Business Intelligence

After yesterday’s stream of consciousness on how PowerPivot could be used in SSRS, here’s a follow-up post on how PowerPivot and ‘traditional’ SSAS could be integrated. Hold on, you say, surely that’s a no-brainer? Surely all that would need to happen would be that Vertipaq would become a new storage mode inside SSAS, along with MOLAP, ROLAP and HOLAP, and everyone would be happy? Well, maybe. But here’s alternative idea that I bounced off some friends a while back and got good feedback on, which I thought I’d air here.
Before I go on, let me state my position on some

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Ahhh, Reporting Services and Analysis Services integration – a never ending source of pain and frustration! Although I shouldn’t complain because it’s been quite lucrative for me in terms of consultancy work…
Anyway, recently I was tuning a SSRS report based on a SSAS cube for a customer. Looking at Profiler I could see a number of slow queries being executed, which was strange given that it was a fairly simple report. It turned out that during the design phase this report had had a number of parameters created in the SSAS query designer that had later been deleted; however, when

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I’ve been doing a fair amount of work with SSRS over the last few days, and with PowerPivot also fresh in my mind it got me thinking about the amount of overlap between SSRS and the PowerPivot/Excel/Sharepoint stack. Of course anyone who’s had to try to sell a MS BI solution to a potential customer over the last few years will have had to deal with conversations like this:
Customer: So, what is Microsoft’s solution for building BI dashboards?Consultant: Well there’s SSRS, or if you want to build an SSAS cube you can use PerformancePoint, or maybe Excel and Excel Services,

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Via the Perceptual Edge blog, earlier this week I came across a cool new open-source Excel addin, developed by Microsoft Research and various people at universities around the world, called NodeXL. You can download it from Codeplex here:http://nodexl.codeplex.com/Marc Smith’s blog also has a lot of information on it here:http://www.connectedaction.net/
Basically it’s a tool for displaying and analysing network graphs. That sounds a lot more complicated than it actually is – really all it means is that you can use it for analysing the relationships between things. For example, if you had a list of people who were registered on a social

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I have a new post on my main blog site about what it takes to enable Answers/Ad-hoc access to OBI. Its more than many people think.

I’m in the process of moving this blog from IT Toolbox to WordPress. They simply have more tools to offer, especially better editing capabilities including images and file uploads. I also now intend to get more into How-To’s and not just theory and best practices.
I’ve already posted a few new topics over there, and as I migrate the posts from here (I call them Classic Posts) I’ll also clean them up a bit.
Jeff

How to get OBI working on this unsupported platform

Today I�d like to comment a bit on the differences between BI and Data Warehousing as I believe they are commonly confused and used interchangeably. Having just come from a project which mixed the two together with poor results, I think some discussion on the topic is a good idea and one that is fresh in my head. This is a long post, so go get some coffee (or Red Bull) first.

What are you really getting for that cut rate independent contractor you just hired for your OBIEE project? What about the small consulting firm you’ve done business with for years for your eBiz work and now they say (me too!) they can do OBIEE? And finally, the ubiquitous offshore firms who will claim to do any project for about $20. This post is a breakdown of why these are poor options and why you’ll be paying more in the long-run.

Have you ever noticed when a report name starts with  “CON”, the file system name will be converted to “co%6E”.

Let start an insider joke: “It’s the usenet handle of the original programmer ;-)”
Anyhow it’s one of those things you will have to keep in  mind when scripting reports.
Till Next Time