BI Blogs

Consider a supermarket data warehouse – you know what was sold, where it was sold and when it was sold, we can even identify what else the customer bought in the same basket. But do we really know who the customer was? Identifying retail customers at point of sale has always been problematic, other business sectors have less difficulty identifying customers; banks have account numbers, Telcos

With a new knowledge encapsulation feature and improved scheduling and security, OWB Paris looks like the real deal

Salient promises real-time visibility into profit and loss from virtually any domain perspective

If IBM?s new Linux-powered bundles look and sound like data warehousing appliances, are they, in fact, data warehousing appliances?

As a leader in a growing organization, you know the competitive pressure isn’t easing up anytime soon. And with fewer resources than your larger competitors, you have to act smarter, move faster, and make better business decisions without the benefit of armies of analysts and consultants. With this environment in mind, more and more mid-sized organizations are turning to business intelligence (BI) to help them gain a competitive edge in the marketplace. Small start-up companies with a few employees, mid-cap organizations publicly traded, and state and local government agencies are making better use of the information within their organization by using business intelligence.

Today’s government agencies are faced with more challenges than ever before. There is the challenge to respond to both constituents and employees; the challenge to meet and maintain regulatory requirements; the challenge to be accountable to taxpayers; and the challenge to manage financials while retaining a highly skilled workforce. Implementing technology solutions for state and local government requires a deep knowledge of not only the challenges you face but also the solutions you need. Empower Solutions’ government experience puts them in a unique position allowing us to bring to you tried and true government solutions.

Organizations that are looking to extend the success they have enjoyed with business intelligence are the best candidates to go to the next level, and embed more intelligence into high-volume operational decisions. This discipline which is called Enterprise Decision Management, differs from traditional BI in that it is focused on execution of decisions and actions rather than reporting. EDM uses business rules management systems and predictive analytics to automate and improve decisions for greater precision, consistency and agility. Adding EDM to BI extends the value of analytics-driven insights, allowing businesses to make smarter strategic, tactical and operational decisions.

The MapInfo Location Intelligence Component, a way of supplementing business intelligence (BI) with location, is a powerful solution for analysts in both business and government. Because MapInfo and Business Objects technologies embrace open standards and proven server architecture, the Location Component extends power from analysts to the entire organization. Combining two 100% Java technologies, MapInfo MapXtreme and BusinessObjects InfoView, in a 3-tier architecture, provides speed, security and ease of use.

Two recent federal mandates placed grant management under increased scrutiny. The Federal Financial Assistance Management Improvement Act of 1999 and the President’s Management Agenda (PMA) require agencies to improve performance and demonstrate the effectiveness of federal grant programs in delivering on services to the public. To meet these demands, grant managers must have the ability to monitor and measure the effectiveness of awarded projects to achieve results. They need tools that can track progress throughout all phases of the award process, providing them with better insight into the complete lifecycle of an award. This insight must be correlated with information about grant-program effectiveness as demonstrated by the accomplishment of outcome-based performance measures.

If you have an Oracle data warehouse and are using materialized views for aggregations then Oracle dimension objects would have almost certainly been defined. These objects describe the hierarchical, attribute and join relationships for dimensions and together with database constraints enable the query rewrite mechanism to successfully rewrite queries that navigate dimensional hierarchies.

I see that Digital Press is about to publish a book on Oracle Data Warehouse Tuning for 10g. I hope to pick up a copy of Gavin Powell’s book soon (even though it is not out in the UK for a couple of months) and maybe review it here.

The contents list looks interesting - if only because it is similar to the one I was thinking of for my proposed book
But being positive, it also means I was