Dave's Adventures in Business Intelligence

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.

Yesterday was the first day of Tech Ed 2009. I didn’t attend a lot of specific sessions but had some good conversations with various folks. The main presentation that I did attend was the “roadmap” for the BI products. Nothing too surprising… Crystal and Web Intelligence and Xcelsius featured prominently and Deski was not mentioned even as a legacy product. It’s like they didn’t want to acknowledge that it exists today. There was talk about a “common semantic layer” which is going to involve something new in the universe arena, but they were fairly quiet about specific details.

I was looking forward to the Demo Jam again this year but that got trumped by a dinner invitation. I will make up for it by attending the “Insight Night” tonight instead, which is more specific to the BI products.

Not much more to say right now, more to come later.

The last few weeks have been busy. Oh, I know it doesn’t look like that with the lack of new posts coming out on my blog. But trust me, things have become quite hectic. 🙂 I am getting ready to head off to SAP TechEd 2009 in Phoenix next week. I get to follow that up by attending the GBN Annual Conference for 2009 right here in Dallas. I was able to almost (but didn’t quite yet) make my goal of documenting all of the slides from my GBN presentation last year as blog posts. I have one more post to finish that will complete the extended version of the Designer presentation from 2008. (Maybe I will get the post done one evening at TechEd.)

I hope to put out some daily blog posts from both conferences. My focus this year for TechEd is going to be to try to learn as much as I can about BW and BEx and how they integrate with Business Objects tools. I haven’t done much in that area yet, and I am starting to see more questions on BOB related to these concepts and I would like to know what’s going on.

Another task that has occupied time over the past few weeks was moving to a new laptop. My older laptop had done a great job over the years of supporting my demonstrations, but it was getting “tired” and not able to keep up with the larger virtual machines required to run the latest software. My new laptop should do a real nice job running VMware: I am running the 64bit version of Vista with 8GB of RAM (half of which I can dedicate to the virtual machine). It has a dual-core CPU (3GHz clock speed and 6MB of cache and 1066MHz front-side bus) as well as a 7200 RPM hard drive and… and well, you probably don’t care about the rest of the hardware specifications. 🙂 Suffice it to say, it runs XI 3 in a virtual image along with Oracle and all of my other goodies quite nicely.

I have several draft posts queued up to finish, including the already mentioned completion of the Time Sliced Measures implementation, part II of the rebate post that a couple of folks have mentioned, and I have a head start on some posts related to my 2009 GBN presentation ready to come out. All of this means there should be more than just filler “news” posts in the coming weeks. Stay tuned. 😎

A post in which I do some subtle ego-bragging while trying to appear to promote an upcoming conference…

I got to go to TechEd last year and really had a good time and learned something along the way as well. I am trying to figure out if I am going to be able to go this year. In order to help justify the cost I went to the web site this morning, and guess who was staring back out at me from the page? 😆

Last year they had a professional photographer taking pictures of all of the mentors, and they told us that they wanted to do that in order to be able to use them for the web site rather than paying stock photography fees. It was a fun idea and obviously I participated. I just didn’t expect to see my face on the web site.

I’m not the only one that was part of the program, so if you go to the TechEd 2009 web site you might very well see Brian, Craig, Gregor, Ingo, Marilyn, or any of a number of my fellow mentors with their smiling faces. As I look at some of the others I seem pretty grim. I will try to smile more this year. 😎

Related Links

• SAP TechEd 2009

In the first post in this series I defined what time-sliced measures are and why they can be useful in a universe. I also shared the design requirements for a particular project I was on. The requirements included:

• Each report is expected to have multiple time-sliced measures
• Users must be able to select the type of calendar during the refresh process; calendar types include Monthly and Fiscal
• Users can provide any possible date as the “to date” for the time slices
• The process of splitting each time-slice time period into its own SQL statement should be completely transparent
• The resulting SQL should be as efficient as possible

In this post I am going to cover the design of a special table that we built in order to support our solution for these requirements. After I talk about the table design I will cover how I use it in the universe, as well as provide a few pros and cons about this solution as I have outlined it so far. Just to prepare you, this post is a bit longer than most that I write, and gets fairly detailed. This post will cover slides 23 through 25 from my 2008 GBN Conference presentation. There is a link to download the file at the end of this post. Continue reading “Time-Sliced Measures Part II: Time Slice Calendar Table”

During the 2008 GBN Conference in Dallas I delivered a presentation related to universe design. The last third of the presentation demonstrated a solution for time-sliced measures that I have used on a couple of different projects now. After the presentation I had two different people make suggestions that were proposed as being easier to implement than what I showed.

In each case I was able to tell the person that we had considered and perhaps even tested their suggestion and found it lacking in some way. I didn’t have time to present all of the different options during the one hour slot that I had at the conference, but I have unlimited time to explain options here on my blog. 🙂 But before I go back and detail things that we tried that did not work out so well, I am going to have a few posts (it’s too long for just one) about the solution we did implement.

This blog post will cover slides 19 through 22 from the 2008 GBN Conference presentation. Continue reading “Time-Sliced Measures Part I: Defining the Problem”

There are so many things going on; I don’t know where to start. Some of the events are more global than others.

• XI 3.1 SP2 has been released. Dallas Marks has already provided details about the release. Tom Nather also posted that it’s lacking some fix packs.
• I just finished going through an Xcelsius training class. Expect to see some blog posts on it soon. 🙂
• DFW local user group meeting is coming up on Tuesday. I was scheduled to present but they moved the date which left me with a conflict. Now I don’t have a conflict, so I get to go.
  
• Voting for the 2009 BOB Member of the Year will open shortly. I have to finish checking the nominations and get the voting page ready to go. BOB members that have been registered for more than 90 days can vote.
• “Early Bird” registration for the 2009 GBN Annual Conference in Dallas expires on August 21st. You don’t want to miss “Return of the Variables” do you? 🙂
  

There is more potential news to come, but that’s what I have for now. I am also going to be taking some vacation soon. Don’t worry, I have some blog posts scheduled to come out while I’m gone so you can carry on without me. 😎

In an attempt to complete the blog posts related to my GBN Conference presentation from 2008 before the upcoming conference in 2009 kicks off I bring you Context Versus Alias: The Smackdown Cage Match. 😆 People often post on BOB as if contexts and aliases are competing for the same job, and that is certainly not true. Each technique has an appropriate use, and I will cover them (although not in much depth) in this post. I won’t be showing the process for creating contexts or aliases in this post as it would end up being too long.

This post is related to slides 13 through 17 from my 2008 conference presentation. Continue reading “Context Versus Alias Overview”

I am going to be delivering two sessions at the 2009 GBN conference this fall. I have one scheduled on Monday and the other is on Wednesday. My first session will be about report variables, and will most likely use the 3.x line of Webi for the demonstration platform. I’ve posted about the history of the “Variables” series of presentations before. 🙂 Since I haven’t done one of those for a while, the title that was submitted was “Return of the Variables.”

Session Code: 902
Title: Return of the Variables
Session Date: Oct 19 2009
Session Time: 1:30PM – 2:30PM
Room: Fleur De Lis A&B

The past few years I have done a few presentations on universe design and I have another one this year too. I just finished a project where we had to deal with recursive (hierarchical) data, and we used quite a few interesting techniques to solve those challenges. I’m going to show various ways to model recursive data and the implications each design has on reports. The subject is a bit more specific than I usually like to use for a conference presentation, but it comes up enough that I decided to submit it anyway. I hope the folks that attend will find it useful.

Session Code: 1012
Title: Universe Models for Recursive Data
Session Date: Oct 21 2009
Session Time: 10:45AM – 11:45AM
Room: Grand Ballroom D

The conference is back in Dallas again this year, which means I don’t get to travel somewhere fun. More information on the conference (including a full schedule) can be found on the conference web site.

Related Links

• GBN Annual Conference