Dave's Adventures in Business Intelligence

I am happy to be able to (finally!) report that my universe “diff” tool (first mentioned a long time ago) is nearing completion. I have been using this partially completed tool on my own for many years, but the only things it compared were objects and predefined conditions. As such it was somewhat useful (mostly to me) but since it was not complete I did not release it even internally to my employer. When I started to extend the code to compare joins, tables, contexts, and other universe components I soon realized that the way I had originally written the code was not very modular. I was going to have to either write specific routines to compare each universe component, or go back and rewrite what I had in order to make it more generic. I didn’t do either of those things. 🙂

As of today I have completed the rewrite and am now going to extend the comparison to other universe components. I expect to have the final code ready to demonstrate (and release) during my talk Change Management Strategies For Universe Developers at the fall BusinessObjects conference. And of course once I release it there, I will also set up a way to download the code here on my blog.

Why use this tool rather than some of the other tools that are available? For one thing, it will be free. Free is good. 🙂 It will be released under the GNU GPL license, which allows me to retain the copyright on the code while ensuring that the code can be distributed without restrictions. Support for the code will be on an “as time allows” basis here on my blog. For more details on the GNU GPL license (if you are not familiar with it) I have included a link at the end of this post. Basically it says that I retain copyright of the code, but anyone can use it however they see fit. So there are no restrictions on using it for personal or company use, and it can even be redistributed. The only requirement is that the code remains free of all restrictions and that my copyright information be retained in a visible fashion.

I’m excited to be able to finally complete this project. When I submitted the abstract for the conference I was hoping that it would get accepted, and that would be the incentive for me to get around to completing the code. It seems to have worked. Now all I have to do is complete my slides and get them submitted (a week late). I look forward to being able to share the results and the code in Orlando.

Related Links

• GNU GPL V2

The full client applications (Business Objects aka Desktop Intelligence) have had VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) for quite some time. The initial release of 4.x included a scripting language that was “like” VBA but was not quite the same. When 5.x was introduced they switched to Microsoft VBA. I have written more than a few VBA utilities over the years, some of which are published on the Integra Solutions library page. Today I want to share a utility that I put together to help migrate universes in a Teradata environment. I should point out that this utility does not require that you use Teradata; it can be used in any database environment where you need to do a mass-update to the owner or schema name.

Executive Summary

This utility is designed to automate the update of the schema or owner name in a universe. The host application is Microsoft Excel since the Universe Designer application cannot be a VBA host. You enter the “From” and “To” schema names into cells in the XLS and run the macro. At completion you will have a universe where the schema (or owner) has been updated.

Continue reading “Using the Designer SDK to Ease Migrations”