Dave's Adventures in Business Intelligence

Today is the Thanksgiving Holiday in the United States. It is typically a holiday where families get together… the travel days around this holiday are often the busiest days from the entire year in airports and other travel hubs. As I am typing this my family is either in the kitchen preparing the afternoon meal (mmm, turkey) or outside running around (kids). I found myself – as I often do – migrating into my home office to check in online. While browing a few posts on BOB something occurred to me. I have come full circle in my “Adventures in Business Objects”.

I started working with the Business Objects products with version 3.1 in January of 1995. That’s a few years ago. 🙂 Being the packrat that I am, I still have the training material that Integra published for that version, and I thought it would be interesting to share some of the screen shots just to show how far things have come.

First, here is the icon that was used for Business Objects at that time:

The red dot was supposed to be the north star and the white curve was the horizon. The explanation was that the original product was called “Skipper SQL” so they went with a nautical theme. I have no idea if that’s true or not, but it made for a good explanation during training classes.

Things were a lot simpler back then. We had a query tool and the universe designer. Yes, even then we had universes to work with, but there was no “Supervisor” or equivalent. If you wanted to set up new users, you signed in to the query tool with a specific user name and password and you got extra menu options that let you set up security (such that it was back then). Here’s the basic login screen.

And of course we had a query panel. It looks a bit similar to what we have today, except that we don’t have a “sorts” area anymore.

The data management part was completely different. Today we get information back in a standard report format and the raw data is hidden behind the scenes in a cube. With 3.1 we got the data displayed in ASCII format in rows and columns.

Instead of “tabs” we had a drop-down selector to move from one layout to another. If you look carefully at the data screenshot you’ll see the name “SALES1.ASC” which tells me I am looking at the raw ASCII data. The shot below shows a report, named “SALES3.E03” instead.

Here’s the selector. The ASC was the data, E01, E02, E03 and so on were reports. Why “E” instead of “R” for report? I explained it by saying that you “write” a report, and the French word for the verb “to write” is ecrivez which starts, as you can see, with the letter “E”. It would be interesting to know the true reason. 😆 A graph tab used a G instead of an E.

Update: please see the comments for a corrected explanation of why we had “E” for a report. Thanks to those that contributed via the comment form.

The report shows breaks and totals and even Alerters. Yes, we had Alerters back in the day, and we liked ’em.

What about variables? Yes, we had them back then. Here’s a screen that shows the variable editor.

The syntax of “In Report” or “In Block” had not been created yet. Instead we used numbers to designate the proper context for a variable. In this case, the zero at the end of the formula designated that this was to be a grand total. It was very simple and easy to explain, which probably helps explain why the transition from 3.x to 4.0 was so traumatic for report writers. Variable context remains a sticky issue even today.

Charts? Yes, we had them. 🙂

Does this look a little bit like Crystal?

Did you ever wonder why the current PRM files include the classification IN_MACRO for functions? It’e probably because Business Objects 3.1 offered a feature called “Macro Objects” where were renamed to User Defined Objects in later versions. We even had a macro language that could be used to write “procedures” used in the reports (not to be confused with macro objects…)

Ah, memories. 🙂

So now I will return (full circle, so to speak) to the original topic of this post. I started with version 3.1. Today the current version of Business Objects is XI 3.1. I’m right back where I started fourteen years ago. 🙂 I am thankful that I have had the opportunity to be a part of this industry which has seen such dramatic growth and change over the past decade. What will the next ten or more years bring us? It’s exciting to think about, isn’t it?

Happy Thanksgiving everybody. Be thankful for your past and excited about your future. I know I am. 😎