BI Blogs

The reason my blog postings have been reduced a bit lately is because of Twitter.  When I come across new content and materials I post the information through my twitter account (http://twitter.com/denglishbi); It is more convenient and easy for me and I plan on using this method more and more over time.

I decided to go ahead do another catch-up for people that might be interested in some of the content that I have been checking out (and plus for when the tinyurl links stop working).  So here is a list of some of the items over the past couple of months (these are in no particular order):

• Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Busines Intelligence 2010 (2009 version)
• Free eBook - First Look at Microsoft Office 2010 - 14 Chapters (XPS or PDF format available)
• PerformancePoint Services 2010 Unleashed "Rough Cuts" available (pre-order here)
• Microsoft release dates possibly leaked for future product releases beyond 2010
• Windows Azure Platform TCO and ROI calculator
• Hyper-V Information Worker 2010 (Beta2) - Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, SQL Server 2008, Project Server 2010, etc. (sorry, no SQL Server 2008 R2 or PowerPivot)
• Business Intelligence Executive Briefing - presentation introduces Microsoft’s vision for BI in the enterprise
• Silverlight 4 Training Course includes hands-on-labs, a video and a whitepaper
• VS 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit - January Release: includes presentations, hands-on labs, and demos
• Add the power of Bing search to your website or blog
• Windows Azure Platform Training Kit - December Update
• Sharepoint 2010 Beta Developer Training Kit - includes presentations, HOLs, videos, and code!
• APO for Microsoft Data Warehousing Quickstart - more great content and tons more available for migration material
• Good overview and training of SSRS 2008 and Report Builder 2.0
• Application Platform Optimization SQL Server Reporting and Analysis QuickStart

Hope you find some of these informational and helpful.

Cheers!

This white paper looks at the business case that should lie behind the decision to build a data warehouse and provide a business intelligence solution.
Updated:

My friend Marco’s spam-bait operation was down last year, and he’s been asking me what business intelligence can do for him. He had just read one of TDWI’s promo emails last night when he called me again.

“I like Vegas. Should I go?” he asked from somewhere that sounded far away. I said it all depended on what he wanted to learn. Is making sense of his data important? If yes, go. But there seemed to be more to his question.

He’s gone through one shady business after another since the early ’60s, when as a teenager he sold drugs on the street. Now he sells fake email addresses in huge blocks to Eastern European spammers. All his customers have had a good education, he tells me, yet most retain some of their families’ traditional ways. He describes them picking over his blocks of email addresses as if over oranges in a bin, rejecting one, taking another. They seem to rely entirely on feel, and Marco makes sure each new batch feels “fresh” and authentic year after year.

“Cool. My data’s real, real important to me,” said Marco. “So’s my know-how, my experiments, my research. Those experts in Vegas dish on how to manage all that, man?”

Definitely the data, I said, but not much on the qualitative end of his research. He was disappointed. 

“You know, you got me going on this insight thing, man,” he said. “And then you change the story. This business intelligence takes care of only some of my insight? Only some of it? What do they think, data’s the only way you get insight?”

He had a point. I thought fast. I said he should think of his operation like a speeding car. He liked that. I said he needed a “dashboard” to let him know how he was doing. He liked that, too. There was a course on Tuesday, I said, all about that.

“Cool, man. But what about my research? I got these journals I keep with my results and theories and shit like that. What about all that? I keep losing track of it all.”

I said I thought he was talking about knowledge management or something. 

“Yeah, that sounds like what I want. Knowledge management. They don’t do that there?” 

I explained that data was this event’s main focus. Other events … but he cut me off.

“No, man. Here’s what it’s about,” he said. “It’s all about marketing. I don’t know much about business intelligence, but I bet that every benefit, feature, whatever comes from a different tool. Each comes from a different vendor,” he said in a tired sing-song, “and the producers of this event have a line on a certain kind of vendor. To protect their game, they make up a category. Get hip, man. It’s always like that.” 

He quickly added, as if he had already bored himself, “How’s the food there? Can a guy score somethin’ to eat?”

The best Caesar’s can offer, I said. Then he had to go answer the door. I heard urgent knocking.

AnalyticsCamp is an unconference started by Nathan Gilliatt, after a networking meeting in Raleigh last year. The first AnalyticsCamp will take place at UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School in Chapel Hill on Saturday, February 6th, hosted by UNC’s MBA Marketing and Business Technology Clubs. It is themed around bridging analytics silos to bring analysts of all stripes together on one day.

SAS is a sponsor of the event, and several folks from SAS have volunteered to lead sessions and help organize some of the behind-the-scenes logistics. In this guest post, I’ll be interviewing Nathan about the unconference:

Nathan Gilliatt, Net Savvy Executive

What is AnalyticsCamp?
AnalyticsCamp is a day for people who work in different analytics specialties to meet and learn from each other. We have great sessions lined up, but it’s really about the people who show up and what they do with the day.

How did the idea come about?
Talk about AnalyticsCamp started after a panel on social media at Web Analytics Wednesday, when we realized that we had too many interesting topics for the quarterly meeting schedule. I had been to several unconferences, and the format seemed perfect for a day filled with all the analytics topics we wanted to talk about. We connected with a couple of the student clubs at the UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School, and soon we had a perfect place for the event. With a full day and multiple classrooms, we can explore 30 topics and attract many more participants than we get at weeknight events.

Why the theme “bridging analytic silos”?
I’ve noticed closely related specialties that seem to be kept apart by a modifier–web analytics, email analytics, social media analytics, customer analytics… and that’s just in marketing! They’re chasing similar objectives and using similar methods, but the modifiers keep knowledge and practices trapped in analytics silos. By de-emphasizing the modifiers and focusing on analytics, we’re creating an environment for people to learn from the other specialties and, in the process, meet interesting people they might not otherwise meet.
Continue reading “All about AnalyticsCamp”

Two new speaking engagements to mention: firstly, I’m happy to announce I’ll be doing two sessions at the PASS European Conference, which is taking place on April 21st-23rd in Dusseldorf, on DAX and SSAS cache-warming. You can view the whole agenda here:
http://www.sqlpass.org/summit/eu2010/Agenda.aspx

I’m also going to be speaking on PowerPivot and how it fits into the wider corporate BI picture at the Microsoft Architect Insight Conference in London on the 31st of March. You can see the agenda for that event here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/architecture/ee959262.aspx

As always, say hello if you see me…

My new video with SearchDataManagement.com:

Solving your application and data integration challenges

Because of the poor economy and corporate demands to increase revenue
while cutting costs, business users are asking for more information now
than ever before.
The benefits of making more data available via a strong integration
process are obvious, but many companies continue to
struggle to solve their integration problems.

In this video interview, we discuss the pros and cons of
different integration technologies as well as service-oriented
architectures (SOA) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software,
and the most successful integration tools for
businesses. We also discuss how to overcome application and data
integration challenges, build a business case for integration projects
and show return on investment (ROI) on your integration
implementations.

In this 11-minute videocast, viewers will learn:

• Why application and data integration challenges are so prevalent
  in companies today, and the benefits of successful integration
  implementations
• Why technologies such as SOA and ERP have failed to deliver on their promises of integration harmony
• The types of data and application integration technologies that are successful and making a difference in businesses
• Why hand-coding is a less desirable approach than using packaged extract, transform and load (ETL) tools
• How technical and IT professionals should tackle integration challenges and problems
• How to build a business case and show ROI for data and application integration projects

I posted a wiki to my company’s home page (http://www.google.com/sidewiki/entry/100318308419716752076/id/bjzCPgiw49UzmckRuIiLBRtmh4Y ) as a test of Google SideWiki - An avid fan of the Google app suite (though still an Apple girl at heart) , I thought I would try SideWIki today. Let’s see how well it links my social networks together from a SEO perspective. As we all know in the "social intelligence" space, linking up social profiles is the "FREE" way to get higher search engine traction between our profiles and our social network pages/spaces. 

Welcome to Mantis Technology Group

One of the few things that i have been working on this week is in understanding how the recently released Fusion Middleware 11g will influence Oracle BI EE in the near future. As was demonstrated & presented in the last Open World by Oracle, the strategic direction of Oracle is to use Fusion Middleware 11g as the base for all Oracle products including Business Intelligence going forward. FMW 11g has an excellent set of components like Visualizations, Custom Graphs, Table & Pivot View Components, Hierarchy Viewer etc which can all add value to the existing feature set of BI EE. If Oracle can somehow make them as pluggable components in future releases, it will make it a lot easier to extend BI EE.

One of the first integrations that i noticed between Fusion Middleware and BI EE was when JDeveloper 11g Tech Preview 4 was released almost 2 years back. I had blogged about it sometime back here. This integration was very promising wherein every report in BI EE Web Catalog was exposed as a view object. So in effect, from within JDeveloper one can easily apply ADF visualizations to an existing BI EE report/dashboard. This integration was very similar to the BI Publisher – BI EE integration where instead of a template, ADF visualization is applied. Unfortunately, this feature does not exist anymore in the production release of JDeveloper 11g. Though it does not exist as a feature now, there are ways to still expose them within JDeveloper. I will cover them in future blog entries.

In the current release of Fusion Middleware 11g, there are quite a few BI specific visualizations that have been made available. All of these can be used even on existing BI EE 10g installations. But the only downside is, there will be quite a bit of coding involved to tie BI EE 10g with the FMW 11g graphs. Hopefully this should be made easier with BI EE 11g.

I will basically highlight some of the interesting ADF Visualization components specific to Business Intelligence in this blog entry here. Many of the graphs shown below are available as part of a sample application that needs to be obtained from OTN. All these(base components for the charts/graphs) are available out of the box with the FMW 11g installation.

Custom Gauges:

FMW 11g adds some significant number of Gauge components. I have listed the important ones below. All these are very interactive like the Corda Charts that we are used to seeing in BI EE. ADF Gauges are based on SVG and hence the drills are supported here as well.

Graph Visualizations:

FMW 11g supports 2 main features in any graph

1. Custom Annotations can be added
2. Individual data points can be moved (drag and drop) for better visualization

Custom panel splitters are supported as well. One can essentially have 4 graphs in a page and then hide/unhide them in a pane layout as shown below

Its very interesting to note that time based interactivity in the graphs have been added. For example, one can choose a time period within a master graph, the child graphs will change automatically.

There is also an inline graph component called Spark Charts. These are charts that are embedded as a cell object in a table/pivot view.

Pivot Tables:

This is one area where i am seeing significant changes to the way BI EE 10g pivot table and FMW11g Pivots. Some interesting features of FMW11g pivot tables are

1. Pivot Table Heat Maps & Conditional Formatting

2. Ability to embed charts (Spark Charts & Gauges) in the pivot tables

3. Ability to drag and drop the columns outside of the edit layout. Also ability to edit cells (potential for writebacks)

Gantt Charts:

This is a significant addition to the list of supported graphs in the FMW 11g. Quite a lot of visualizations are supported on the Gantt Charts

There is another nice add-on to the normal Gantt charts i.e one can track Resource utilization as a stacked bar against Time as the base.

Hierarchy Viewer:

This visualization is probably one of the highlights of FMW 11g. Instead of a normal hierarchy drills from Pivots/tables, this visualization can provide visual hierarchical drills as shown below

Mapviewer Integration:

This is another area where FMW 11g adds a lot of value. It is now possible to directly reuse Maps built out of Mapviewer and render them along with BI components within the FMW framework

There are other areas as well where every graph/chart has improved. For example, now FMW 11g supports a set of attributes that can be modified uniformly for all the graphs. It also provides Master-Detail forms/reports. On a whole, to me, it looks like Oracle has indeed spent quite a bit of time and effort to get the BI framework in FMW ready. Now if only these can be reused out of the box directly from within the BI EE in future releases, then it could add significant dimension to the way we do BI reporting. I guess only time will tell on how these components eventually get into BI EE.

Bringing in a new software package or expanding the use of an existing one is an exciting endeavor for a company. The benefits SAS can bring your organization are extensive and will, without a doubt, outpace the expense many times over. But for SAS to fully deliver on its promise of immediate and significant ROI, your analytical staff must learn how to use the software. Training your user base on the effective use of SAS can be one of the highest return-on-investment endeavors you can make in your company.

In the paper, “Are you getting the most out of your SAS software,” I describe the benefits of training your SAS users and the negative costs of not training them. Citing research from a number of well-respected groups including the Gartner Group, ICD, and the American Society for Training and Development, this paper outlines the 11 reasons to invest in training. You can download the complete paper for more details (and for a full list of references).

Continue reading “11 reasons to invest in training”

Use this to help you collect your KPIs, Objectives and Perspectives all in a cascaded modular approach…Free template on Google Docs for you to use!

Edit form - [Scorecard KPI Collection Form] - Google Docs
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The annual RMOUG Training Days event takes place on February 17th and 18th in Denver, CO, with some additional university sessions taking place on February 16th. I am excited to be co-presenting with Mark Rittman on A DBA and Developers’ Guide to Oracle Warehouse Builder 11gR2. Quite often, when we speak or train on OWB, it is slanted toward BI architects, ETL developers, etc. In this session, however, Mark and I will be demonstrating some of the new 11gR2 features of OWB, approaching the subject from a application-neutral perspective. So perhaps you want to consider using OWB as more of an integration tool, or just need to do your average, run-of-the-mill database development, OWB might just be the tool for you. Additionally, there is a new feature in OWB called code template mappings that allows DBAs and database architects to participate in the ETL lifecycle with some database best-practices, without having to actually DO the ETL development.

This will be my first time attending the Rocky Mountain Oracle Users Group event, and I am excited to see a strong showing from some of the community staples. Have a look at the agenda and see some of the presentations that will be going on at the largest Oracle regional user group event in the United States. You could do worse than spending a few days in beautiful Colorado, after all.

Sometimes I have an idea, spend a bit of time testing it out, and it ends up being a dead end. That’s what happened this evening but there’s at least one interesting bit of info that resulted so I thought I’d blog anyway…

My original thought was this:
* Excel 2007 can connect to SQL Server to retrieve data for use in reports in a worksheet
* SQL Azure is SQL Server in the cloud
* Office Web Apps gives us the ability to view Excel spreadsheets in the cloud
* So can I create an Excel spreadsheet that connects to SQL Azure, build a report using data from there, upload it to the Excel Web App and then refresh the connection so that my spreadsheet in the cloud displays live data from the cloud?

The short answer is no, at least not at the moment. But after a bit of trial-and-error I did get halfway there and manage to hook Excel 2007 up to SQL Azure (nb I’m not talking about using PowerPivot, which does work with SQL Azure, but the built-in Excel functionality). Here’s how:

• None of the built-in functionality for connecting to SQL Server from Excel 2007 seems to work. However it is possible to connect to ODBC data sources from Excel and SQL Azure can be exposed as an ODBC data source.
• So, in Excel, go to the Data tab and click on the “From Other Data Sources” and “From Data Connection Wizard”.
• Select “Other/Advanced” and then the Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Data Sources and then click Next
• Select the ‘Use Connection String’ option and paste the ODBC connection string that SQL Azure generates for you into the box.
• Paste the value of the Uid property in the User name box, and put your password in the Password box. Delete the Uid and Pwd properties from the connection string.
• Type the name of your database into the Initial Catalog box, then click OK
• Finally a list of tables in your SQL Azure database appears; choose one, create an Excel data source and then create either a table or pivot table from the data. Click OK, enter your password one last time, and bingo!

Unfortunately, as I said, when I uploaded the resulting spreadsheet to the Excel Web App, I got the following error message:

Shame – I can understand why it makes sense for most external data connections not to be supported, but in this case, when the external data you’re connecting to is also in the cloud, it would be nice if an exception could be made.

One day, though, I’m sure a scenario like this will work. When I think about what Microsoft’s story for cloud BI might be like, the Excel Web App is the obvious candidate for the reporting tool. Whether you’re reporting direct from relational data stored in SQL Azure, or from some kind of cube (PowerPivot in the cloud is another obvious direction), Excel is going to be the easiest way to do it for the largest number of people. I do see a role for some kind of SSRS in the cloud too, but even in the Microsoft BI stack at the moment there’s a lot of overlap between SSRS and Excel/Excel Services for reporting; I wonder if this will be rationalised at some point? For example Report Builder has never really caught on as a way of letting end-users build their own reports, so why not forget it, develop Excel for this purpose and somehow extend SSRS’s rich functionality for managing and scheduling reports to work with Excel-based reports? Just a thought.

I posted the Gartner Magic Quadrant last week (Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Integration – Delta Comparing 2007-2009) and commented my opinion on the choices for winners and losers (big surprise, but really, I was shocked).

For one, BI practitioners tend to believe they are experts at their domain, and rightfully so, if they are good at what they do and have been doing it for a few years. In my case, 11 years of my life have been spent learning, upgrading, relearning and immersing myself in business intelligence tools and platforms.

So, this year, I was surprised by their ETL quadrant because of Pitney Bowes – Here is my comment:

[Laura Edell comment] Ummm, I thought Pitney Bowes provided corporations with stamps and other business-related supplies…How does one leap from that genre to not just business intelligence, but data integration…? Maybe to compete with the former Business Objects Data Quality Zip Code Cleanser? j/k – but I thought that was eye catching enough to call out.

A little while later, I was most surprised to receive an email from Pitney Bowes’ VP of Communication following up on my comment in a most professional manner. He also offered to chat further about their PBBI solution and walk me through the history and evolution of the PBBI product stack:

Here is a list of ETL / BI related links from the Pitney Bowes site @ http://pbinsight.com/solutions/by-business-need 

Improve Operational Efficiency

Automated Address Management for Improving Operational Efficiency

• Business Intelligence
• Customer Communications
• Data Enrichment
• Data Governance
• Data Integration & Extract, Transform, and Load
• Data Profiling
• Data Quality
• Data Transformation

Kudos, Pitney Bowes! I stand corrected!

A