Dave's Adventures in Business Intelligence

Score one for the Phoenix airport for having free wireless… why can’t more airports do this?

I am on my way home from TechEd 2009. Overall it was a good conference. As always, it seems that the contacts I made and conversations I had were as valuable (if not more so) than the presentations I attended. As mentioned earlier, I was able to sit in on a “strategy session” for the semantic layer, which was quite interesting. There are a number of changes coming that are apparently already in the pipeline, but we didn’t stop there. We talked about all sorts of possibilities. Some folks might not remember that the semantic layer concept was one of the very first patents that Business Objects was awarded. It’s nice to see (at least in my opinion) that it’s finally getting some attention. We have been coasting along for years. As I have said more than once, it means that they did a really good job with the universe concept when they revised it for version 4.0 over 10 years ago, since we’re using essentially the same technology today. If even half of the ideas we talked about come to production in the next two years we’ll have some really nice updates. Finally. 🙂

Last night I attended a presentation about TREX. When I got there, it seemed that the presentation wasn’t exactly what I thought it was. (That’s my own fault, instead of a conference backpack this year SAP gave everyone a thumb drive with all of the presentations included on it. I should have reviewed it first.) Despite that, it turned out to be quite interesting. For those that haven’t heard about it yet, TREX seems to be the name for the in memory technology used by the accelerated version of Explorer. I was expecting to hear more specifics about that, but instead I found out that you can use the same TREX technology to power an enterprise search. For example, one of the items they showed in the presentation was how they pointed the search indexing process at their corporate shared drive. When the index process was complete, they had their own internal search engine that was lightning quick due to the in-memory storage of the search index. Very cool stuff.

I am wondering if I can use that to index my corporate Business Objects documents and such as well.

After I get home, I get a brief rest and then dive into the GBN conference which starts officially on Sunday with a welcome reception. At some point I might even have to get some work done.