BI and Data Management
Aug 03 2010
Three Tips for Better Data Definitions
If business or IT users insist that their definition is good and everyone knows what they mean when in fact that is not the case, the strategies below may help.
1. Provide examples of unclear
vs. clear definitions
Users who are intimately familiar with their business process and
supporting systems may not understand the point of specifying exactly what they need. To them "the ID of the customer" is a 
perfectly acceptable
definition of "Customer ID." Or, the IT representative may give a
definition that works for them but no one else, such as "the primary key
of the customer table". It will help both to see examples of what is
needed in order to have a workable definition to support data warehouse
population and use of the data.
Jul 26 2010
Business Objects vs. SSRS, Which one is right for you?
This write up contains a high level investigation of the Business Intelligence solution offering from Microsoft (SQL Server Reporting Services or SSRS) and the offering from SAP, the Business Objects base reporting package (BOBJ). While BOBJ does have more options for reporting and presentation, from a basic report feature standpoint both of the tools offer similar functionality and offer the user a great deal of flexibility in the presentation of their data. The other difference between the two solutions that needs to be considered is the expense associated with the Total Cost of Ownership. While you will have similar costs in the requirements gathering, design, development, testing, and ongoing administration, there is a significant difference in the licensing cost of these products. While BOBJ charges by either named user or CPU, SSRS comes with SQL Server so there are no additional costs with adding a BI tool set.
SQL Server and Sharepoint offer a quality BI solution, which meets basic architectural principles and business requirements. Because of Microsoft’s desire to establish itself in the BI space, it offers the BI components with a license to SQL Server. The lack of flashy, AJAX style reporting features (which are often shown in demos of BOBJ) may limit the business’s interest in SQL Server. Additionally, BOBJ’s reporting, ad hoc queries, dashboard, data visualization capabilities are key strengths of the SAP BOBJ product suite and are among top rated BI tools.
When considering the total cost of ownership, a company must consider the individual components that make up this expense. Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) comes from the High Level Business Requirements, Software Selection Process, Software Installation, Detailed Requirements, Design, Development, System and User Acceptance Testing, Production Software Licenses, the ongoing Maintenance of the solution. While many of these costs would be similar across the two platforms, a company needs to assess the differences in development time, and ongoing maintenance and understand which tool their personnel and IT infrastructure can support. Specific costs and return on investments are highly dependent on company’s specific situations and deployment choices. From our specific client exposure, mid-market companies do not opt for BOBJ, and we find that SQL Server is more prevalent. An SSRS solution will often be lower cost from a licensing perspective as all components are included with a SQL Server license. However, SSRS requires a developer to build their reports, where BOBJ supports an end business user self-service model. So long term technical support and development costs could actually be lower with BOBJ.
Because many companies already own SQL Server licenses within their infrastructure, the ease and low cost benefits of implementation may be too good to pass up. However, companies either without SQL Server in house or requiring heavily visual reports accessible to business users or self-service access to information with minimal IT support may want to implement BOBJ as their BI stack.
Jul 14 2010
Use conceptual data modeling in requirements definition
I’ve often thought that conceptual data modeling was an underused tool in the arsenal available to requirements analysts, and in a recent conversation I found that many were surprised that it would be used in the requirements phase at all. Checking the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOK) I found data modeling listed among the tools available to requirements analysts to “to describe the concepts relevant to a domain, the relationships between those concepts, and information associated with them.” There’s also Steve Hoberman’s excellent book on the topic, Data Modeling for the Business, an introduction to data modeling aimed at a business audience
Jun 09 2010
Cloud Computing – are you participating and don’t know it?
For something that is attracting boatloads of attention, lots of curiosity, some level of skepticism, but plenty of filled seats in various seminars, Cloud Computing still seems like a pretty mysterious thing. But maybe it’s really in use more than we think, and for many of us, we can actually claim to be participants without having consciously moved towards the cloud.
Jun 09 2010
Text Search in SQL Server Stored Procedures: Overcoming sys.comments Insufficiencies
Searching a SQL Server database’s sys.comments table has long been a quick way to find stored procedure usage of another database, table, or column. Likewise, clicking “view dependencies” on a table is a quick way to find the opposite: which stored procedures (on the local db) refer to that table. I recently came across a scenario where neither met my needs, so I had to expand the capabilities of the former. The limitation of the first approach is parsing the text field to find multiple items. CHARINDEX and SUBSTRING functions only get you to the first, and looping can be incorrect as line breaks may occur haphazardly mid-text.