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”
One of the original Dungeon Masters passed on when Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons, died today. There have been plenty of people who have had an impact on the lives of millions, but Gary hits closer to home. He had an impact on me.
I started playing Dungeons and Dragons in 1980. I kept playing through college and beyond. I met some really great people along the way, and remain friends with many. I even have a Dungeons and Dragons themed website that has never quite received the amount of attention that it deserves. I would be willing to bet that the percentage of people that work in the information technology industry today that played D&D is quite high. Hm, maybe I need to figure out how to do polls on my blog. 🙂
Even this web site shows touches of Dungeons and Dragons. The logo in the top corner, the text that changes under the blog title, even the title itself can all be traced back to origins in some fashion or another related to D&D. I have many fond memories of playing the game into the wee hours of the morning. I have what feels like acres of shelf space dedicated to D&D books and other materials. I have created worlds. 🙂
Thank you, Gary.
I started to write this a long time ago, but a few things (okay, lots of things) got in the way. I did manage to write a brief introduction a while back but that’s as far as it got. So today I want to write at least a little bit more about fan traps in particular.
Continue reading “Do I Have a Fan Trap?”
There has been quite a bit of speculation as to what will happen with the user conferences that Business Objects has held. The questions have been answered, at least as far as the 2008 version of the European Insight conference is concerned. It will be held at the same time / same venue as the SAPPHIRE conference in Berlin, in May.
The call for speakers is up on the Business Objects web site (see Related Links). But what about the Americas conference? What I can do is speculate, is I don’t have any inside information. I suspect (and frankly I hope) that they will still hold a separate conference for the Americas Insight this year in the fall, as they have been doing for quite some time. I believe that the European Insight conference was combined with SAPPHIRE because it was convenient. The schedule is very close to what has been used for the past two European conferences (2006 – 2007) and extending SAPPHIRE (which is already a huge conference) to include another thousand or so participants was probably easier than trying to book and manage a separate venue.
But the Americas conference is much larger and has been running longer as a separate entity. I really hope that they keep it separate.
Related Links
Comments Off on European Insight 2008 Call for Papers is Open
I’m going to be recapping one of my “Tales of the Universe Ninja” presentations at the DFW User Group meeting tomorrow (February 19). If you’re in the area and never been to one of the user group meetings, please consider stopping by. Hope to see you there. 😎
Registration Link
One of the most frequent questions that comes out of either the “building reports” or “universe design” areas on BOB has to be: how can I get rid of the time on my date prompts? And it’s not a new question; I bet if I searched I could find the same questions dating all the way back to 1998, which are the oldest posts we have on the board.
The overwhelming complaint generally boils down to, “… but my users don’t like it.” I get that, certainly I do. But to be honest it’s easier to spend an hour or two of your time 😉 convincing the users that it is more cost effective to leave it than to try to change the way the tool works. It’s not worth the time to remove the time when it works perfectly fine if you ignore it.
Normally I am all about trying to figure out a creative solution and do the “outside of the box” thinking. People that know me understand that one of the best ways to motivate me to solve an issue is to say something along the lines of “… and Business Objects said it can’t be done.” Well, then I have to do it. 😆 But not in this case.
Continue reading “Making the Best Use of Your Time (in a Prompt)”
As a community service I present the first post in my new “rants” category. I miss being able to rant… I haven’t been able to chew anyone out for trying to export a Business Objects report into Excel for quite a few versions now. 😆 So here goes…
If you have a cell-phone with a nice LOUD ringtone of your favorite musical artist, and the ring tone goes on for almost a minute, and the decibel level is high enough so that you can hear it over the rumble of your Harley, then for the sake of everyone’s sanity TURN OFF YOUR FREAKIN’ PHONE when you’re not at your desk. Or take it with you. Or put it on silent mode.
Or next time when you come back to your desk you might just be phone-less.
There. I feel better. Carry on with your normal activities.
Better, Faster, Cheaper?
Shortcut joins seem to be one of the more misunderstood features of Designer. They should not be used to resolve loops; that is not their function. They are supposed to be used to take shortcuts, thus the name. 🙂 They can make your queries faster, certainly, as they allow you to drop tables from the query. But there are limits as to how they can be used.
As a designer I almost always wait to the last step (or nearly so) to add shortcut joins. Here is the most important point about shortcut joins, in my opinion: If a universe isn’t working without them, adding shortcut joins does not fix any problems. In fact, it may only make them worse. I covered shortcut joins in a fairly detailed fashion in my most recent conference presentation. I am working on a series of posts to supplement the presentation slides and those will hopefully be ready soon.
Integra Solutions has again been recognized as Training Partner of the Year by Business Objects. The announcement was made on Tuesday at the partner conference in Las Vegas. A quote:
Authorized Education Services Partner of the Year: Recognizes the Business Objects partner that delivered the most onsite and public education services revenue, executed excellent class participation rates, and consistently achieved top customer satisfaction ratings. The winner of this year’s award is Integra Solutions, a Business Unit of Quorum Business Solution. Integra was recognized for being an exemplary Trusted Advisor through their commitment in educating their customers on Business Intelligence, and providing a solution that is best for the customer.
A link to the full article is in the Related Links section at the end of the post. This is not the first year Integra has been honored with this award. It’s nice to see the recognition continue after we merged with Quorum Business Solutions.
I don’t typically go to the partner conferences, since I get to go to the regular user conferences each year instead. We had several folks that did get to attend, and Amy (our sales director) got to stand up on stage and receive the education award. Very cool.
Related Links
For the past several years I have included notes about the JOIN_BY_SQL parameter now available for universe designers. The short definition: instead of documents having multiple SQL passes with a join or synchronize option, this parameter asks the database to do the work instead. I have stated in more than one presentation that we saw major performance improvements by using this feature. Now I have to back-track on that just a bit. 🙂
Continue reading “JOIN_BY_SQL Revisited”
