'Most important ever' MySQL reaches beta

'Most important ever' MySQL reaches beta - ZDNet UK News: "'People have been criticising MySQL since we started [in 1995] for not having stored procedures, triggers and views,' said Axmark. 'We're fixing 10 years of criticism in one release.'
'It's the most important release we've ever done in the company,' Axmark added. "

Open Source OLAP - Mondrian Review

The Bayon Technologies blog has the best review of Mondrian I have seen yet.

Bayon Technologies :: Open Source OLAP: "My overall impressions were positive; it's a good core set of functionality and performs rather well. Like any Open Source project it is an alphabet soup of supporting libraries, environment variables, generators, frameworks, and takes more than the usual 10 minute commercial product install. We're not building a kernel here, but it's not trivial to get the examples up and running. "

The Brain Behind The Big, Bad Burger And Other Tales Of Business Intelligence

The Brain Behind The Big, Bad Burger And Other Tales Of Business Intelligence - BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE - CIO Magazine Mar 15,2005 is a very interesting article describing how BI is used in some fast food chains. The lessons, however, are universal, and well worth noting for reinforcement:

Tips For Getting BI Right

Analyze how executives make decisions.
Consider what information executives need in order to facilitate quick, accurate decisions.
Pay attention to data quality.
Devise performance metrics that are most relevant to the business.
Provide the context that influences performance metrics.
Take into account users' feelings, and address their concerns up front.

DMReview On Maximizing Your ETL Tool Investment

Mark Rittman has the goods:

DMReview On Maximizing Your ETL Tool Investment: "Maximizing Your ETL Tool Investment : 'Is your organization struggling to justify an ETL (extract, transform and load) tool purchase? If the tool is an enterprise level solution, the entry price is likely well into the six digits. At this price, the justification process may appear daunting. Because these tools serve a purpose and are critical to serious data warehouse endeavors, the justification is well worth the effort ... Since Oracle (substitute any database) exists in house, writing stored procedures in PL/SQL is often the first thought for ETL development. With no additional licensing and existing in-house talent, the decision appears obvious. Less obvious is the lack of integration, lack of usable meta data and additional maintenance cost.'"

Q&A with Panorama: Building a Top-Notch BI Platform on SQL Server

Interesting interview with some pointed questions:

Q&A: Building a Top-Notch BI Platform on SQL Server: "Some folks might say that there�s not much of a future in partnering so exclusively with Microsoft � that the software giant has something of a reputation for�pardon the imagery�devouring its partners. What�s your take on that?
�What about Microsoft?

Are they friend or foe?� That�s a question we get all the time.
The way that we look at it, in fact, is that we�ve been a partner of Microsoft for a while now. When they acquired our server technology back in 1996, a client existed, and they could have taken over that by releasing [a client] of their own. But they didn�t. Where Microsoft has focused its BI attentions is to provide a platform � on which to build business intelligence solutions, and [that�s] where ISVs like Panorama [can work]. "

Planned Microsoft Realtime Reporting Server Could Rock Analytics World

What is this?


CRN | News | Planned Microsoft Realtime Reporting Server Could Rock Analytics World: "Microsoft is poised to fire a shot to be heard 'round the business intelligence world later this year.
The company is quietly working on a realtime reporting server, to carry the Office label, that theoretically would deliver timely updates from all manner of back-office applications, several sources said.
The planned server, going under the code-name Maestro, is expected to hit beta this summer. It will be built on various pieces of Microsoft's stack, including SQL Server reporting services and notification services, as well as the score carding expertise from the Office group, sources said. "

SQL Server 2005 Part 1 - Tools

SQL Server 2005 Part 1 - Tools: "In our series dedicated to new features implemented in SQL Server 2005 Beta 2, we have focused so far mostly on areas of design and functionality improvements, covering availability, scalability, and, more recently, security (including authentication, authorization, encryption, and digital signatures). In this article, we will shift our attention to interface related modifications, starting by discussing a set of tools providing SQL server management capabilities.
The most prominent and immediately noticeable change is the lack of SQL Enterprise Manager, which used to serve as the primary utility for SQL Server administration. Its replacement, SQL Server Management Studio offers significant functionality enhancements and sports a new look, implemented using Winforms and .NET Framework, drastically different from its Microsoft Management Console-based predecessor. Among the benefits resulting from this change are resizable and non-modal dialog boxes, which allow comparing their content and simplify switching between them when performing multiple actions in parallel. The name of the new tool as well as its appearance, which closely resembles the Visual Studio Interactive Development Environment (IDE), reflects an increasing significance of programming skills in SQL Server management. They result from a new design philosophy, which provides access to administration and programming features through the same interface, ensuring consistent experience and accommodating streamlining of both types of activities. "

Sybase Announces Database Auditing Tool

Sybase Announces Database Auditing Tool: "Regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) require that companies not only control who accesses data, but follow who touches the information and what's being done to that information.
'It's really about understanding who did what, when and how to the data,' said Michael Wipperfeld, vice president of marketing and product management for Acton, Mass.-based Lumigent Technologies Inc.
According to Lumigent, while most database suppliers, including Sybase, offer their own database auditing tools, most of these tools are insufficient to meet internal requirements, let alone external regulations. "

New SQL 2005 webcasts coming in April

Christa Carpentiere writes New SQL 2005 webcasts coming in April: "This batch is focused on integration with VS 2005, especially smart client development. You can check out the offerings at http://www.microsoft.com/events/series/msdnsqlserver2005.mspx"

Web Services Mashup

In the This-is-going-to-be-Very-Important Department, Phil Windley's Technometria | Web Services Mashup points to the opening keynote of ETech and a list of publically accessibleweb services from Ebay, Amazon, Google, Yahoo, etc.

The challenge, of course, is now that you can automate the functions that those sites perform, how can you string them together to make something enourmously useful?

A week old, but I just spotted it.

Microsoft SQL Server: SQL Server System Table Map

Via Roman Rehak's blog, Microsoft SQL Server: SQL Server System Table Map: "The printed SQL Server 2000 system table map has been a very popular tool for database administrators, programmers, and other professionals working with SQL Server 2000. The online system table map incorporates the benefits of the visual representation of table relationships from the printed version of the map with the same level of technical detail found in the system table topics in the Transact-SQL Reference."

Great resource if you've never used it.

Event Registration (EVENT: 11904)

Event Registration (EVENT: 11904): "Data warehousing has historically relied on proprietary software and large, expensive servers. The large and growing open source software movement is producing tremendous impact on organizations by delivering enterprise-class products such as Apache and Linux. Super warehousing represents the confluence of open source technologies and commodity hardware in the data warehousing industry. This free web seminar will discuss super warehousing's emergence as a disruptive force in the industry and explore how enterprises can leverage it to achieve new levels of performance, scalability and cost effectiveness.

Learn how super warehousing is changing the rules of data warehousing
Find out why open source databases have become viable and appropriate for enterprise BI
Hear how major technology companies are getting involved and why
Discover how to get started today
Speakers include:
Bill Inmon - Founder of Inmon Data Systems "


When Bill Inmon gets involved, people pay attention. When it's open source databases on the agenda... can't ask for more legitmacy than that.

Predictive Analytics in Clinical Healthcare

Predictive Analytics in Clinical Healthcare: "Predictive analytics is the hot topic in business intelligence right now, and for good reason. Since the first commercial transaction took place thousands of years ago, sellers have wanted to predict who will buy, what they will buy, when and how much. Significant amounts of time, energy and money are devoted annually to making these types of predictions across virtually every industry.
The patient encounter is the universal nugget in clinical healthcare, driving every decision and action by this group. What if one could predict the specifics of your patient encounters, and use this information to improve decision-making across the entire organization? The benefits of answering this question to patients, to the organization and to the stakeholders are potentially tremendous."

DM Review: Using BI for Predicting Future Partner Performance

The Challenge of Predicting Future Partner Performance is a great approach, a great way to to apply BI techniques to a new problem.

Two of the major objectives of managing alliances and partnerships are optimizing partner performance and continuously improving the results over time. The "what can you sell for me this year" strategy employed by many vendors has grown ineffective. Today's partner performance measurements concentrate heavily on quantitative results. A snapshot of what is often measured follows:

Increase in partner sales
Products sold by partner
Margin by partner
Increase in new partners
New partner effectiveness
Sales from leads
Prospects generated without leads
Marketing program costs
Marketing materials costs
Forecast accuracy
Sales vs. forecast
Sales by customer
New partner support costs
Competitive wins/losses

Always useful to consider these "out of the box" ideas.

SQL Server Health and History Tool (SQLH2)

Download details: SQL Server Health and History Tool (SQLH2) and

SQL Server Health and History Tool (SQLH2) Reports

A collection tool for diagnostic data, and a reporting services pack to view reports of the data. Good stuff, I'll have to check this out.

Microsoft adds business intelligence to Great Plains 8.0

Microsoft adds business intelligence to Great Plains 8.0: "The Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services Report Pack will be available to allow customers to draw information from Microsoft Great Plains and create analytics reports specific to their business needs."

This seems to be a trend (and a smart one), leveraging Reporting Services. Several have come out, including one for Exchange, and they all add some significant value to the products they support. I hope ones come out, for free, for many more apps.

Imagine this in a Data Warehouse

O'Reilly Network: From the Labs: ETech 2005 talks a bit about the research going on at Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google.

Rick Rashid of Microsoft research asked what would happen if we could record everything that happened to you in a day. There are many reasons that this isn't interesting. First of all, recording everything would leave you with too much information to sift through. Secondly, as you move, many of the images that would be taken and stored would be too blurry to be of much use. The SenseCam is a small device that you wear throughout the day that decides, based on other sensor cues, when to take pictures that might be important.


Rashid demonstrated by showing a film that consisted of a series of pictures taken as the person wearing it spent an ordinary day. It provide a pretty complete scoped view of the whole day. Rashid said that these devices can be used to support individuals with memory loss. It can allow patients to record and consolidate memories. Also, it can help their care givers check on what went on during the day.

When I read that, I start to think about how employers will want that sort of monitoring on certain employees... perhaps salesmen, truck drivers, or telecommuters. Far fetched? I don't think so. They'll want all of that archived and searched, maybe for compliance, performance reviews, or something else.

If it becomes easy, I could imagine a time when the first spyware app that attaches to one of these devices is born. Or for that matter, the first time one of these ends up in one of those spy gear stores (great for checking in on a spouse!) and I'm sure the CIA, if they haven't yet, want to attach a little transmitter to one of these things along with a power source.

Interesting directions technology is taking us, for better or worse. One silver lining... if you are in the Business Intelligence field, it will be a growth industry for a very long time.

Receive Podcasts Using Your PC

WindowsDevCenter.com: Receive Podcasts Using Your PC explains how to do it with a few easy tools, and how to listen to them in Media Player on Windows.

I've watched theis trend, but don't need an iPod right now, so I didn't think I could check out what all the hype was about, so tis is a nice way to see what is going on in a bleeding edge niche that seems distined to have far more ripples in the future.

Analysis Services 2005 Editions differentiation

Mosha Pasumansky writes about Analysis Services 2005 Editions differentiation since the recent announcement about the different SQL Server additions. The good news is, the stanadard version will have more features than originally expected. See the story for more details.

On a side note, in fairness to my linking to a story a couple of posts back about how )racle 10g BI is best suited for Oracle shops, the same, in general, holds true for Analysis Services, though not quite as much. I'm sure that clarifies things.

Data Warehousing Appliances: The Next High-End Trend

Data Warehousing Appliances: The Next High-End Trend: "At this month�s TDWI World Conference, DATAllegro showcased its P3000, a data-warehousing appliance that can be used by itself or bolted-on top of an existing Oracle data warehouse. The P3000 can support up to 3 TB of user data and�as high-end solutions go, anyway�is affordably priced at $450,000.
DATAllegro�s flagship data warehousing appliance uses commodity hardware, like the Netezza solutions it�s designed to compete against. A single unit can support up to 42 Intel Xeon processors, and the P3000 uses inexpensive Serial ATA storage instead of SCSI or fibre channel devices. It�s also based on open-source operating system (Linux) and database (Ingres) software. The Xeon chips that form the basis of the P3000�s power plant are outfitted with Intel�s new EMT64 (64-bit) extensions, which should effectively allow Xeon to scale to near-RISC or -Itanium heights. "


First, people have been predicting DW appplicances for years, they have never hit. Requirements gathering from users and integration with source systems is where the majority of implementation and maintenance work happens in data warehouse initiatives, yes? These appliances will not make work that any easier.

Second, the blurb above alone should be enough to rebut any argument that open source databases are not ready for the DW and DM world.

Oracle BI for 10g - not practical as stand alone - TDWI

Oracle Releases BI Bundle for 10g: "In spite of its �standalone� description, Business Intelligence 10g should be considered an Oracle-only play"


Of course, Oracle’s BI bundle has more going for it than its integration with the 10g database. More to the point, it also exploits the 10g underpinnings, which help to give it performance advantages relative to many standalone or third-party offerings.

“[W]hile Oracle Business Intelligence 10g is intended for Oracle database shops, its individual components are likely to be the de facto benchmarks against which third-party BI and ETL offerings are evaluated,” Schiff notes. Because Business Intelligence 10g isn’t dependent on Oracle’s application server, some previous fence-sitting customers might have an extra incentive to check it out, he speculates.

When to use SQL Server 2005 inbuilt Web Services?

Great Bookmark for developers:

When to use SQL Server 2005 inbuilt Web Services?: "SQL Server 2005 allows stored procedures and functions to be exposed as web services direct from the database without any need to be running IIS. To do this, SQL must be installed on Windows Server 2003 to take advantage of the kernel mode http.sys. (Hmmmmm - I see Windows XP Sp2 also has kernel mode http.sys- something to try later on).
They are very easy to setup - which then leads to the obvious next question which many ISV have asked me 'When would you use them over ASP.NET web services'. The answer is a 'it depends' answer but as a rule of thumb..."

Compliance to Regulations: A Data Warehousing Approach

Compliance to Regulations: A Data Warehousing Approach: "CEOs and CFOs are challenged to assess the organization's business practice and operational data compliance to myriad regulations periodically basis and take corrective/preventive actions when needed. Off-the-shelf packages need customization to suit the organization's regulatory compliance needs. In fact, no single package can help organizations ensure the compliance to all regulations.
Hence, corporations need a scalable framework to manage the regulatory compliance. A custom-built compliance data warehouse framework may be best suited for organizations with large amounts of operational and transactional data. Scalability to adapt to the changes in regulation is the core purpose of a compliance data warehouse framework. "

Yahoo! News - IBM to Acquire Ascential Software for $1.1B

Wow, that was quick, right after someone was writing they needed to buy an ETL tool. They get a big one.

Yahoo! News - IBM to Acquire Ascential Software for $1.1B: "International Business Machines Corp. is buying Ascential Software Corp., which makes software that helps business manage data, for $1.1 billion in cash. Ascential shares rose more than 16 percent in early trading. "

Why IBM needs ETL | The Register

Why IBM needs ETL | The Register: "Comment IBM needs to develop a modern, fully-functional ETL capability - as opposed to the relatively limited capabilities that are currently provided by Warehouse Manager. Or it needs to buy one. There are two reasons why."

Process Warehouse: The Missing Link in Business Performance Management

Process Warehouse: The Missing Link in Business Performance Management: "Process Models - In order for measures and targets to be instituted for a process, you need a model of the process and the different process steps involved. You also need a multidimensional cube to be associated with the process model for fine-grained process analysis. "

Great article, I enjoyed this. Applying BI and OLAP knowledge from Finances into Operations is a coming Big Wave.

Oracle Customer Data Hubs Chief Defends CDH Model

There's a few articleson EWeek that just popped up about Oracle's Customer Data Hub, which has a pretty big vision and is getting some scrutiny. I've never seen an installation, or a demo, but it sounds like a great idea to me. Oracle Customer Data Hubs Chief Defends CDH Model has some great info:

Is anybody actually using this stuff out of the box, though? Or are they all building it themselves from TCA and OCO, as Zornes suggests?

There's always an element of customization. It takes a couple of years to implement this kind of thing.




Oracle Customer Data Hubs Chief Defends CDH Model




Zornes says that CDH works best in all-Oracle shops, which kind of negates the core idea of having these hubs tie together disparate systems, doesn't it? ADVERTISEMENT
[Zornes] said that if you were an Oracle customer, there's a propensity to choose our solution. We said, "Well, so?" That's OK, there's nothing wrong with that.

This is part of my view on what he said: What we're talking about is these mixed environments. The idea is that companies have customer information fragmented around the company in multiple systems.

If one of those systems happens to be an Oracle system, we get to bid on the opportunity to be that customer master, the central master.

He somehow was discounting the fact that because we have a customer master in our application system that somehow we're not a player in the [CDI] market. Our view is that Oracle is positioned beautifully for the CDI marketplace.

We have two sides to our business: our applications side, selling ERP [enterprise resource planning] and CRM [customer relationship management] systems, which requires a customer master, and since most companies have fragmented ERP systems, you have two choices: [one is to] unify around E-Business Suite.



If you're not inclined to do that, you don't have to unify around our suite, but you can unify around our data model. You don't have to implement it in the context of E-Business Suite. You can certainly implement Oracle CDH independent of [Oracle] transaction systems.

Second, with all our technology customers, one of Oracle's core messages has always been about IT consolidation and simplification. That's what people come to Oracle to do: They have 50 databases, and they want to collapse that down to one or two.

Those companies who are trying to save money on pure IT spending find this a very interesting subject. It gives them the opportunity to retire older systems, possibly. If you can have a project that protects customer data, you have the opportunity to, quote, do some consolidation.

What's the difference between Oracle's data hub and its data warehouse technology?

A data warehouse is passive and historical. A data hub is active and current. In the data hub, you actually update data. You're creating data. We want people to update data records, change relationships, update info. It's something you don't do in a data warehouse. It's a downstream system.

Another important, important fact is that a data warehouse is unidirectional. All source systems send information to this specific place. You might clean up data as you try to normalize it and get rollups as it goes into the warehouse, but what have you done to correct data in its source? Nothing.

Data warehouse users, they make their best efforts to clean up data, but the data hub is trying to correct data at its source.

That last answer is a bit scary. I'm not sure Id be ready to take the risk of blindly trusting the results of something like that.

Data Warehouse Architecture: The Great Debate

Data Warehouse Architecture: The Great Debate: "However, because both Mr. Inmon and Mr. Kimball are very prolific in publishing their ideas and offering their opinions, I have undertaken the task of �staging� a debate between them based on their writings. It will appear as a series over the next five weeks."

Cool :)

Chris Webb's BI Blog: Querying a dimension not a cube

Chris Webb's BI Blog: Querying a dimension not a cube: "Why is this useful? Anyone who has written any kind of client interface for AS2K and used the ADOMD catalog object will know how slow it is, and that it's easier to write queries instead; and similarly in Reporting Services very often you have to write queries to populate lists of valid values for parameters. The problem is that when you run a query on a cube you always have to bring back at least one measure's worth of data, which is a bit of a waste and potentially time- and resource-consuming. Now you don't have to bring back any measure data because you can query the dimension instead!"

Data cemeteries impede business intelligence use: ZDNet Australia: News: Business

Data cemeteries impede business intelligence use: ZDNet Australia: News: Business: "Industry analysts are falling over themselves to highlight 2005 as the year when business intelligence hits the mainstream. But those looking to implement business intelligence solutions may find their efforts hampered by vast silos of generally incorrect data. "

SSIS plays Vegas

Excellent writeup from Donald Farmer, who demoed Integration Services, or the Yukn's DTS, at the latest TDWI conference. Tons of good info on what people were interested in.

SSIS plays Vegas: "Nevertheless, the Oracle folks and I did find a lot in common. Not least the fact that we now own much of the data integration space by default. Why would anyone consider a pure-play vendor before at least putting their database vendor's toolset through a thorough Proof of Concept? Of course, we will not win all of these - the pure play guys are still ahead in some areas - but we will win enough to make a huge difference. And of course as we move forward with the new versions, features and capabilities, we will increasingly meet every need of our customers."

DM Review 2005 Data Visualization Competition

Business intelligence, data warehousing and analytics editorial from DMReview: "Data warehouses have been around for a decade and business intelligence is an accepted business practice. Now it is time to focus on the only part of business intelligence that most people see: the presentation of information to those responsible for doing something about it.
DM Review is sponsoring this competition to discover and recognize best practices for data visualization. We are looking for the graphical presentation of data for four separate real-world scenarios. Each involves the display of quantitative business data � three scenarios are prescribed, and one allows you to solve a data visualization problem of your own choosing. This is your chance to demonstrate your talent and to contribute to our effort to promote data visualization excellence.
Entry Guidelines
Submission deadline: Entries must be submitted to DM Review by March 15, 2005. Winners featured: Upcoming summer issue of DM Review"

Eye on ROI: Useful ROI Metrics Vary by Technology Category

DMReview, in Eye on ROI: Useful ROI Metrics Vary by Technology Category, has a great article on metrics you can track for IT investment ROI. There's a great grid:

[wish] "CREATE TABLE ... LIKE" in SQL Server 2005

Great Tips....


My friend Dave recently told me about the "CREATE TABLE ... LIKE " SQL statement. MySql and DB2 both support it, and it's apparently part of the SQL99 spec. It's not supported by T-SQL (SQL Server).

CREATE TABLE LIKE is quick way of cloning the structure of an existing table, including any indexes (but not foreign keys). This can be particularly useful in creating new tables to be added to an existing MERGE table.

mysql> CREATE TABLE log_20041124 LIKE log_20041123;

As far as I know, this will not be supported by T-SQL, despite all the other SQL enhancements in Yukon. You can copy everything except the keys / indexes with "SELECT INTO":

select * into CustomersCopy from Customers where 1 = 0

That copies the structure, but doesn't copy the indexes.

Where can you download SQL Server 2005?

Enjoy Every Sandwich: "A frequent question I see on the various news groups goes something like this one: 'Is it possible to download SQL Server 2005 for practice? Is there like student edition available for nominal fee? Subscribing to MSDN is very expensive for an individual.'
Actually you can get all you need for 'free.*' I'll point you at the most current stuff. "

Fourth post down. Lots of links for the curious.

Is SQL Server 2005 Worth the Cost?

Is SQL Server 2005 Worth the Cost?

A fair question, with some thought put into the answer.