Recent content on /home/mackle/emporium
Introduction Apache Iceberg is a super compelling technology, I love it. There’s a lot of reasons to be excited, it’s open source, performant, supports time travel and is ACID compliant. These features are all well and good, but often with technologies like Iceberg we never really understand the why - always the how or the what for. If you haven’t already come across column…
Introduction Model Context Protocol is a standard method for connecting GenAI to external systems. It’s widely adopted and tools like Claude and Gemini have comprehensive support for MCP. Building a MCP Server to handle requests from LLMs is a great first step when looking to integrate existing applications with GenAI or when building agents. I’ll cover how to use FastMCP in this blog…
Introduction to SQL on FHIR FHIR ( Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources ) resources are JSON documents with nested structures and arrays. In another blog post I introduced FHIR and it’s role in standardizing healthcare data. It is great for supporting solutions and applications but makes them difficult to query with SQL or run analytical processes against. As Data Analysts, we want to…
Introduction to FHIR Currently, Electronic health records live in siloed systems and sharing patient information between these systems often involves custom integrations that are expensive. Reporting data between agencies or healthcare providers often uses HL7v2 which requires specialist knowledge and healthcare specific software. FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) represents a…
Intro-duck-tion If you’ve not came across DuckDB previously I’d highly recommend looking into it, it’s fast, open source and rapidly gaining traction within the Data & Analytics space. DuckDB is designed for fast SQL queries on analytical workloads, namely it’s design choices favour aggregation and grouping, particularly in instances where only a subset of columns are used.…
Introduction On the first post on graph colouring I touched on bipartite graphs and how we can efficiently colour them with only two colours. This will underpin one of the optimizations we can make on the solution, which currently is only an implementation of the greedy algorithm. If you haven’t read the first part I’d recommend doing so here . Bipartite Graphs Bipartite graphs are a…
Introduction Last year I was presented with a rather interesting issue which gave me an opportunity to use some latent mathematics knowledge. This post covers the simplest form of the problem where some of the complexity is removed via constraints. The problem revolves around efficiently processing a data model definiton and can be summarised as follows: Given an entity-relationship(ER) model with…
Hey! I’m Stuart and I’m a Software Engineer/Consultant from Scotland with a degree in Mathematics from the University of Glasgow. I now live in Seattle, Washington working in Solution Architecture/Sales Engineering for State and Local Government. Some of my professional interests include: Analytics & GenAI Distributed Systems & Analytics Runtimes Graph Theory Containerisation and…