Dave's Adventures in Business Intelligence

In part one of this series (What Does It Take To Become A Blogger?) I talked about what it takes to become a blogger by answering the “Five W’s” of reporting. In part two (Blogging for Dollars? Or Something Else?) I went a bit further into depth on reasons for blogging, how much money you should expect to make (or not make), and covered some of the financial costs of running a blog. In part three I want to talk about what happens after you start blogging. The worst possible case is that you put yourself out there and nobody notices. Let’s assume that’s not going to happen. 🙂

Content Is King

I talked previously about setting up a posting schedule and sticking to it. This becomes the “pulse” of your blog and I think it’s one of the most important attributes of your new online presence (call it brand or whatever else you like). I tend to post mostly technical articles that are designed to solve a specific problem. That’s what I do in real life (solve problems, or at least attempt to do so). That makes it easy for me to carry that over into my blog life. (Hopefully solving more than I cause. ;)) That being said, what if I don’t have any blog posts ready to go for a particular month? Do I make up some fluff in order to maintain my self-imposed posting schedule, or do I just skip a month? Maybe I should just post a movie review or talk about my latest technical toy that I have purchased to fill in the gaps?

Or perhaps not…

Continue reading “Exposing Yourself To The Internet”

I have updated my conference presentations page with links to download my two sessions from BI 2012 conference last month. The two sessions were:

Leveraging Report Variables for More Robust SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence Reporting
This session explores the role of report variables in SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence 4.0 and offers undocumented tips and tricks to exploit them for more creative and efficient ad hoc reporting and data analysis. Walk through system demos to understand what’s required to merge data providers in SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence, including tips to leverage the ForgeMerge() function to fix unbalanced data providers in a full client document. Obtain best practices for using SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence report functions and other context operations to enable calculations at different levels of granularity. Explore workarounds for displaying UserResponse() values on separate rows in a table, and see how this improves the user experience. Get techniques to optimize prompt handling, including insight into whether and how to create a prompt syntax that substitutes “today’s date” for a prompt default value.

The Web Intelligence session was actually delivered with the 3.1 rich client, not 4.0 as mentioned. The conference page lists a number of blog posts related to the content included in that session.

Universe Design Techniques Proven to Boost Front-End Performance
This session dives deep into universe development and examines when, why, and how to tweak your existing Business Objects universes for optimal report performance — and when you may need to build new ones. Explore proven techniques for extending a universe to ensure more efficient queries, an optimized end-user experience, and more timely and efficient BI operations. Acquire tips to perform index awareness, such as choosing a value from the list of values (LOV) directly within the query panel, rather than using prompts. Learn how to use aggregate awareness to set up complex logic and step through a demo to see how this results in significantly improved performance on the front end. Gain insight into whether and when to leverage shortcut joins to boost query speed. Explore universe design techniques that provide the best performance when pointing to a data source outside your Business Objects system. View detailed demonstrations of various advanced universe design techniques and leave with proven strategies for incorporating them into your own environment.

The Designer session included information that I have posted about on my blog before. However, in going through my older posts to build some links to those posts I realized that I’ve never really covered the aggregate awareness feature here. I hope to address that in the next few weeks.

I’m not sure Jobs had this in mind when Apple invented the iPad:

Cartoon from MiniMumble.com.

This conference has been flying by, primarily because I’ve been so busy. Today is the last day of the conference and since I woke up early I went to Eric Vallo‘s session on high availability. Eric is a very entertaining speaker who also happens to know his stuff. After that I visited with a few folks on the way back to my room where I will be packing to head home as soon as I finish this post.

Wednesday morning I went to Alan Mayer’s session on how to perform a self-service system health check. I had not seen him in quite a while and it’s always good to catch up. If you weren’t aware of this, I used to work with Alan back in the Integra days, and Alan has launched a new venture called Solid Ground Technologies. Alan has been a regular at BI events for even longer than I have, and he always delivers great sessions. This year was no different.

I then spent Wednesday afternoon with Michael Welter preparing for our joint training session; we delivered a 3 hour hands-on session on the semantic layer to end the day. If you can imagine in three hours we covered setting up a connection, inserting tables, creating joins, building classes and objects, differences between dimensions and details, derived tables, measures, solving loops with aliases, solving loops with contexts, and even fan and chasm traps. Yes, in three hours. Just like running a marathon. 😉 We repeated the session on Thursday morning to start what was my busiest day so far.

Thursday after the repeat of the designer session I got to spend the next hour talking about one of my favorite topics: BOB. They scheduled a room for me and allowed me to talk about the origin of BOB, some best-practices or tips for using BOB (how to search, among other things) but as the conversation went along we also talked about some of the challenges of running a large and active online community. I also talked about some of the new features that I hope we will be able to release within a few months. The crowd was small, but it was still a lot of fun for me to be able to talk about our progress over the last ten years. I would have been willing to do the same talk to an audience of one.

After that I had a quick lunch (food here is decent, by the way, and no problems at all finding water throughout the day unlike at another event I attended earlier this year). I went back up to my room to test and then reset all of the demonstration queries for my afternoon session on tuning universes. I covered index awareness (which I have blogged about before), shortcut joins (also a prior topic from this blog), and finished off with aggregate awareness. I will be posting the presentation slides after I get home, and will be adding a blog post (or two) related to aggregate awareness to eliminate that gap. That session was a lot of fun, as it included a lively discussion with audience members as they peppered me with questions throughout the hour.

One interesting difference between this event and other events where I have presented is the timing: the sessions here are designed to be an hour of lecture followed by a 15 minute question and answer period. As I was preparing my presentations for this event it really helped me to know that I could include extra content; so many times I have had to cut out important or useful information just to fit inside a one hour (or even fifty minute) time window. As a presenter I found that to be a nice change, and in the few sessions that I was able to attend I didn’t mind that they ran a little bit longer.

Overall I enjoyed the event. I was told that there are about 1,800 folks that are attending (although some of those are cross-over registrations, meaning they registered for a different event other than BI2012 but their conference pass allows them to attend all of the sessions.) The hotel was nice, although it was a long walk to the event location, and the walk included a pass through the smoke-filled casino area. That wasn’t always pleasant, but it’s a part of doing business in Las Vegas.

Finally, an amusing (at least to me) story to end the week: while I am here I am also still trying to keep up with work back home. At one point I was getting extremely frustrated with the hotel Internet access. I had established my connection and started up VPN. I was trying to import a universe, make a few small changes, and then export it again. The problem was the import process kept timing out. I finally was able to get the universe imported and make the changes but was a little hesitant to try to export after the time-out failures from earlier. I didn’t want to risk having the export process interrupted (this is a fairly large universe).

Finally I decided to risk it, and I exported the universe.

The export completed successfully.

Which proves that what happens in Vegas does not, apparently, have to stay in Vegas.

😛

Yesterday was a busy day! I flew in to Vegas on Monday night, and arrived too late to visit the registration booth. I met Michael Welter and he watched me eat while we talked about plans for the conference. Later I got a chance to visit with Steve Krandel as well.

I got my registration taken care of the next morning with minimal fuss, had a quick breakfast, and then made my way over to the keynote speech which was going to be given by Steve Lucas and Timo Elliott. It was the first time I remembered hearing of them speaking together, and they confirmed that during the keynote itself. Unfortunately I was going to have to leave the keynote early, as Michael and I had to go review the configuration of the laptops in the room for our training class at 9AM.

The topic on the keynote was big data, which is probably not a surprise. SAP has been using the big data concept to push HANA (to his credit, Steve waited until about 10 minutes into the talk before mentioning that product name 😉 ). He also took a more unique approach to demonstrate the growth of big data. In many sessions like this the presenter has focused on a graph that shows the amount of data being generated every week / day / hour / minute of our lives. That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t mean that I have to process all of that data. Who is really going to analyze all of the bytes of every photo ever uploaded to Flikr for example? Instead of doing that, Steve showed a graph based on research from LinkedIn and other sources showing the documented growth of big data jobs. These would be jobs with titles like Data Scientist and so on, and there was a clear growth in this area over the past few years along with a major spike in 2010. Interesting approach.

Steve then introduced the typical “Three V’s” of big data, those being Velocity, Volume, and Variety. At this point Timo stepped in and suggested that a fourth “V was equally important, that being Validity. It doesn’t really matter how fast your data comes in, how much data comes in, or how different the data is if it’s not valid. That’s a fair point, and also serves as a selling point for the data services from SAP which come with various data validation tools. I don’t think that point was lost on the audience. 😉

Steve then went on to show a list of a variety of open source tools used to ingest, process, store, and then analyze big data. There were quite a few tools that I had heard of before (Hadoop, Voldemort, others) but also some tools that I had not yet heard of. Many of those tools are in use in large enterprises today.

However, these open source tools – as great as some of them are – were not designed to integrate with each other. Now we’re starting to see where this talk is going as Steve shows a slide that shows how SAP provides tools for the same four steps (ingest, process, store, and analyze) for handling big data sources. This is about when HANA made her first appearance, I think.

Now that HANA was on the table, Steve was able to start talking about real-time processing of big data. He used an analogy that seemed appropriate at the time but later as I started thinking about it, maybe not so much. He showed a picture of a person looking at traffic on a very busy street. That person wanted to cross the street, and was taking in all of the data points including traffic flow patterns, weather, sounds, smells… basically a huge amount of data was being collected as the person was standing on the side of the road.

Steve then said, would you make your decision to cross the road if your data was five minutes old? What about 60 seconds old? Even five seconds?

The point, obviously, was you needed up to the second, or actual real-time data in order to make that decision. That’s a fair point in a life or death situation like crossing a very busy street, but I’m not sure it works when talking about big data quite as much. For example, what about the volume of the data flow (one of the three V’s mentioned earlier)? If I have been looking at historical data (say for the past 24 hours) then I have some idea of what the traffic flow patterns are going to be. There is not nearly as much traffic at 3AM as there is at 9AM, and thats useful information too. But I am going to maintain that there are times when real-time is important (my speedometer in my car) and times when it’s not as important (fuel gauge). As long as I know my fuel gauge is updated every fifteen minutes that’s accurate enough for me to determine when I need to stop for gas. But I don’t want to have to explain to a traffic policeman that I didn’t really know how fast I was going through that school zone since I had just exited the highway… 😆

The point is, real-time data has a place, but I don’t think that all data has to be real-time data in order to be valuable. (Is that the fifth V?)

At this point I had to leave the keynote, but I know they were webcasting it so perhaps it’s available online for me to go back to later.

Michael and I found that our virtual machine image was working fine, so I think we’re prepared for our training session (which will come later today.) I delivered my first talk of the week about Web Intelligence variables (my first time ever on that subject! :lol:) which seemed to go well. Later I attended a session given by Timo during which he shared a lot of statistics and case studies about analytics, including one about new paint on big boats that was designed to be too slippery for marine life to attach to but had the pleasant side effect of making the boats more fuel efficient as well. It was also good to catch up with Timo again; he says he has now been with Business Objects for twenty years. 😯

At the end of the day I participated in an Ask the Experts session. I shared a table with Tammy Powlas, and we had conference attendees drop by with their questions. The session ran for an hour and a half, and our table always had people there, so I assume we were popular. In fact the last group of folks I talked to went beyond the scheduled closing time and they started to turn out the lights! 😆 Eric Vallo did a drive-by but didn’t stop to chat as the table was full.

So what are my thoughts on the event so far?

Everything has been running smoothly and the folks here seem to appreciate the content. WIS made a specific effort to include a lot more “classic” Business Objects content this year so I’m seeing a lot of familiar faces. (Haven’t mentioned Jamie yet, but he’s here, and I expect to see Chris later today. Also had dinner with Alan Mayer (founder of Integra Solutions and now Solid Ground Technologies) last night.) My schedule has kept me fairly busy, but I hope to attend more sessions in the coming days, specifically around mobility. I’ll be back with details.

First post from a new laptop. Browser doesn’t have spell check, so hope everything came out okay…

I attended (and graduated from) Louisiana State University some years ago. During my time there they did something interesting to the quad outside of the main library. They took up all of the landscaping and planted only grass. There were no sidewalks. My initial reaction was one of disbelief, as I knew that students would be walking back and forth across the grass, wearing out paths wherever they walked. Sure enough, after only one year there were clearly defined paths in the grass. What happened next?

LSU paved those areas.

Smart.

They waited until they were able to observe established usage patterns and then they built sidewalks. In other words, rather than wasting time and money trying to anticipate how the quad would be used, and what the traffic patterns would be, they simply opened up the entire area and watched. Only after they had collected this information did they move ahead with the final stages of their project.

More often than not, I have seen companies end up taking the opposite approach to business intelligence solutions, and that hurts everybody. Continue reading “Pave Where They Walk”

I missed the keynote on the first day, but I made sure I made it on day two. The four pillars of the conference were cloud, big data, mobility, and social. I get the first three; they’re very similar to the Business Objects themes of cloud, mobility, and in-memory for the past few years. The social aspect bothers me a bit, and not just because I’m not a huge fan of Facebook. They showed off a number of Facebook apps (Usher, Wisdom, and Emma are three names that I remember as I’m finishing up this post). The apps themselves are okay, but I really don’t think they should be the focus of the company. Michael Saylor is apparently very big into the social scene, and he’s betting big that the company efforts in this area are going to pay off. I keep thinking back to what the core competencies are, and how does social fit? Not so well, in my opinion, but as the next few years play out I guess we’ll see how that strategy works out. I recently read another article on CNN that was musing about the future of Facebook, titled, “Will Facebook Be The Next Yahoo?” that sums it up nicely, I think.

Mobility was another subject that was emphasized during the keynote. Various studies were quoted that suggested that within a few years almost every customer will have at least one mobile app, and by 2015 mobile development projects will outweigh desktop projects by a ratio of four to one. I get that, but so does SAP. I believe it was Steve Lucas (or perhaps Vishal Sikka) who said at a recent event that “Mobile is the new desktop.” I found that most folks at this event believe that MicroStrategy is currently ahead of SAP’s mobility offerings. (That’s probably not a surprise, given the venue.) The primary advantage that they have over SAP is the fact that everything has grown organically, so integration is already there. SAP is still trying to work to get Web Intelligence and Xcelsius and other content delivered to the iPad in a seamless fashion. They’re making progress, but it’s not like MicroStrategy is waiting for them to catch up either.

Both vendors (SAP and MicroStrategy) are making a lot of noise about the cloud. I can see where this would be very attractive, especially for a smaller or mid-sized company. The ability to spin up a project with minimal (or no) investment in hardware would save money but more importantly allow faster time to delivery for the project. They did a good job of spinning that advantage during the keynote, but I don’t think it needs that much “spin” to show the advantages. There wasn’t anything super exciting about this that I haven’t also seen from SAP.

After the keynote we had another nice lunch (again, the food and service at this event reminded me of the way things used to work at Business Objects events) and then it was time for some track sessions. Overall I found this event did not have very many deep-dive technical sessions, and I really missed the labs that are available at Business Objects events.

I attended one session on data “mashups” that reminded me a lot of the features provided on the bi.ondemand.com cloud site. I did pick up a few new sites that are interesting sources for public data. For example, we looked at garbage collection statistics from NYCOpenData. 😆 MicroStrategy offers direct interfaces to any URL-enabled data source but also Twitter, FourSquare, and of course Facebook. Another site that provides open data is InfoChimps.

I went to a few other sessions on day 2 and more on the morning of day 3, but nothing that I really want to cover in detail. As I’ve mentioned (more than once) I felt that at least for me this event did not offer enough deep-dive technical content. Even when a talk was interesting (see the notes about the LinkedIn talk from day 1) they often didn’t offer much about MicroStrategy.

But I did get a t-shirt. 😛

I have had a couple of people ask me (offline) if I’m leaving Business Objects and working with MicroStrategy now. Rest assured the answer is no, I am not. But I’m excited about the opportunity to get my hands on another tool, especially when both tools have strengths. Ultimately it’s about getting data to end users in a format that they can use to improve the business, so why not have more than one choice? In fact it has been over a year since I renamed my blog from “Adventures in Business Objects” to “Adventures in Business Intelligence” in order to be able to talk about different ideas like this. I’m nowhere near as fluent in MSTR as I am in BOBJ, but I hope to fix that over the coming years. We’ll see how that goes. 😎

I’m at my first MicroStrategy conference this week. It’s interesting to see what is different and what’s the same compared to the Business Objects conferences that I normally attend. For one thing, they don’t hand out survey forms at the sessions. For a BI / data company, that seems surprising. The food here (which I know is a big reason why folks come to conferences, yes? 😉 ) is like the food used to be at Business Objects conferences several years ago, that is to say we sit down for lunch and they bring around plates. Yesterday was chicken, pasta, green beans, and cheesecake for dessert. It was quite good.

That being said, try to find a bottle of water, or even a water cooler, anywhere around the place. It’s nearly impossible. I finally found some water late yesterday afternoon, after asking a number of different conference folks and getting blank looks or, “I think I saw some over there, somewhere…” comments. The wireless has been good, although it ironically dropped out (at least for me) in the room I went to for the mobility track. 😆 That track is all the way on the end of the hotel, so perhaps they need another access point.

Not only are they not handing out survey forms during the sessions, but they’re not scanning our badges as we enter the rooms. Again, for a data company I find that surprising.

But what about the content? Yesterday I attended three sessions. The first was a joint session between Teradata and eBay. The Teradata folks talked about their generic concepts for “big data” and how to let analysts make the best use of it. The eBay gentleman then talked about some specifics around how they work with their large data sources (petabytes of data). It was interesting but I didn’t see a lot of MicroStrategy stuff, just big data stuff. Next I went to a session delivered by LinkedIn. I found it to be more interesting because in this case they talked about data quality issues that I can certainly related to. BOB is nowhere near as big as LinkedIn (they have 135MM users at this point) but we still have consistency issues. For example, the presenter asked the audience how many ways we thought the job title of “Software Engineer” appeared in their database. The majority of the guesses were very low compared to the actual value of over 6,000. They have over 8,000 different iterations of the company name IBM! 😯 As you can imagine, searching is a big challenge for LinkedIn. As I said, the talk was interesting, but at the end the presenter had not talked about MicroStrategy or shown a single product during the entire talk! In fact that was the first question from the audience, “How are you using MicroStrategy in your environment?”

The last session I attended (the aforementioned mobility track) was given by a presenter from Lowes Hardware. Lowes is a big user of MicroStrategy products. (In fact their former CIO is now apparently in charge of the cloud for MicroStrategy.) He was by far the most engaging presenter and he powered through his session even after the failure of the audio equipment in the room. Lowes has purchased over 40,000 iPhones and has apparently bet big on that hardware platform along with the mobile products from MicroStrategy. He gave a great example… every store manager used to spend a few minutes each morning jotting down some notes from a sales report in order to have that information with him or her at any point throughout the day. Just a few minutes a day, but it was something they did essentially every day. The replaced the report delivery (and hand notations) with a mobile app and eliminated those few minutes. It doesn’t sound like much, does it? They estimated that the savings (I assume based on average pay for store managers) at only $6.84. I think I have that number correct, if I’m wrong it’s not by much. When that savings was multiplied by the number of managers across all stores, and then multiplied again by the number of days in a year, the total productivity savings came out to $4.3 million dollars. Per year. Talk about a quick return on investment, yes?

The app was cool, but I wanted to know more about how it was built, what tools were used, and what the process looked like. So far the sessions I’ve attended have been very light on specifics, so I hope I pick better sessions today. Will let you know tomorrow.

There were certainly a number of interesting developments in 2011, including the release of BI 4.0 and the ever increasing hype about HANA. But more importantly my family ended the year healthy and happy and that’s far more important. I certainly wish the same for you, your family, and your friends. I’m taking a break now and will be back again to talk about mundane BI topics next year.

I will be kicking off January with the next post in my “becoming a blogger” series. I will be starting off my conference season for 2012 by attending MicroStrategy World later that month followed by attendance (and speaking) at the BI 2012 event at the end of February. I’m delivering several track sessions at BI 2012, including co-teaching a primer on universe design with Michael Welter.

But until then, best of wishes to everyone for a happy and healthy new year. 😎

One of the possible enhancements we have been requesting for years is the ability to validate prompts. (We’ve also been looking for the ever-so-popular ability to use a formula such as “Today()” as a default for a prompt but this is different.) If we had true cascading prompts in Web Intelligence that would eliminate one use case for validated prompts but not all. I had someone comment on my blog recently asking about how to validate one prompt selection against another and that started me thinking… what would something like this look like if we did get it? Continue reading “Why Can’t I Validate Prompts?”