DS Panel

It’s Day 0 of the BI Conference, I haven’t even registered and I’m already busy… This morning I went to a presentation by DS Panel (the guys who brought you the Santa Dashboard a few months back). They’ve been around in the Microsoft BI world a long time but for some reason I’d never seen their stuff so I was curious to check it out.
 
Now the question that I’ve been asking all third-party tool vendors, and which I’m sure all prospective customers are asking too, is why should I buy from you when PerformancePoint is just around the corner? For DS Panel and others about 80% of what they do is what all AS client tools do and certainly what PerformancePoint is going to do, so it’s the details, the unique features and the quality of execution that’s important. DS Panel have a new release of their core dashboarding product, DSP Performance Canvas (see http://www.prweb.com/releases/2007/05/prweb524461.htm for the press release, http://www.dspanel.com for the company home page) and it certainly looks pretty and seems easy to use; their use of AJAX means it’s extremely responsive for a web app too. What caught my eye was their integration with various enterprise search engines, something I blogged about a while ago although I’m a bit more positive about the idea than I was then. They also have a cool solution for dashboarding on mobile devices, which I’ve not seen anyone else do, and where their use of sparklines is really effective; and a few other nice features such as the ability to add annotations to specific slices of data. Overall definitely worth checking out if you’re in the market for a dashboard application, need easy Sharepoint integration, and can’t wait for PerformancePoint to be released or reach a useable level of maturity.
 
Hmm, now time for me to go over to the conference centre and register. There will be a lot more blogging to come over the next few days: more product reviews, reports of presentations and maybe even another podcast!

Chalk Talk at the BI Conference

I’ve managed to sneak onto the schedule of the BI Conference next week after all: I’ll be doing a chalk talk on "Writing MDX for KPIs" on Wednesday afternoon in the 4:00-5:15 slot. Of course this leaves me very little time to prepare so I guess I’ll be working on the plane; I need to make sure I don’t say anything controversial (or worse, wrong) because you never know who might be in the audience…
 
This also means I’d better not overdo it on the Tuesday night meet-up I blogged about a while ago. We’ve got quite a few people coming now, and if you’d like to join us then just turn up at the registration desk in the conference centre at 6pm.

Resolving Common Connectivity Problems White Paper

Here’s a new, and extremely detailed, white paper on how to troubleshoot connectivity problems for AS2005:
I can’t imagine there’s a scenario this doesn’t miss, and it’s good to have the error messages generated from different clients too.

OLAP or Relational?

If there’s one big religious divide within the BI world, greater than the differences between vendors, then the question of whether to use an OLAP database or to query the relational database directly is it. Standing in the pro-OLAP camp as I do I probably have more in common with an Essbase guy than someone who wants to do BI with the SQL Server 2005 relational database exclusively. Anyway, here’s an article by Ralph Kimball in Intelligent Enterprise that sums up the arguments on both sides pretty well:
I’m pleased to see that he makes much of MDX as a plus-point on the side of OLAP; even Oracle’s supposedly all-SQL approach begins to look a bit MDXy when you see the details (see for example Mark Rittmann’s post, also from today: http://www.rittmanmead.com/2007/04/30/obi-ee-time-dimensions-and-time-series-calculations/) although from what I’ve seen MDX still has some important advantages. It’s just a pity that as a language it seems to be fragmenting into different vendor-specific implementations so quickly – for example, see this post from the Panorama blog on SAP BW MDX: http://www.panorama.com/blog/?p=44.
 
 

Last Night’s SQL Event in London

Just a quick note to say thanks to everyone who turned up to the combined SQL Server and SQL BI events in London last night. We had some great presentations from Reed Jacobson, Allan Mitchell and David Francis, beer, pizza, freebies… what more could you want? Thanks are also due to Simon Sabin and Tony Rogerson for doing the organising, Conchango for providing the rooms and Red-Gate for sponsorship. We’re thinking about doing another one in June, also in London (we’ll probably end up alternating between London and TVP) so if you’d like to present then let me know. Simon was also doing some experiments with Live Meeting so maybe we can start broadcasting these events to the world…
 

Using the Create Cache statement

Another interesting article from the SQLCat team on using the Create Cache statement:
 
I’m not sure why they say that it was introduced in SP2 since this has been around at least since AS2K and possibly before. Interestingly someone asked me only two days about this functionality and I’d completely forgotten about it despite all the work I’ve done on cache warming recently; I assumed it had been dropped in AS2005 (perhaps it had and maybe it’s only been reintroduced in SP2?). I played around with it a lot a few years ago on AS2K and never found it had any benefit but perhaps the architectural changes have rendered it more useful… I must update my cache-warming package to make use of this. There’s also a WITH clause variant too that isn’t mentioned in the article (although it’s in AS2K BOL) which needs further investigation too.
 
Lastly this article also mentions a new connection string property I’ve heard about which again was introduced recently, Disable Prefetch Facts.

Business Objects to buy Cartesis

Industry consolidation continues – at this rate there’ll be about three vendors left. Andy Hayler says pretty much everything that needs to be said here: http://andyonenterprisesoftware.com/2007/04/another-one-bits-the-dust/
 

Cubulus – an open source OLAP engine

I’ve had an email from Alexandru Toth about an open source OLAP project he’s working on. Here’s what he had to say:
 
I am developing an Open Source OLAP project  called "Cubulus". There is a presentation material at http://cubulus.sourceforge.net/   , and an online demo at  http://alxtoth.webfactional.com/  .The source code is at http://sourceforge.net/projects/cubulus/ .

In brief, Cubulus is an analytic engine + slice&dice web interface on top of relational database (MySQL at the moment) . It caches calculated cells, and is able to parse basic MDX queries. Project is in early alpha, and runs on  Mac OS X, on Windows .. and on Linux too 🙂

 
Perhaps not ready for the enterprise just yet, but still a worthy effort and any new OLAP that supports MDX is ok with me.

Analysis Services Load Testing Tool

It’s all happening on Codeplex at the moment: via Russell Christopher and Patrice Truong I’ve just seen that the dev team have released their Analysis Services load testing tool to the community:
 
I like this new-found enthusiasm on the part of Redmond for sharing code like this with the rest of us….