Open source calling | InfoWorld | Column | 2005-06-28 | By Chad Dickerson

Open source calling | InfoWorld | Column | 2005-06-28 | By Chad Dickerson: "I am running out of options for areas in my IT operation that legitimately shouldn�t be open source. Operating system? Linux works like a champ. Web server? If you�re not running Apache at this point, what are you doing? Database layer? MySQL scales fine for most Web-based apps, and basic master/slave software clustering for it is free, which can save roughly six figures over a commercial solution if you�re running more than a couple of database servers. App server? JBoss (Profile, Products, Articles) if you want Java, or you could just use PHP running on Apache, among many other choices. "

Oracle revenue jumps 26 percent in healthy quarter

Update: Oracle revenue jumps 26 percent in healthy quarter | InfoWorld | News | 2005-06-29 | By James Niccolai, IDG News Service: "Ellison argued that Oracle is growing its database business at the expense of IBM, its main rival. He pointed to recent market share reports from IDC, Gartner, and Morgan Stanley, all of which show Oracle gaining share. 'We believe people are moving from mainframes and large-scale systems to Oracle grid,' he said.

Still, Gartner's figures show Microsoft, while still in third place, growing its database business fastest of all."

Project No 2: Business Analytics

Project No 2: Business Analytics: "Demand for analytical tools increasingly comes from all departments, from marketing and sales up to the executive suite. In the post-Enron era, top managers in particular need to be able to document and explain the metrics that underlie their decisions, according to Robert Blumstein, a research director at IDC.

'Distributing analytics to the whole organization has empowered employees to make decisions that in the past they didn't have the data to make�or might have made in off-handed ways,' he says.

IDC expects the analytics software market, which includes both basic and more sophisticated predictive tools, to continue to grow from $8 billion in 2003 to $11 billion in 2008, about 8% per year."

Free Mobile Calls to Anywhere in the World

Phil Windley's Technometria | Free Mobile Calls to Anywhere in the World: "Our Verizon plan allows unlimited calls between our two phones. Now imagine one of those phones (or a third, they cost $9.99 per month each here in Charleston) is attached to a PC back at our house. By calling that phone and using the IPDrum software that ships with the Mobile Skype Cable, I can be linked directly to Skype where I can dial a second call over the computer network. Since the mobile call is free and the Skype call is free, suddenly I can make unlimited mobile calls anywhere in the world. Even more powerful, by linking my Skype and mobile numbers through the IPDrum software, any Skype user anywhere in the world can call me for free. "

Knightsbridge Survey Shows What Business and IT Professionals Want Most from BI

Knightsbridge Survey Shows What Business and IT Professionals Want Most from BI: "Corporate action to make good on these intentions appears to be definitive. Seventy-eight percent of respondents said that their company's biggest information-centric priority in 2005 is to invest in business intelligence or enterprise data warehousing strategy (51 percent) or implementation (27 percent). Furthermore, 46 percent say their company is planning, developing, implementing, or maintaining a business intelligence or data warehouse initiative at the moment; only 32 percent indicated their company is in the investigative stage.

'Achieving the promise of BI has been long overdue,' said Roderick Walker, president and CEO of Knightsbridge Solutions. 'For years, companies have talked about leveraging data to advance their goals, but didn't take a long-term, iterative approach to get there. Finally, we're seeing a great deal of momentum and success in major corporations becoming much more analytic as they seek to optimize their business operations.'"



Some good info.

Oracle's OTN TechBlog: New Podcast on BPEL

Oracle's OTN TechBlog: New Podcast on BPEL: "We've just externed a new OTN TechCast (podcast) interview with Oracle BPEL expert Dave Shaffer. Among other things, Dave explains why J2EE developers should care about BPEL, the architecture of a BPEL 'business process,' and how a BPEL business process is related to/differs from a conventional 'Web service.' Good stuff for people getting started with BPEL."

OTN also has a podcast. Who knew?

IPv6 Primer

The Tech Zone Computer Hardware Reviews

A nice, non-technical primer on what IPv6 is, and why you should care if you are unfamiliar with it. File it under stuff-I-need-to-know-sooner-or-later.

Ballmer: SQL Server in 18 months(?)

Ballmer: 'We'll catch Google' | CNET News.com: "Another partner complained of SQL Server's lack of spatial storage capabilities, saying the database was being beaten by Oracle.

This may be addressed in the next release (of SQL Server) in 18 months, Ballmer said, but conceded he 'really didn't know.' "

This is from an article about Steven Ballmer's comments to Australian IT partners within the last few days. 18 months would be a bit.... over schedule to say the least.

Microsoft Architecture Resource Center

Microsoft Architecture Resource Center

This was an advertisement all over my Feedster RSS feess. Great information nonetheless. Especially if you want to know what its like to be the architect of a large IT department.

Oracle, IBM Offer XML Indexing

Oracle, IBM Offer XML Indexing: "For its part, IBM will feature three forms of XML indexing with the release of its new DB2-hybrid database, code-named Viper, due in the first half of next year, with a full, open beta due later this year, said Bob Picciano, vice president of database servers at IBM, in Armonk, N.Y.

Viper's XML index options include a Path-specific index, with an enhanced B+ tree on path expression geared toward fixed schema and known access patterns; a Values index, including indexing on all elements and attributes but no full-text search designed for arbitrary XML without a full text; and a complete index, providing an index on all elements and attributes with full-text search.

'[Viper] will feature all three [forms of XML indexing], and the usage will vary based on the types of documents and collections and the type of workload an application has,' said Picciano. 'Customers will use it to understand how big their documents are, how often they get updated [and] what is the size of a transaction.'"

The News Show

The News Show � On the beat. Offbeat.

The News Show is a web only, daily (yes daily) short video report of tech and business issues. It is put together by Techweb and Information Week, so it looke like it is for my kind of audience. I just watched Friday's video, which had a great sumary of all the customer-data loss problems that happened last week, and I just had to watch "IT Security in Syria", who couldn't?

This looks interesting, and I'm going to make a note to catch some shows next week.

Tips for MDX Tuning - from Only4Gurus.com

Tips for MDX Tuning - from Only4Gurus.com: "Summary: This Microsoft Support WebCast will discuss some simple but most practical tuning tips to increase SQL Server Analysis Services query performance."

Can SQL be Saved from XML?

Can SQL be Saved from XML?: "Why is the Industry in Such a Rush to Change SQL?

There seems to be an unsound rush to modify ANSI SQL to handle XML without proper regard to its hierarchical structure makeup. Hierarchical processing is very different than relational processing and requires new solutions which were not addressed with the addition of XML-centric procedural SQL syntax."

SimonS' SQL Blog : Cool things in SQL2005 1 - 5 The editor

SimonS' SQL Blog : Cool things in SQL2005 1 - 5 The editor: "1. Colour
So we all know that colour coding code really helps readability, however we all at some point want to print some code out to review, stick on the wall etc, only to get black and white from QA.
Now you get full colour print outs. So get that mamouth SP print it out and produce some modern art"

Intelligent Enterprise Magazine: ProClarity Teams with Microsoft to Extend Comprehensive Scorecard Application

Intelligent Enterprise Magazine: ProClarity Teams with Microsoft to Extend Comprehensive Scorecard Application: "'Maestro helps businesses turn information into action by surfacing key business metrics in the Office System,' said Chris Caren, general manager of the Office Business Applications group at Microsoft. 'The ProClarity platform extends this capability by adding robust analytic capabilities and advanced business performance analysis to Maestro.' "

Despite the fact that Mr. Caren invented a new verb right there, I'd like to learn a bit more about "Maestro."

IBM open-betas two integration products

IBM Unleashes 'Hawk' and 'Serrano' Information Integration Tools: "IBM on Thursday will reveal the first fruits of its acquisition of Ascential Software as it opens a beta for Project Hawk and Project Serrano, the two new stars of its information integration portfolio.

This covers two new products: IBM Rational Data Architect and IBM WebSphere Information Analyzer. Big Blue is also rolling out updates to four of its WebSphere Information Integration products for integrating unstructured and structured information."

More details in the article. Like all of IBM's literature, you have to wade through tons of double talk and marketing bs before figuring out exactly what is being described here (which is always much, much less than it initially appears.)

To enroll in the beta, visit this IBM page.

Open-Source BI Startup Pentaho Makes Debut

Not quite a debut, just PR hype, but...

Business Intelligence Pipeline | Open-Source BI Startup Pentaho Makes Debut: "The Pentaho BI Project plans to introduce reporting, analysis, data-mining and workflow capabilities to mid- and large-sized organizations through a series of BI components that can be deployed together or individually. The software packages will be capable of financial reporting, sales analysis, product analysis, procurement management and other business functions, Pentaho said. "

I don't know much about Pentaho - Nicolas Goodman posted this opinion which I found in one of my comments a few weeks ago.

But at the moment, Pentaho is still vaporware. An alpha download might be available in 60 days, and a more usable version might be available later, if enough people want to dive in a start hacking on the code. At least I'm guessing that's what Pentaho's strategy consists of.

PowerPoint Presentation - Understanding Web Services Choreography

From ebPML: Steve Ross Talbot's PowerPoint Presentation - Understanding Web Services Choreography. Very concie and well thought out. Read it if you're interested in this stuff. You'll hear about it in your company within the next few years.

BPM Workflow Handbook 2005

Workflow Handbook 2005: "DOWNLOAD A FREE CHAPTER:

BPM�Too Much BP, Not Enough of the M

Derek Miers, Enix Consulting, United Kingdom
The problem with many BPM deployments is that they often overlook the reason why this technology is needed in the first place�to support the achievement of business objectives. The re-emergence of business processes as a core discipline in modern business management is fairly clear. But in order to really derive the maximum benefit from BPM initiatives, firms need to manage the people interface more carefully."

This is very good stuff. I'd like to see the whole book. Here is a sample from that cahpter, which includes case studies and alot of anecdotes:

The primary focus of the analysis was to understand the critical success factors
associated with major BPM deployments—how these affected productivity
and the goals of executive management. In all cases, the businesses concerned
had already deployed business process support environments. We
really wanted to understand the issues that affected how one firm’s BPM implementation
was more successful than that of another. What did they do
different? What ‘best practices’ were developed? How was it driven and managed?

We found that senior managers often bought into the idea of a BPM deployment
based on not only increased productivity and better consistency, but
also on the Holy Grail—better ‘Management Information.’ They really wanted
the ability to look into the end-to-end profitability of a product or service,
drilling down to assess, compare, and contrast the impact of one channel
over another, or how individual departments were performing against Service
Level Agreements (SLAs). They wanted the ability to track and monitor their
business, identifying teams that were failing or quickly spotting bottlenecks
that were impacting performance. They also wanted the ability to ensure
adequate adherence to new regulatory requirements.

Connected Systems Developer Competition - Prizes

CS Competition - Prizes: "What Can You Win?
1 Grand Prize Winner will receive $50,000 USD
9 Category Prize Winners will receive either $12,500 USD or enterprise copies of SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005 and BizTalk 2006
15 Finalists receive a 1 year MSDN Universal subscription plus a paid trip to the joint SQL Server 2005/Visual Studio 2005/BizTalk 2006 Launch Event and competition finalists dinner "

I'm late to the punch on this, but this looks like a pretty good deal. The Rules list the 15 categories (like"Best Tool to provide additional functionality to SQL Server 2005 that is not already included in the product " and "Best extension of a video gaming experience using Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 ") and I would guess, as an outsider, that there anyone who comes up with a clever entry has a very good chance of snagging a prize.

Chris Webb's BI Blog: "A Jump Start to SQL Server BI" ebook

Chris Webb's BI Blog: "A Jump Start to SQL Server BI" ebook: "An ebook called 'A Jump Start to SQL Server BI' is available at
http://www.windowsitlibrary.com/Ebooks/sqlserverbi/Index.cfm"

DTS Gotchas

I just had to move a DTS package (along with the db schema and Analysis Services cube) from one machine to another, and there were a few gotchas I hadn't planned on...

- first, when detaching a database, the logins for that database, that also used it as their default database, will now have a new default database... need to change those back.

- next, if you use logging for the transform task, and get the "Device not ready/can't write log" error when testing the package in a new location, be sure to check both the Options tab on the Transform Data task (for the location of the exceptions file), and the Logging file for the package (under the Package Properties).

- Last (at least for now), if you call one package from inside another (using the Execute Package task), realize it does not address that package by its name, but by its object ID. Thus, moving the package to a new machine ives it a new object ID, and it will fail, even if everything about the new machine is made to appear like the old machine.

Remember those, and you may save much frustration.

Interlocking BI Platform Speeds Financial Filing

This is some very, very high payoff stuff.

FYI, XBRL is an XML standard to describe SEC and financial reports companies must make. This will make it trivial to, for example, take in data easily from all your competitors and run stats on them (say, revenue growth in the markets you share).


This will open up a whole new world for bean counter types that think outside the box.

Interlocking BI Platform Speeds Financial Filing: "Edgar Online's systems convert SEC data into XBRL to make it available to the I-Metrix suite. Ipedo pulls the XBRL-tagged financial data, processes it along with business context, and delivers it to XI, which uses Crystal Reports or Business Objects' Web Intelligence product. "

Top Companies View Business Intelligence (BI) as Key to Future Growth

Top Companies View Business Intelligence (BI) as Key to Future Growth: "How does business intelligence work from a 'big picture' perspective? Here's a glimpse into how three organizations have benefited from the use of business intelligence: (Note that not all of these are Accenture clients.)"

Execute on Better Decisions Faster

Execute on Better Decisions Faster: "Which Corporate Executives and Firms are Building and Leveraging EDWs?

We read in an online article in Infoconomy that Dell Computer Corporation is one of several trailblazers using an EDW to provide insight for decision support across all aspects of the business, from financial management to supply chain management and the customer demand chain. 'The warehouse drives all aspects of the business, not just decision support and we're tying it into real-time decisions,' CIO Randy Mott said."

Oracle's Fusion Evolution

Oracle's Fusion Evolution: "Q&A: In an eWEEK.com interview, John Wookey, Oracle's senior vice president of application development, talks about Project Fusion, service-oriented architectures, business process management tools and the database question. "

Phil Windley's Technometria | Decoding the WS-Alphabet Soup

Phil Windley's Technometria | Decoding the WS-Alphabet Soup: "devX has a handy reference on various WS-* standards, what they�re good for, and when to use them. The article starts out: "

Capacity Planning: Whatever Happened to Predictability?

Capacity Planning: Whatever Happened to Predictability?: "Once upon a time there was predictability in the world of computing. We had OLTP systems and peak periods of operation. Those peak periods typically were from Monday to Friday from 10:30 am to 2:30 pm, day-in and day-out."

BNSF's Best Practices for Implementing Balanced Scorecard

BNSF's Best Practices for Implementing Balanced Scorecard - CIO Magazine Jun 1,2005

CIO does a podcast... this is cool!

Why You Keep Score

Why You Keep Score - CASE STUDY 3 - CIO Magazine Jun 1,2005

"The Metrics: Scoring with the Balanced Scorecard
BNSF Railway's IT department decided to prove its value to the
company with the Balanced Scorecard. Maybe you can too."

The Data Warehouse Appliance Myth

The Data Warehouse Appliance Myth: "However, other reputed virtues of the appliance, as promoted by the emerging appliance vendors, include the benefit of software that is tightly optimized to the specifically tailored hardware as well as the simplicity of a single source for hardware and software.

While promoting these virtues, what these vendors are actually saying is that the genuine benefits can only be accomplished using specialist hardware platforms and that this is the only way to build an appliance. Therein lies the myth."

SQL Server 2005 Release Date

SQL Server 2005 Release Date: "Microsoft's Paul Flessner just sent out an email to all of the official Yukon Beta Testers: SQL Server 2005 will ship the week of November 7, 2005. "

When Shrinkage is a Good Thing! Three Ways to Shrink Your Batch Window and Save

When Shrinkage is a Good Thing! Three Ways to Shrink Your Batch Window and Save: "For an IT industry hooked on the idea of straight-through processing and real-time information, it is surprising to discover that few people are aware of how job scheduling can help achieve this emerging trend. The majority of enterprise computing is still comprised of batch job processing, yet its potential to impact on overall business objectives is being overlooked. In most data centers, little or no effort has been put into improving this vital component of IT operations."

Or the real message: don't overlook anything when trying to optimize a process. Often, very high payoff improvements are right under your nose.

Top 10 Trends in Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing for 2005 Revisited

A good read!

Top 10 Trends in Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing for 2005 Revisited: "Trend #3: Offshore sourcing for bi/dw

Original Observation: Although there has been much buzz (and controversy) surrounding offshore sourcing in the past several years, companies have been hesitant to send their business intelligence and data warehousing work offshore because it requires more business knowledge and customization than other types of projects. However, the cost savings aspect of offshore sourcing can be irresistible, especially with pressure coming from the top of the organization to do more with less. "

SQL BI : Surrogate key generation in SSIS

SQL BI : Surrogate key generation in SSIS

This is a really nice article. DTS has always been one of those features in SQL Server that the more you learn about it, the more you learn new things that make a DBAs job easier, and it looks like SQL 2005 will take that to a whole new level.

Detailed examples with screenshots, this article is worth a bookmark. Will be a nice skill to have when SQL 2005 ships.

CA Set to Do Battle As Open-Source Databases Aim for Oracle

I'm sure Larry is shaking in his boots.

CA Set to Do Battle As Open-Source Databases Aim for Oracle: "Computer Associates International Inc. recently showered some hard-earned cash on the winners of its Ingres Million Dollar Challenge, the goal of which was to motivate developers to cook up migration toolkits from Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, Sybase and MySQL databases to CA's Ingres r3 open-source database. The resulting winners are now available and downloadable from Sourceforge.net.

The challenge was a slick move. First, in record time�five months�CA was able to put into place tools to easily migrate customers off both proprietary and open-source rival databases, although nobody has yet managed to come up with a complete DB2 migration tool. Also, it was an easy way to seed the creation of an open-source community around Ingres. ADVERTISEMENT "

Tapping the RFID Data Flood

One of the biggest trends out there... an example in the header indicates Wal-Mart predicts their RFID events will require 7.5TB of storage a day.

Intelligent Enterprise Magazine: Tapping the RFID Data Flood: "Not all RFID events are relevant to ERP and BI systems. How do you filter the information that's relevant for business use?

This is one of the big challenges of RFID systems. Probably 99 percent of RFID data may not be relevant to enterprise applications, but it's critical to process the intelligence within that data. The fact that a case or pallet just moved past RFID scanner number 19 is not important. However, if you can somehow derive from that data that the case or pallet actually wound up going onto the wrong truck, that is valuable. "

Governance Gauge: XBRL Sets the Standard

I've been preaching about this on and off for awhile: Intelligent Enterprise Magazine: Governance Gauge: XBRL Sets the Standard: "Supporting more than governance, XBRL will enable corporate strategists to perform automated, apples-to-apples comparisons with competitors and potential acquisition targets. "

Chris Webb's BI Blog: Design a BI app and win $50000!

Chris Webb's BI Blog: Design a BI app and win $50000!: "Just spotted the Connected Systems Developer Competition:
http://www.csdevcompetition.com/
...and the fact that one of the categories is 'Best Application using the Business Intelligence Features of SQL Server 2005 (Reporting Services, Integration Services, Analysis Services)'. If I had the time I'd enter - I bet you could come up with something really cool using all the new functionality we've got, especially data mining."

The Coming Explosion Of Data

Sadagopan's weblog on Emerging Technologies,Thoughts, Ideas,Trends and Cyberworld: "If most non-stationary device that can be Internet-enabled are made so � with embedded GPS and telemetry like phones, PDAs, cars, trucks, laptops, motorcycles, and cameras, but a host of other devices too, ranging from the sinister to the sublime, we are probably talking about a billion location aware devices, including the 500-million cellphones being sold each year, on out through 20-million cars and trucks being sold annually, and a host of other industrial devices. There is going to be a data explosion from the bottom up as all those data devices are constantly sending GPS and (likely) telemetry data, the data will be flowing inexorably outward. Continuous telemetry (at 10Hz) and GPS (at 1 Hz) requires about 1 kb/s. Two hundred million devices will require, well, 200,000,000 kb/sec of bandwidth - or 200 gb/sec. It is a large load on networks, one that could, in aggregate, soak up considerably otherwise unused bandwidth out there as devices continually ping out location and direction. It is also going to require off-device storage, as most of these devices have no capacity for logging all the data - but keeping the information will be crucial as people search through and find new optima in these large, location-enabled datasets. In a more practical way RFID implementations see explosion of data � with tagging and tracking data continually streaming in � providing for collecting and analysing these data needs huge storage and unique retrieval capabilities."

MSDE Facts

A good reference:

MSDE Facts: "Despite how great MSDE is, I find myself constantly forgetting just what exactly its limitations are. So, without further ado, MSDE Facts:"

It's always a bit odd to me that SQL DBAs actually know very little about MSDE when it comes down to it. All they know is that on the last scan they performed for SQL Servers, twice as many MSDE installations popped up as databases.