Last updated on August 6, 2018. Published on August 6, 2018. Forward-thinking organizations are increasingly including Machine Learning capabilities as part of their overall digital business strategy. When used effectively, Machine Learning can enhance existing products and services with new smart features, or reduce operating and production costs. As organizations proceed from strategy development to implementation, Machine Learning platforms and their services support numerous intelligent applications for lightweight, agile POCs as well as highly scalable production deployments, with all the benefits expected from a cloud-based infrastructure. The top cloud platform providers we evaluated are Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, and SAP. … Read More
Recovering Data from a Crashed NAS in Windows with VirtualBox and Ubuntu
Home NAS: Having a Network Attached Storage (NAS) is great and convenient, in that all of your data is typically backed up with 2 or more hard drives in a RAID setup in many modern systems. Such was the case with my home Synology Diskstation DS212. The idea is: one of the 2+ drives fails, you buy a new hard drive to replace the bad one, and the data from the good drive(s) automatically copy onto the newly installed blank hard drive, and you’re back up and running again. The Problem: What happens when both drives fail in a 2-drive … Read More
NLP Cloud Platform Comparison
Last updated on July 24, 2018. Published on July 24, 2018. Choosing the right cloud platform for your business can be tricky and ultimately depends on what specific service-based capabilities you are looking for. To help identify platforms and services to evaluate for your Natural Language Processing (NLP) needs, we have compiled and categorized the related services from several leading cloud platform providers. The cloud platform providers we evaluated are Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, and SAP. We looked at the services offered by each and matched up those that provide similar capabilities. Please see the table below. NLP Cloud Platform … Read More
Increasing Code Coverage to Include Catch Blocks [Salesforce]
In Salesforce, it can sometimes be frustrating driving your Apex Class & Trigger Code Coverage up to get beyond the 75%, 80%, or 85%+ marks. Some of the more difficult parts of that process can be covering all scenarios to achieve this. In particular, this post focuses on code not executed within the try-catch constructs count against the overall Code Coverage calculations. With a simple refactor, we can remedy that without changing the underlying functionality of the core class — just the test class. The try-catch we will start with before our changes have the following format: try { // … Read More
Adding a Wait / Sleep / Pause for Salesforce Unit Testing
There are certain scenarios where there are timing issues that cannot be avoided in Salesforce. For instance: in a trigger handler class, you may have to institute some logic to only execute a block of code if certain conditions are met such as an object hasn’t been modified in the last X seconds, perhaps even due to some 3rd party packages your organization has adopted that requires you to work around timing. Or something has a very short cache life in order to prevent many back-to-back SOQL calls. But then when it comes time to test that class, how do … Read More
Ensuring Trust with Blockchain
Blockchain is a transformative technology that will revolutionize the way information is exchanged across the globe. It stands on the four pillars of Consensus, Provenance, Immutability, and Finality which ensures TRUST in all forms of economic exchanges of value and information. The existence of uncertainty and distrust in all forms of economic exchanges has resulted in tremendous inefficiencies and disruptions between all participants of an economic system, e.g. insufficient trust and information sharing can lead to inefficiency and infectiveness in a bank’s operation as the same information is duplicated across all participants like bank, auditors, regulators, and insurers in the network … Read More
How to Bypass Validation from Apex Across Objects [Salesforce]
If your Salesforce org has Triggers and Apex, you’ve probably run into the issue of hitting Validation Rules (VRs) when your Apex code tries to insert or update a record. The example below is across two objects and how you can solve for it. Let’s say you have an object called Positions and another object called Applicants. There is a lookup field on Applicants to the Position object. On the Positions object, you have a date field called Last Interview Date to identify the latest date an applicant was interviewed. Due to the relationship between Applicants and Positions only being … Read More
A Work-Around for Salesforce Bulk API v2.0 (in Dell Boomi)
Summary: Salesforce Bulk API Usage, though it offers performance benefits over regular APIs is a scarce resource for organizations. It is important to conserve and optimally use the Bulk API. ——- The Dell Boomi Salesforce connector does not support the Bulk API v2.0 (which essentially makes a determination automatically whether to use the regular or bulk API) at the time of writing. This feature is sought-after in the forums since organizations hit their Bulk API usage limits frequently. Processing much lower volumes of documents through the Bulk API (Bulk API accepts 10,000 documents in a single go) may be a wasted … Read More