Coding

The Great SQL bot Bake Off: Comparing the big LLM beasts on SQL code generation

Reading Time: 9 minutes

A side-effect of all the time I spend breathing the rarified alpine air of the CDO community is that my SQL skills have become rather rusty. So I’ve been intrigued by the idea of using the code-generation capabilities of tools like ChatGPT and Bard to write SQL for me. But how good is the current crop of LLMs at creating SQL code that not only works, but generates the insight you’re actually looking for? I decided to find out.

JavaScript advice

Reading Time: 2 minutes

There’s a good post over on Avinash’s blog with 9 tips for getting JavaScript tagging right on your website. There’s not much for me to add except to say that you should click the link above and read his advice; but I do have one thing to add about redirects (point 7 in Avinash’s post). … Read more

Open Source Web Analytics

Reading Time: 2 minutes

News reaches me of the launch of the first open-source web analytics tool – Breadboard BI Web Analytics, from the folks at Breadboard BI. When I was at WebAbacus, we had some quite lengthy discussions as to whether we should make the WebAbacus platform available as open source software. In fact Dan Drury even wrote … Read more

ActiveX miseries

Reading Time: 2 minutes

It’s just come to my attention (on account of installing the latest security patches for Windows from Microsoft) that a small but profound change has been made to the way Internet Explorer handles ActiveX plugins (such as Flash, PDF, Quicktime and Java). Owing to a patent dispute with a no-name company called Eolas, who licensed … Read more