Picked up from Dan Meyers and Peter Koller, it looks like Microsoft are working on some packaged BI solutions aimed at specific verticals which will be sold under the brand name ‘Enterprise Cube’. Apart from Mark Kromer’s blog, which Dan points to, the only other information I can find about it is this session abstract from the Australian BI summit, which describes the first of these solutions aimed at the telco industry:

Microsoft Enterprise Cube – BPM Solutions for Today’s Business Needs
Haresh Khatwani, Group Product Manager MEC, Microsoft & Daniel Yu, Product Manager, Industry Solutions Group, Microsoft

Microsoft Enterprise Cube is the only packaged end-to-end BI offering at Microsoft and provides the framework for pain-point-specific BI solutions for industry verticals. Using case studies form leading telecommunications companies in the USA and Korea this session will show you how the MEC framework enables modularity, quick installation, quick time-to-market and how your organisation can leverage the Microsoft BI product stack to report, analyze, trend and forecast business data without effecting live business support systems.

I’m always sceptical about the technical value of generalised industry solutions, except when the data involved varies so little in format that you can genuinely stick a pre-defined cube on top of anyone’s data with the minimum of customisation. For example, solutions on the Microsoft BI platform that I know about that can do this include Data Intelligence’s PharmaAnalytics solution for pharma market research data, and PrecisionPoint’s solution for Dynamics, and I’m sure there are hundreds of other similar ones out there. Perhaps they could be brought into the ‘Enterprise Cube’ fold too under some kind of partner programme?  

From a marketing point of view, though, I think it makes a lot of sense – it will bring on board a lot of customers and partners who would otherwise not look at the Microsoft BI platform, and as Peter comments this is something the other BI vendors have been doing for a long time and makes Microsoft look more credible in this space.

While at SQLBits, Dave McMahon of the Next Generation User Group recorded a podcast with various people there, including me. It’s now available to download here:

http://www.nxtgenug.net/Podcasts.aspx?PodcastID=42

Can I state for the record that I did do a presentation for them earlier this year, in Oxford!

Craig Murphy has a lot of other SQLBits-related podcasts and videos on his blog too, including a picture of the top of my head taken while I was recording the above podcast:

http://www.craigmurphy.com/blog/?p=728

One of my particular hobby horses is always using full unique names when writing MDX, rather than just referring to the name of the member. Consider the following query in Adventure Works:

select {[Measures].[Internet Sales Amount]} on 0,
{[Source Currency].[Source Currency].&[United Kingdom Pound]}
on 1
from [adventure works]

OK it doesn’t make much sense in itself, but we know what it is doing. Now take a look at this query:

select {[Measures].[Internet Sales Amount]} on 0,
{[United Kingdom Pound]}
on 1
from [adventure works]

It returns the same results, but it’s bad for two reasons. First the reason I always knew about: if there’s another member with the same name (as there is in Adventure Works, there is more than one Currency dimension) then you can’t be sure what member the query will return. For example, you might have a Region on your Geography dimension called ‘West’ and a Customer with the surname ‘West’ – only unique name is going to be able to uniquely identify a member. The other reason I just found out about from Mosha, and it explains some weird behaviour I had noticed several times in the past but never understood. When you have a query (or worse, a calculation) that doesn’t use unique names then AS will search through the members on all dimensions to look for until it finds a member which has the right name. This is not too bad when all of your dimensions are MOLAP, but if you have a ROLAP dimension and AS decides to search through that then you can end up with a big performance problem. If you rerun the second query above and run a Profiler trace then you will see AS query the Internet Sales Order Details ROLAP dimension, and this makes the query substantially slower. Note that you might be lucky and that AS might find a member with a matching name before it comes to search the ROLAP dimension, but you probably don’t want to take that risk!

Interesting post from Jamie Thomson’s non-SSIS blog on Microsoft’s web analytics offering Gatineau, and how it looks very much like an Analysis Services solution:

http://jamiethomson.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!550F681DAD532637!2339.entry

I’ve blogged about adCenter’s use of Analysis Services before and I’ve heard the same stories as Jamie about a mutant version of AS. I wonder whether someone might consider telling us more about this, if this is (as I suspect) what he’s working on at the moment?

If you did go to SQLBits (or even if you didn’t) then you may be interested to know that the slides from all the sessions are now available for download from the website:
http://www.sqlbits.com/

Over the next few weeks there’ll be some pictures going up too…

Just a quick post to say thanks to everyone who attended last night’s BI evening in London. I thought it went really well – we had some good discussions springing from Mark and Suranjan’s presentations. I’m very grateful to Vaughan, Sandra and Sanjay of IMGroup for hosting us and providing so much beer and pizza.

I think I’ll try to organise the next one around December when more details on Katmai should have emerged. Since the last few have been in London, perhaps we should go back to TVP to avoid any accusations of being too London-centric…

The press release is here:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/Sep07/09-19OfficePerformancePointPR.mspx

…but there hardly seems to have been the kind of firestorm of enthusiasm I would have expected surrounding something like this. Perhaps I read the wrong blogs, perhaps everyone’s at PASS, perhaps everyone’s been playing with the CTPs so long it hardly seems news that it’s finally released.

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

Ashton Hobbs has just posted a very early version (ie it’s a bit buggy and Ashton is looking for feedback) of an MDX editor he’s working on that integrates with SQL Management Studio and adds some of the more obvious functionality that SQLMS is missing. You can read more about it here as well as download it:

http://withnolock.com/communityserver/blogs/dirtyread/archive/2007/08/06/new-mdx-editor.aspx

Here are a few more details:

The Editor provides Intellisense, Snippets, and the grid supports any number of specified Axis.  I’ve only included one snippet initially for parallelperiod, but people can create their own (they’re stored in My Documents\My SSMS Snippets).  With ParallelPeriod snippet, I’ve added a custom snippet token tag called DateLevel which will pop down all levels from Date dimension for the cube.  You can invoke the parallelperiod snippet using its shortcut “pp” or by pressing Ctrl+Shift+P to invoke snippet menu (although seems to work in some and not other SSMSs).  Ctrl+Tab will invoke the Intellisense drop down.  F5 executes a query.  The treeview also has tooltips on each of the nodes that provide more detailed info than standard SSMS.

There are several other items I want to add like additional snippets (if anyone wants to make any and share that would be great J), function intellisense, export options, and any other MDX thing that might be useful.

If anyone does try it out then I would be interested to hear your thoughts and whether it’s something people would use (if so, I’ll continue working on it), also if there any found bugs.

There are a whole bunch of new white papers detailing new features in SQL2008 (you can see the complete list here) but I thought I’d highlight the BI paper:

http://www.microsoft.com/sql/techinfo/whitepapers/hosting_sql_2008_bi.mspx

It’s the first time I’ve seen a fairly detailed discussion in public of what’s going to be new in SQL2008. Here’s a section on what’s new in the AS engine:

The premise of Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) is that instant access to accurate information enbles end users to answer even the most complex questions at the speed of thought. Thus, the aim to continuously excel in providing even faster query times and data refresh rates is a priority during the development process of any Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services release, an aim that naturally also has been driving the release of SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services.

SQL Server 2008 includes Analysis Services that enable you to drive broader analysis with enhanced capabilities, including complex computations and aggregations. Analysis Service provides enterprise-scale performance through:

· A flexible caching model. With Analysis Services, you can control how data and aggregations are cached to optimize query performance while maintaining an acceptable level of latency between the cache and its underlying data store.

· Declarative attribute relationships. In an Analysis Services dimension, you can explicitly declare relationships between attributes in a hierarchy. This enables Analysis Services to pre-generate aggregations when a cube or dimension is processed, which improves runtime query performance.

· Block computation. Block computation eliminates unnecessary aggregation calculations (for example, when the values to be aggregated are NULL) and provides a significant improvement in analysis cube performance, which enables users to increase the depth of their hierarchies and complexity of computations.

· Writeback to MOLAP. Analysis Services 2008 removes the requirement to query ROLAP partitions when performing writebacks, which results in huge performance gains.

· Scale-out Analysis Services. A single read-only copy of an Analysis Services database can be shared between many Analysis Servers through a virtual IP address. This creates a highly scalable deployment option for an Analysis Services solution.

 The two points here are the biggies. Block computation should significantly increase the performance of many calculations that don’t perform well on SQL2005; writeback to MOLAP should finally solve the biggest weakness of AS for financial applications, namely that writeback performance at the moment is rubbish (maybe PerformancePoint will consider it good enough to use now!).