Dave's Adventures in Business Intelligence

I have been selected to speak at the 2012 SAP BusinessObjects User Conference (twitter tag #SBOUC). My topic this year will be a follow-up of sorts to a topic I did last year called, “Designer Essentials.” In the essentials topic I went over the basic requirements of universe design (setting up a connection, adding tables, building joins, and so on). I also covered additional steps that have to be done in order to ensure the correct results, like making sure all SQL traps are resolved. My session this year covers the next step, which answers the question:

Now that my universe is working, how can I make it go faster?

I will be covering shortcut joins, index awareness, and aggregate awareness. I have talked about all three of these features before (they’ve all been available since version 6.5) but I hope to have time to show a neat trick with the @Aggregate_Aware() function that actually has nothing to do with aggregate tables. I’m also going to touch on the use of in-database solutions like aggregate join indexes (from Teradata). It will be a lot to get through in an hour, so maybe I’ll have to eliminate some of my historically bad puns.

Nah, I’ll leave the puns in. 😛

As an aside, if you’re planning a trip to Orlando there are a couple of quick things to make sure you are aware of. First, the conference is early this year. It’s in September rather than the October/November slots that we’ve seen in prior years. Second, the conference has been extended an extra day, so plan to arrive on Sunday and depart Thursday. Content delivery starts on Monday, September 10th and runs through Thursday, September 13th. The final day (Thursday) is a half-day of additional content provided by SAP covering their complete analytics product line. This additional content is included as a part of the SBOUC conference this year. Steve Lucas announced this last year during his keynote.

Best of all? Wednesday night we have a concert from 80’s legendary arena rock band Foreigner which should be a lot of fun. I grew up listening to Foreigner along with Styx (who I was able to hear earlier this year), Boston, and many other “classic rock” bands. Hm. The term “classic rock” makes me feel old…

As a personal note, this will be my 17th consecutive year speaking at what I consider to be one of the “can’t miss” BusinessObjects events of the year. My first talk was back in 1996, and was quite forgetful to be honest. The next year I delivered a talk titled “Variables and More Variables” and it has gone on from there. Take that, Donald. 😛 Donald did get accepted, and all kidding aside, I consider him to be one of the best BI speakers out there. I look forward to hearing what he has to share this year.

SAP has put out quite a few tutorials on the new Information Design Tool (IDT) in their new community. The table of contents includes topics like “Concept: Navigate the interface” and “Concept: Create a universe” to more detailed tasks such as “Create a data foundation based on a single source relational database” and “Create a shortcut join.” Altogether there are 133 video tutorials currently posted on YouTube. If you’re new to the IDT or are wondering how to do common tasks that you’re used to from the original universe design tool, these tutorials look like they will really help.

Note: at this point I have only watched a few of the videos, and the audio sounds computer generated. But if you don’t have access to training, or are familiar with universe design but aren’t clear where some of your favorite features went, they should prove very useful. Just skip the first 45-50 seconds to get past all of the introductory template stuff. 😎

Official Product Tutorials – SAP BusinessObjects Information Design Tool

While looking for something else, I found a document from SAP that details how “legacy” work flows from the original universe designer can be recreated (or not) in the Information Design Tool. Because of the risk of SAP changing their URL structure (what! that never happens… 😉 ) I have also downloaded the PDF and hosted it here on my blog. If the link above works, please use it as SAP is more likely to have the most up-to-date version. If the link is broken, you can try downloading the version of the document that I am hosting here on my blog.

Download Link: IDT legacy workflows.pdf