tasks based on configuration. Some bots required specific inputs to execute the required commands. Some bots run itself automatically. Bots are powered by a mixture of artificial intelligence and natural language processing to engage in a human-like interaction with an end-user.
.NET Core is a modular, cross-platform, and open source software development framework that is used to build Windows, Web, and Mobile applications for Windows, Linux and OS X platforms.
An Introduction to the Blockchain technology.
The design world is constantly changing, expanding, and challenging new horizons. Every year brings in new perspectives and technology that inspires designers to try something fresh (or sometimes, breathe new life into something classic).
Moving from Manual to Automated Testing. Learn the pros and cons of manual testing and what you stand to gain from switching.
As Adobe approaches their second anniversary of launching Adobe XD, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on some of the more recent feature additions to the platform, as well as to share insights into their future roadmap.
Machine learning is an analysis of data to use it to drive answers. Data is derived by detecting statistical patterns and trends.
Process of automating business operations with the help of bots without human intervention is called Robotic Process Automation (RPA).
Our August Spotlight features one of our Program Managers, Dylan Kesselring! Learn more about his role, hobbies, and most valuable lesson learned at Exsilio.
Power bi data gateway is used as a bridge between on premise database and cloud services to have up to date data.
Our October Spotlight features our IT Director Umesh Prajapati! Learn more about his role, hobbies, and his biggest lesson learned at Exsilio.
Learn about common issues in a data warehouse and the approaches you can use to resolve them.
Here's why you should make the move to a Cloud-Based EDW.
Here's a step-by-step tutorial on using the Change Data Capture function.
The recap of our 1st international hack-a-thon event! See all the highlights of the event from each office here.
Learn about one of our PMs, Sirisha Pisupati, including her daily work, lessons she's learned at Exsilio, and why she makes the best Vegetable Briyani!
Our guide on how to hack an XPath through the ETL jungle in SSIS.
The Spotlight shines on Hyo Lee! Learn about his favorite camping spots, background, and the lessons he has learned at Exsilio.
How to Load Data from Azure Data Lake Store to Azure SQL Server via SSIS
How to add Restful web services using Web API 2.0 in MS Visual Studio, protect our APIs with Azure Active Directory using OAuth 2.0, OIDC, and JSON web tokens
The Spotlight this quarter falls on our Data Warehouse developer Ashish Sharma! Learn about his daily tasks, hobbies, and dream vacations!
Learn more about one of our senior application developer Bhavesh: his hobbies, his daily work, and his favorite food!
A baseline on how to start using Execution Plans to improve your query performance.
Learn more about Data Warehouse Developer Michael Gilman including his daily tasks and what he believes makes a great Exsilio employee.
Understanding the benefits of the PIVOT/UNPIVOT Clause in SQL Server.
Here's an example of how we put our Exsilio Fundamentals into practice. This week: a puzzle challenge!
Explaining SSAS Dimensions and Cube Basics.
Read a quick interview with one of our Developer Consultants about what she loves about her work and her favorite hobbies!
Tips and tricks on handling multiple Agile project requests.
The pros and cons of Dynamic SQL and how to use it.
Learn about our corporate recruiter Erin Vyborney's hobbies, day-to-day work, and background!
Here are some tips on how to calm down an overwhelmed stakeholder.
A few best practices that can improve support processes and help get more insight into how well current processes are performing.
The 6 key solutions to upgrading your ticketing system.
Learn more about one of our veteran PMs, Charles Dahms, and his hobbies and daily work.
How to setup and use R in SQL Server 2016 using the SQL server R Service.
5 Steps to Turn Around a Troubled Project
A flowchart to better understand the function of an enterprise data warehouse.
Here’s a quick primer on how we decide between Agile/Scrum and Waterfall.
Understand the 3 main strategies used when implementing a enterprise data warehouse.
Get to know Raviraj Oza, one of our App Dev consultants in our India office.
Meet our Orange Studios Office Coordinator, Neetu! Learn about her hobbies, day-to-day work, and the two things she can't live without.
How our team created course recommendations without Historical Data by utilizing Fuzzy Search and TF-IDF.
Back again with another Employee Spotlight with one of our marketing consultants Josh Dominguez.
Who is Mike James? Well this Employee Spotlight will answer all your questions about Exsilio's Technical Project Manager.
Meet Eric Ross, our IT & Operations Manager, and learn about his favorite hobbies, daily activities, and love for hockey.
The comprehensive set of video walk-thru tutorials for the Azure ML Toolbox.
Discover 3 quick Google Analytics sections that can provide insights into your landing page's success.
Do story points always have to serve as a measured unit of time? Well, it depends.
Learn more about another member of our App Development team, Poornima Deshpande.
2 Google Analytics Segments to you can create to unlock new insights in your data.
Here's how to download and access a Sharepoint file via Powershell or SSIS.
Learn more about our Manager of Program Management, James Burk, including his favorite food, experiences, and love of space exploration.
Employee Spotlight: Senior Application Development Consultant Jeremy Ramos.
Introducing two of our new employees: Vince Marchillo and Sirisha Pisupati
Understand the core purpose of Business Intelligence and why it is valuable to an organization.
You've got your first BI project. Now what? Here are 3 key prep phases to keep in mind.
Orange Studios has a partnered with Hopelink to fundraise for families in need in the Redmond community.
Understand best practices for SQL Stored Procedures regarding 3 categories: readability, performance, and handling bugs.
Triathlons, Mario Kart, and more in October's Employee Spotlight with Andrew Hill.
How to choose between a Star Schema or Snowflake Schema when your building a data warehouse.
Understand the essentials of OAuth in a nutshell: What it is, how it works, and how to implement it.
Meet Esayas, one of our rockstar App Developers in Redmond. You can find him tackling tough programming problems, or following his favorite soccer team!
How to evaluate the performance of a model in Azure ML and understanding “Confusion Metrics”
Belinda recalls learning she was joining the company cruise her first day on the job.
Matt is one of our rockstar designers for the Yeti team. He specializes in crisp design, awesome front end dev, and sniffing out the best BBQ in the OC!
In my first post, How to load data into SQL Server using JSON functionality, I discussed one of the key functions of SQL Server 2016 JSON support, which is OPENJSON.
Today we will see another built in function of JSON, which is ISJSON.
ISJSON - This function is used to test whether a string contains valid JSON or not. It returns 1 if the string is valid JSON. If not, it returns 0. It returns null if the expression is null. We will check all of these return values.
How to use Azure Automation to schedule executions of stored procedures on your SQL Azure database.
SQL 2016 brings in many new features such as Data Masking, Always Encrypted, multiple TempDB database files, Query Store, JSON support, Row Level Security, R, and Stretch Database etc. Today we are going to focus on one of my favorite which is JSON support.
Many people ask us, “What is the best part of working at Exsilio?”.. The answer is simple, our people! Every month we spotlight one of our awesome employees. These spotlights will highlight their experiences, accomplishments at Exsilio, and fun facts about what makes them great! This month, we're featuring Shawna!
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Many people ask us, “What is the best part of working at Exsilio?”.. The answer is simple, our people! Every month we spotlight one of our awesome employees. These spotlights will highlight their experiences, accomplishments at Exsilio, and fun facts about what makes them great! This month, we're featuring Sylvia Cortez! MORE
Sometimes you may find your SQL Server database is performing at suboptimal levels. After a lot of use, especially in a production environment, your database will have endured a high number of transactions, object creation and drops, and these can lead to fragmentation of the data at the disk level. You may also find that your database is quite large, but it has some empty space. However, when you attempt to shrink the database, you cannot do it. In this case, a common culprit is fragmentation.
This procedure code should help you out with setting up an environment for your users and save yourself the extra steps of manually creating group, schema, and granting permission.
Many people ask us, “What is the best part of working at Exsilio?”.. The answer is simple, our people! Every month we will be spotlighting one of our awesome employees. These spotlights will highlight their experiences, accomplishments at Exsilio, and fun facts about what makes them great!
Our favorite in-house photography nerds breakdown their best practices for tackling low-light in-door photography.
For all the devs out there - how do you configure the environment variables for an SSIS Package? Our preference is to create package and using parameters and variables to create two separate environments of the same package. In this post, we'll show you how.
The most important decision to make before creating an advertising campaign is determining the audience you would like to reach - or finding your niche market.
If you want to analyze or create a particular job, Integration Services (SSIS) package, or other form of ETL in Microsoft SQL Server, one of the first things you may want to do is take a look at all the stored procedures you are running and determine which ones need to run before others.
Recently, I had the honor of participating in Startup Weekend GIRLS (#swgirls) at the Lake Washington Girls Middle School. Together with our Marketing Coordinator, Shawna Proske, I acted as a coach; to help the new generation of entrepreneurs to brainstorm, plan, develop, and pitch their new business ideas for the competition.
Many business leaders find themselves asking, “How much Business Intelligence do I need” when faced with the task of determining where they stand in the market, where they can improve, and/or how they can cut costs. Of course, if that business had unlimited resources, then the answer is “give me everything you’ve got”. Unfortunately, most of us don’t have those kind of resources, so the question becomes: how much business intelligence (BI) do I need.
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Recently, noted writer and public speaker, Tim Ferris announced he would be moving more of his marketing to email from major social channels like Facebook and Twitter. The reason he gave is that today's world is a “battlefield of noise” and that with social media saturation, his blog posts were getting lost in the fray.
There are many resources for aspiring or practicing project managers. A cursory internet search turns up a multitude of tools, theories, and certifications. While the inherent rigidity of project management is important, soft skills often play a huge role in determining the outcome of a project. The behaviors outlined below reflect learnings that I’ve accumulated over the years to improve my projects and provide the most amount of value I can to any project owner.
Thanksgiving is a time to rejoice and be grateful for all the good that has happened to us over the past year. At Exsilio it is also a time for employees to gather and stuff our faces with delicious food! We get excited every year to show off our cooking (or buying for us non cooks) skills during the Thanksgiving potluck. Both our Redmond and Irvine offices took part in what is quickly becoming a yearly tradition. Employees battled in the morning to get our work done as the aromas of everyone’s dishes filled the air. MORE
As a business intelligence professional, I am always keeping an eye on developing trends in the industry and recently I came across an article on the "Top 8 Big Data Trends That Marketers Should Care About." Being a part of the Redmond office, I have the opportunity to see our marketing team in action and appreciate the work that they do. This article naturally piqued my interest as I see the team work diligently to help clients develop sound marketing strategies to grow their businesses and streamline their day-to-day business operations. MORE
As modern web applications become increasingly client heavy, it’s important to properly organize your client side code. In small applications, organization may not seem necessary, however, as your application grows and more people are involved with the project, proper organization becomes key to keeping the application maintainable. This is where Modules come in.
In part 1, I covered a few important things you should know when starting with LESS CSS. This segment will cover Bootstrap. If you don’t have a decent understanding for LESS, I encourage you to spend some time with it because Bootstrap leverages the technology and this article will make much more sense.
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Last year, Exsilio’s resident Search Engine Marketing expert Chris Meade released an article making the case for Bing Ads. For this article, we are taking a different approach and focusing on the maximization of the ROI on your ad campaigns by choosing the network that best helps you achieve your end-goal, whether that is more leads for your business, greater awareness of your products and services, or building brand loyalty.
The 3 reasons why consulting is the great career opportunity: Training, Networking, and Experience.
The difference between running an SQL Server Integration Services Fast Load and a Stored Procedure.
Advertising on Facebook has become a powerful tool marketers use to create successful campaigns that can reach a worldwide audience. MORE
In the past years, the trending of mobile technology, applications and the cloud has grown exponentially. It continues to grow today. Therefore, the demand for testers is growing as well. Security, performance, and usability testing are on top of their list to have a successful product.
The popularity of mobile technology and apps are insane. Along with it, the demand for mobile testing continue to trend exponentially every year. Based on the study published by Capgemini, Sogeti and HP in 2013 -2014 around global testing trends, there is an average of a 70% increase in mobile testing practices across industries. MORE
At Exsilio we do a lot of consulting work. As a result we often need to use client provided credentials on our Exsilio work stations. This can be difficult if the credentials provided are active directory based, since most of us are running on an internal active directory domain. To get around this we use a cool little Explorer extension called ShellRunas which is part of the Sysinternals Suite (a free collection of useful system utilities for Windows). MORE
In the web world, LESS and Bootstrap are major tools in the developer's toolkit. If you haven't heard of them or have not had the chance to use them, I highly recommend it. They will make your web development process extremely easier. But as with anything, there's a learning curve. MORE
There’s a good chance that you looked at a map recently. Maybe it was the GPS in your car or on your phone. Or it may have been on an app to help you find a place to eat or fuel up at a gas station. Every time you use one of these maps you are utilizing a Geographic Information System. Until about 5 years ago, if someone said ‘GIS’ they were probably talking about ESRI’s ArcMap. Today, the term GIS is more ambiguous and can be applied to a lot of different solutions that involve a map. MORE
With new emerging technology and the internet at our fingertips, Social Media is changing the marketing world today and offering a unique way for marketers to engage customers. Not only does it promote news or updates in real time, it also allows interaction between the organization and their customers via comments, Likes, feedback or sharing. MORE
"if you aren’t running campaigns on Bing Ads, you missed 5.6 billion US queries conducted in March, 2014”
"The weather was perfect and the sun loosened the snow for better riding conditions. We took full advantage of the great weather and magnificent snow available to us." MORE
In this article I will prove how the opening sequence of Mary Poppins foreshadows both the narrative arch of the film as well as the economic reform which is currently underway in Switzerland.
Last week, I saw this image floating around the internet.
I’ve been obsessed with advertising since I was young. I love everything about how ads are created.
Exsilio is participating in a new marketing operations initiative from Microsoft, called the Digital Efficiency Program (DEP).
The Hard Work / Fun Rewards model and why it works at Exsilio.
For me, Halloween is a holiday that is full of memories, maybe even more so than Christmas or my birthday.
Over the last two months, there has been a bit of a panic in the search community (SEOs specifically) around the shocking change in Google's keyword data. Or lack thereof.
With the number of people living around and commuting to and from Microsoft’s main campus in Redmond, Washington, you might guess there are quite a lot of after work drink meetings happening.
In the world of social media there are as many ways to measure success as there are ways to cook eggs.
If a tweet falls in the woods, does it make a sound? You bet it does. Remember when we used to have to actually watch commercials on TV?
You can't just execute an idea that worked for someone else and expect it to perform better for you. This is how best practices get people in trouble; an idea, concept, campaign, etc, turns into a practice, diminishing opportunities for innovation and creativity.
The last Mythbusters* episode I watched tested the Monty Hall Paradox. The last time it was popular in mainstream was on the game show Let's Make a Deal.
How Taco Bell's success with its Dorito Tacos highlights the two methods of branding your company and services.
Social media has become the way many companies communicate their brand and messaging to their customers.
Sometimes it’s hard to make the case for a big investment in social media marketing. It can be difficult to scale, time-consuming, and there’s always the risk of - gasp! - negative feedback.
A colleague and I were recently tasked with reviving a client's stale Twitter account. The account had several hundred followers, but had not been active in months.
Understand the importance of impression share and how to use it optimize your ad campaigns.
Ten months ago, I wrote a post about the ‘Second Screen Phenomenon’ and how marketers intend to harness it at the 2012 Superbowl.
Often times in the past, I try to delete a file or folder only to be presented with a message kindly reminding me that I can’t delete because it has been locked by another application, So I find the program that has the file open and close it. That’s fine with me because I understand the kernel needs to protect the file to maintain stability.
The Good and the Bad when it comes to the Surface RT.
Conversions are the most sought after end-goal for most online advertisers; it declares that their efforts have worked. These often come at a cost, and require hours of effort and optimization to ensure maximum efficiency.
Which metrics are best in SEM? There are so many numbers and metrics available with online marketing and advertising.
If you love what you do, it doesn’t stop after you leave work. I love search, and I’m always looking to try something new. As such, I turned to my LinkedIn profile.
I’ve always felt very comfortable walking up to strangers and starting a conversation. Since I was very little, my CEO father took me to business meetings with him and forced me to walk up to his friends and say hello – most often, I had never met these people before.
You’ve done the hard work, you’ve chosen the keywords, dialed in the targeting, and built the landing pages – Google & Bing are ready to serve your ad, and you’re ready for some new customers.
We can probably all agree that jQuery is pretty awesome. It makes writing client side code a piece of cake and there are tons of plugins to do what you need or at least to get you started.
Well, here I am again. I find myself back at Exsilio after a 3 year hiatus to see what else is out there in the professional world of software development. I’m lucky enough to live in Irvine, CA.
When I first saw the trailer for the new Ridley Scott film, Prometheus, several months ago, I thought it looked like a pretty good sci-fi film, but I wasn’t “over the moon” excited for it.
Sign Up Now to Receive the Exsilio Quarterly Newsletter: If there is one word I use to describe the people and the work at Exsilio, the first word that comes to my mind is "passion."
Email marketing is a quick, cost-effective marketing solution for businesses of all sizes.
In our latest venture outside the office and the land of code and Expression Studio, we have teamed with the Irvine Chamber of Commerce to bring "Legends and Leaders" to the Orange County business community. In its second year, Legends and Leaders is an extradordinary event showcasing standouts in corporate Orange County.
For decades, retailers having been trying to gather their customer’s interest, habits, and behavior to better understand how they should be targeted.
How does our Creative Department tackle a project? Check out this guide on establishing a creative style and approach in Exsilio's creative process.