Dave's Adventures in Business Intelligence

I recently attended the 2009 TechEd conference. Here is a copy of the top portion of the session evaluation form. Notice anything that might cause a problem?

I know that form was reduced to fit the size of the page so it may not be immediately obvious what I think the issue is. In order to make it more clear I have posted a larger view of the specific survey choices.

Look at it for a bit and when you’re ready … Continue reading “It’s Not Always The Report Writers Fault”

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. 😎

This morning on my way into work I heard a commercial for IBM Cognos business intelligence solutions on the radio. 😯 This was normal (meaning local) radio, not satellite or anything special like that. The target audience was apparently small business owners. I normally tune out commercials but when I realized they were talking about “business intelligence” I turned up the volume to see just what they were talking about.

They went through most of the 60-second spot without mentioning any product names. Only at the very end did they mention IBM Cognos, a web address, and a toll-free number to call in for more details.

Has anyone else heard this, or something similar?

It’s really hard to make up reasonable fake data. Or maybe it’s just hard for me, because I have tried and not been very successful. 🙂 For this reason I have typically used eFashion or Island Resorts Marketing for my various technical tips and conference presentations. They’re small enough to be speedy during conference demonstrations, but complex enough to be interesting. For the conference coming next month I am also going to use the “Motors” database provided in the designer training class. I have converted these databases to Oracle because it allows me to have more fun. Microsoft Access is easy and portable but doesn’t provide all of the features that I would like.

Sometimes, though, I want more. Continue reading “Good Sample Databases Can Be Hard To Find”

Last month I wrote a post introducing the Dagira Group. I talked to a few folks about some ideas I had. I filled out the paperwork and registered a basic business in the state of Texas.

After all of that, it seems that I am going in a different direction instead. What does that mean for me? for this blog? for B B? Don’t worry, everything is going to be fine. Continue reading “News Post – September 2009”

I have been primarily a technical guy. For that reason most of my posts on my blog fall into the same category. There are plenty of other folks that talk about the big picture, many of whom do a great job. I enjoy reading some of these other blogs and one in particular that I like to read belongs to Timo Elliott. He is the source of the bouncing objects Windows cursor that we have available for download on BOB.

Earlier I was reading some of his older posts that I had missed, and found a real gem. If you have a few minutes, trot on over to Timo’s blog and read his recent post about testing your decision making skills. In my opinion it’s not only fun to read, but more importantly, provides some important lessons for BI practitioners.

Moral of the story: it doesn’t matter how accurate your information is if users can’t understand it.

I am proud to introduce the Dagira Group. *sound of crickets chirping*

What the heck is the Dagira Group? Astute readers (and that would be all of them, far be it from me to think anything less 🙂 ) will recognize that “dagira” is the domain name for my blog. At the moment the “group” is relatively exclusive, as it consists of exactly one person.

Me.

Why is that?

Here is something I don’t get to say very often… I resigned from my job yesterday. 🙂 In over twenty years I have only worked for three different companies. In the late 80’s I started in the technical support department of a software company named Fifth Generation Systems and eventually made my way into the IT group there. They made the top-selling personal computer backup program called Fastback, later followed by Fastback Plus. Yes, that is a highly-collectable still shrink-wrapped package from my computer museum that I have scanned and posted. (I say “museum”, my wife says “junk”, but to each their own, right?) 😆

I worked for Fifth Generation Systems until 1992. At that point I moved to Dallas to join a consulting firm where I continued to work until the end of 1994. I joined Integra Solutions and started learning Business Objects in January of 1995. That was a long time ago. 🙂 In 2007 Integra Solutions merged with Quorum Business Solutions but I’m going to still count that as one company.

So that means from 1988 to 2009 I only worked for three companies. What’s next?

First I am going to take some time off, as I already had some vacation scheduled. (I am going to get out of this Texas heat and go somewhere much cooler.) When I come back, I have some preliminary ideas about a universe review service that I would like to offer, as well as some other things that have been floating around in my brain for a while. I will be posting more details as they get finalized. I will still be doing the presentations that I was selected for at the GBN conference coming this fall, and I will continue to remain active on BOB. Those things won’t change.

The services that I have in mind will be provided by a new company named the Dagira Group, and ultimately this blog site will contain more information about the services that I hope to offer.

So as I said earlier in this post, I am proud to introduce the Dagira Group. *sound of much applause*

There, that was better. 😎

By the way, I have several blog posts written up and scheduled to be published while I am on vacation. You’ll never even know I am gone.

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. 😎

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

Some of you may already know this, but I have more than one blog. Five, to be exact. The reason I did that was because I have a wide variety of interests and one blog just wasn’t going to work. People that are interested in photography won’t want to read about phpBB, and people that are interested in phpBB aren’t going to be ready to wade through all of the Business Objects posts, and so on. Thus the extra blogs.

I have decided I need to do the same thing with twitter. I started with only one twitter account, but I am now going to split off the BI tweets into a new channel. The new channel can be found under http://twitter.com/dagira_tweets.

As a footnote to this post, here is the standard icon used for twitter members that don’t upload a picture:

And here is a picture of the hotel carpet at a reception I went to a few weeks ago at SAPPHIRE:

I think I was the only one who noticed. 😆