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. 😎
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?
I haven’t had a good rant in a while. I’m overdue.
Here are some real comments that were posted on BOB.
I already have around 18 contexts in Universe and hence I dont want to add any extra
The last two companies I have worked at, forbade the use of contexts
I only create contexts when I’ve got no other choice.
And this one wins the prize:
Here’s a list of what I cannot do (client requirements)
1. Cannot use contexts in the universe.
…
If you recognize one of your comments, please understand I am not ranting about you as a person, but about the sentiment or opinions expressed in the comment itself.
As a consultant, my job was sometimes to deliver a solution. At other times my job was to provide advice. My advice was based on my assessment of two things: what the client told me they wanted, and what I felt like they really needed. 🙂 Continue reading “Use Contexts, Dammit”
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”
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
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 have discussed the MultiCube() function a number of times in my series of Variables presentations. In certain situations it allows you to fix measure objects when you have two (or more) unbalanced data providers in a full-client document. ForceMerge() is the equivalent for Web Intelligence.
So how do they work, exactly? What do I mean by unbalanced data providers? How is it fixed with these functions? Are there any special conditions to be aware of? Continue reading “Using ForceMerge() To Fix Unbalanced Data Providers”
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”
