Dave's Adventures in Business Intelligence

Last week I signed up with an account at ondemand.com, a “software-as-a-service” offering from SAP BusinessObjects. I wanted to play around with Explorer for a bit, and we don’t yet have that product installed in house. It seemed like a good time to take advantage of their free demo account. I have no idea what is required to set up Explorer, or what sort of data issues I might encounter along the way. I am going into this experiment completely devoid of any knowledge of the product other than what I have seen in demonstrations. One of the selling points of the tool is that there are no training classes for this product; it’s supposed to be just that intuitive. It will be interesting to see how I do.

I first looked all over the site to find out what the restrictions are. Since I was going to be using a free trial account, I didn’t expect to be able to upload my entire two billion row fact table, nor would I want to. 🙂 However, I did want to stretch the system to show of what Explorer can do. I could not find anything, anywhere, that detailed the specific limits of the free account. I even tried to find out what pricing would be in the event that I decided to host more data, and I could not find that anywhere either. If anyone finds that information online, please post a link.

Other than these site issues, how did my initial exploration go? Continue reading “Exploring with OnDemand.com”