New Case Study: Safety National
Apr
4
Written by:
Charles Flock
4/4/2017 2:10 PM
You should check out the new case study on the case study section of the site.
There were 2 things about this study that were particularly interesting to me. The first is that there are so many functions in XLeratorDB and our users are combining them in so many novel and interesting ways that it's to keep track of the different types of the business problem that they are trying to solve. Safety National is an excellent example of this. What problem were they trying to solve? If you read the case study you can find out. I sort of understand it, but I am not an actuary or a CFA so my understanding is not very deep. The important thing is that it didn't have to be. Safety National understands their business and knew what they wanted to do and XLeratorDB was easy for them to learn and use. In fact, they were able to implement a solution to their business problem in less than 2 weeks
The second interesting thing, which is something that I have written about before, is how the SQL Server RAND function can just leave you scratching your head. In any environment where you want to generate lots of simulations or model outcomes, generating random numbers is key. And working in SQL Server makes it is desirable to generate lots of those random numbers in a set-based operation. Which is absolutely not how the SQL Server RAND function works. If your query returns 50,000 rows, for example, and you want each row in the resultant table to contain a column with a random number, don't use the SQL Server RAND function; every row will have the same number. True, it is randomly generated, but only once for the entire resultant table. That's why we implemented an XLeratorDB RAND function which works the way you would expect; 50,000 rows returned would be 50,000 random numbers.
If you are interested in trying out XLeratorDB, just download the 15-day trial. It's a fully functioning version of the package. If you find that there is something that you need that isn't in the package, send us an e-mail at support@westclintech.com; we are always interested in new ideas to add to the package. If you have other questions, contact us at sales@westclintech.com