Month: September 2007

SQLCAT sessions at PASS

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Conferences, conferences, conferences… so many to choose from, and most people (me included) can only attend one a year. I spent my money on attending the BI conference in Seattle and so decided not to go to PASS; naturally when Mosha announced his MDX session I was kicking myself and considering splurging a few grand just to see him, although it’s a good thing I didn’t. But if you’re on your way to PASS and looking for some good content then I’ve been asked to direct your attention to the presentations the SQLCAT team are doing:

Various PerformancePoint Information

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Things are warming up in advance of the release of PerformancePoint, I see…

First of all, there are some launch events in New York and London:
http://www.microsoft.com/bi/performancepointlaunch/
I’ve registered for the London event, so say hello if you’re going! I see it’s at Vinopolis, so hopefully the drinks will be good; pity it’s on a Tuesday when Borough Market is closed.

If you’re trying to find out more about PerformancePoint, Microsoft have clearly done a deal with the folks at the OLAP Report (why not make my day and buy a subscription?) and made their writeup on it available as a free download from the Microsoft site:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/3/c/d/3cdc4df9-eb2b-4eb1-b29f-d892f31aa29c/OLAP%20Report%20PPS%20preview.pdf
As you’d expect from Nigel and co it’s pretty even-handed and not afraid to make the odd criticism where necessary.

Books are also starting to appear. I see Nick Barclay has announced two sequels to the excellent BSM book he and Adrian Downes wrote from last year covering the monitoring/analytics and planning sides of things:
http://nickbarclay.blogspot.com/2007/09/two-rational-guides-for.html
This made me wonder what other books might be in the pipeline. A quick look on Amazon revealed:

"Microsoft Performance Management: with Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007" by Joey Fitts and Bruno Aziza

"Business Intelligence with Microsoft Office PerformancePoint 2007" by Craig Utley

"Administrator’s Guide to Microsoft Office 2007 Servers" by Peter Bruzesse

Cognos buys Applix

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Yet another acquisition, this time Cognos buying Applix… some commentaries:
 
As the second article notes, there’s some overlap between Temtec Executive viewer (which I know a few people are using on top of AS) and Cognos’ own products, so I hope this doesn’t mean another third-party AS client tool will disappear. Also, TM1 currently supports MDX as a query language, but who knows if continuing this support will be a priority for Cognos. What with this and the acquisition of Essbase I hope support for MDX in the wider OLAP community won’t start disappearing.