BI and Data Management
Jan 27 2010
Bursting Reports Using Cognos 8
What is Report Bursting?
Bursting reports is the technique used to run a report once and divide the results for distribution to unique recipients.
Advantages
There can be significant performance improvements by using report bursting. For example, if you need to distribute a sales report 50 sales persons with the results separated by the salesman you have two options. You could run the report 50 times filtering the report differently (by salesperson) for each run or you could run the report once and burst the results to each salesperson. By running the report once and bursting the results, the database is only hit once instead of 50 times.
Jan 26 2010
Unpivot in SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)
When importing data from a flat file into a database it is not uncommon to be presented with a source that has repeating data sets. This data isn't normalized and usually needs to be split into a single row for each repeating group. Moving multiple matching sets of columns into rows can easily be done using the Unpivot transformation in SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS). For example, the following data is presented containing 2 columns that apply to every field (Date and Type), followed by 5 groups of 3 columns (Salesperson, Sales and Units).
Jan 25 2010
IBM Cognos vs. Business Objects
I’m a IBM Certified Cognos developer who is just learning Business Objects. With many years of Cognos experience and just a few weeks with BO I must be clearly biased towards Cognos and I probably am. So with my bias why even write something comparing the two technologies? Why not? As a consultant I am always learning new technologies and being asked to compare and contrast them. Given the number of different tools offered by both vendors, I think the comparison is best done at the individual tool level. It is also important to note that I have not used all the tools Business Objects has to offer.
Web Intelligence vs. Report Studio/Query Studio
Jan 02 2010
On DW federation, whac-a-mole, and integrating business data
Information Management recently sent around their pick of best IM blog articles of 2009. Among them was Forrester’s James Kobelius’s reaction to Bill Inmon’s “incineration of a straw man concept that he refers to as ‘virtual data warehousing (DW).’”
Dec 02 2009
SQL Server Transactional Replication
BACKGROUND
Recently, I was on a project in which the customer needed real time reporting from a custom order management application. The application ran on a Microsoft SQL Server 2005 back end. The solution needed to provide reports, pulled from live data, without causing any database contention that would negatively impact the performance of the application. Normally, this would not be a problem as you can write reports to read uncommitted and not worry about placing locks on database objects. The problem, as it turned out, is that all end users of the application needed to be able to run reports against the one million+ row order tables. As you can imagine, giving this functionality to over 100 concurrent users can cause resource availability issues on the server whether or not there is any blocking. So, I needed a solution that would address this reporting requirement without negatively impacting the application’s performance.