Dave's Adventures in Business Intelligence

Interesting footnote in a presentation on the accelerated version of Explorer… the presenter said something along the lines of, “… and of course eventually we want to accelerate everything.”

All I can say is “wow, I can hardly wait” for some of the features discussed in a private strategy session for the semantic layer. I need to find out how much I can say (and when) before I say much more on a public blog though.

Yesterday I went to a “best practices” session for universe design on SAP. I would have to say it wasn’t really a best practices session. I expected some tips and rules on when to use what technique, but instead got an overview of universe technology and a workshop where we created and updated universes on BEx queries and relational databases. We used Island Resorts for the relational exercise. 🙂 At the very least I did learn some about building universes on BEx, which isn’t very difficult. They have improved that process in 3.1 as you can use the “View – Refresh Structure” option to review changes that may have been made in the query (or a BW cube) since the universe was built.

I think I need to learn more about how cubes or queries are built in SAP to completely appreciate what’s going on.

As an SAP Mentor I did get a really fun rugby shirt. It has my name on the back which has proved to be beneficial as several folks have recognized me and come up and talked to me. One gentleman was in from Australia; I had met him at the Mastering Business Objects conference earlier this year.

Last night I attended “Insight Night” which was the first edition of this event. The plan is for this event to evolve into a community event, where folks that show up are presented with a problem and given tools (and some time) to solve it, then they will share their solutions or at least the proposed solutions to the audience. Last night we watched a demo of how SAP products (including Explorer and Xcelsius) were used at a yacht race in San Francisco. I should be able to dig up a link and post it; it was fun to see how the different technologies were used by the various race captains.

The crowd here is certainly smaller than last year. I asked someone yesterday, and they suggested that attendance was bout 3,500. I believe last year it was over 6,000 so the number of attendees is really off this year. On the other hand, the folks that did come certainly seem to be appreciating the content.