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.