MySQL AB :: A Practical Guide to Migrating From Microsoft SQL Server to MySQL

Just in case you ever needed it...

MySQL AB :: A Practical Guide to Migrating From Microsoft SQL Server to MySQL: "With the rapid growth of MySQL in the database market, many corporations, government agencies, educational institutions, and others have begun to migrate away from their expensive and proprietary databases. Of course, a migration from any database is not something to be taken lightly, and so countless organizations are considering their options for migrating to MySQL.
In particular, many MySQL customers are migrating from SQL Server because they have reached the conclusion that the combination of cost-savings, platform freedom, and feature set of MySQL make for a compelling business case to offload some or all their database-driven applications to the MySQL database server."

Top 10 Trends in Business Intelligence, Part 1 What Do They Mean to Manufacturing Companies?

Top 10 Trends in Business Intelligence, Part 1 What Do They Mean to Manufacturing Companies?: "The desire for enterprise-level business intelligence for many organizations continues to be driven by the ever-increasing need for an integrated view of data from many disparate sources. Fueling this need to integrate data are the growing demands for regulatory compliance, increasing merger/acquisition activities as the economy continues to improve, and an increasing desire among executives to monitor and analyze performance at the global enterprise level. Achieving enterprise-level business intelligence requires significant process and organizational changes, as well as a solid enterprise-level business intelligence strategy and architecture that address the goals and objectives of both the business and IT."

SQL injection attacks against databases rise sharply

SQL injection attacks against databases rise sharply: "Info-theft attempts up nearly 40-fold since beginning of year"

Marketing Challenge: Three Magical Marketing Metrics | MarketingProfs.com

Can you be this simple and direct talking to your business users?

Marketing Challenge: Three Magical Marketing Metrics MarketingProfs.com: "Don't drown in data. Instead, start small with these three steps:
1. Review your business model and objectives
2. Keep your metrics simple
3. Assign a unique identifier for every campaign "

Download details: BSM - Project Server Template Samples

Business Scorecard Manager is a great adition from Microsoft... it really does allow you to make some impressive dashboards very quickly.

Download details: BSM - Project Server Template Samples: "These samples will get you up and running with Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005 utilizing the sample OLAP database provided from Project Server 2003."

MSDE will not run on Vista...

DDJ Departments Database Database Blog: "MSDE will not run on Vista...
I am not entirely sure what I think about this news that MSDE, the free version of Microsoft SQL Server, will not run on Vista."

Chris Webb's BI Blog: SQL2005 Upgrade Technical Resource Guide

Chris Webb's BI Blog: SQL2005 Upgrade Technical Resource Guide: "I knew a while ago that some of my colleagues at Solid Quality Learning had created a guide on upgrading to SQL2005; it was only when I got round to looking at it that I realised that it had a large and useful section on upgrading from AS2K to AS2005. You can download it here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=3d5e96d9-0074-46c4-bd4f-c3eb2abf4b66&displaylang=en"

How to get more out of your DBA (!)

Event Registration (EVENT: 25120): "Join us on July 18 as Claudia Imhoff explains why this “dirty little secret” in the world of IT is no longer acceptable. She will explain:

How to balance the role of your DBAs and make them more proactive than reactive.
New ways to automate mundane and time-consuming processes around best practices.
How to improve your database environment by fixing issues before they become major problems.
What’s needed to ensure your databases meet regulatory compliance requirements.
How to standardize DBA procedures across multiple types and numbers of databases.
...in other words, how to spend less money while getting more benefit. "

What's Hot, What's Not: IT Skills You'll Need in 2010

What's Hot, What's Not: IT Skills You'll Need in 2010: "Business Intelligence
Hot
Business intelligence
Data warehousing
Data mining

Foote's mantra for the coming decade: If you think the marketplace is competitive now, wait until 2010. A leveled global playing field, innovation and the availability of technology to make business execution easy will make hot skills must-haves for competitive companies."

DBA from Crisis to Confidence

DBA from Crisis to Confidence: "This article describes some of the steps for a thorough post-mortem that a DBA in crisis mode should follow, especially in crises that happened unknowingly, caused database outage or company dollars. It is very important that some of these tasks listed below be performed before you resort to such drastic measures as restarting the database or server it self. I classify these tasks into three categories, tested on 10g and Linux environments. Please ensure you can run the tasks on your specific environment before you use them.

hanganalyze;
system state dump;
Errorstack if a specific process is at fault. "

Download Data Models by Bill Inmon

Corporate Information Factory (CIF) Resources by Bill Inmon, Inmon Data Systems

This is cool... it is a collection of data models on Inmon's website free for perusal. Includes Manufacturing, Banking, Retail, and many more, inluding business functions like Sales and Corp Tax. Worth a bookmark.

Here is the one for Oil& Gas.

GigaOM : » StartUps Embracing Amazon S3

Amazon continues to impress... these storage cost numbers are ridiculously low...

GigaOM : » StartUps Embracing Amazon S3 - He was facing a hefty tab for storage - Smug Mug is adding about ten terabytes worth of photos every month and claims he saved almost $500,000 in storage expenses. His monthly tab just in storage is around the $1500. An Apple 7TB XServe RAID costs about $13,000. Of course there are cheaper options, but still it is a lot of savings.

Ten Ways to Improve Data Warehouse Performance

It's from Sybase, but should have lots of great tips no matter what database platform you work on:

"Attendees will learn how to…
Use historical data and analysis tools to tune data warehouse performance.
Know when to build smaller data marts around your main data warehouse to offload work and leverage existing IT investments.
Achieve operational business intelligence capabilities by supplementing traditional strategic and tactical information with “right time” data."

Study: Outsourcing Boom Is Over

Study: Outsourcing Boom Is Over: "The study found that 47 percent of buyers reported they had prematurely terminated at least one outsourcing relationship in the prior 12 months. "

Virtual PC Is Now Free!

Microsoft Virtual PC 2004: "Virtual PC Is Now Free!
Whether Microsoft virtualization technology is an important component of your existing infrastructure or you're just a Virtual PC enthusiast, you can now download Virtual PC 2004 Service Pack 1 absolutely free. Microsoft is also offering the free download of Virtual PC 2007, with support for Windows Vista in 2007."

Business Intelligence Network 2006 Data Visualization Competition

Great opportunty for some talented and creative report writers:

Business Intelligence Network 2006 Data Visualization Competition: "We are pleased to announce the Business Intelligence Network 2006 Data Visualization Competition. This contest provides you with an opportunity to showcase business data visualizations that illustrate what can be done when people apply best practices in visual design to the analysis and communication of data.
This competition consists of five business scenarios that require visual representations of data to solve real business problems. You may submit solutions to all five scenarios or only to those that interest you. Those who respond to all five will be eligible to win the overall prize. Everyone who submits a solution to a scenario will be eligible to win the prize for that particular scenario. The winning solution for each scenario will be featured in one of Stephen Few's monthly articles in the Data Visualization Edition of the Business Intelligence Newsletter. Even some of those solutions that do not win will appear in articles, in many cases to illustrate practices that don't work effectively. "

Deadline is Friday though!

SOA immaturity dogs early adopters

SOA immaturity dogs early adopters: "Johns foresees a number of challenges, however, as the company exposes its systems to agents and customers. 'Security is the biggest challenge,' he says. 'Because we're providing external access into our system, we have to be very specific about what we want to present and give access to.' The company expects to go live before the end of the year with the first phase of the project, allowing customers to enquire about their account and make payments. The next stage will give customers the capability to make changes to their accounts directly, such as entering a request to add a vehicle to an insurance policy. Longer-term, the aim is to build both an information and transactional resource where people can get a quote and automatically process it. "

Users Declare: Thumbs Up (Mostly) For Microsoft’s BI Stack: TDWI

Users Declare: Thumbs Up (Mostly) For Microsoft’s BI Stack: TDWI: "BI pros—or BI pros in Microsoft-centric technology shops, anyway—think Microsoft’s Office-based BI strategy could do for business intelligence front-end tools what SQL Server and its all-in-one BI stack have done for the business intelligence back-end. More to the point, many say, Microsoft’s push into BI client tools is primed for success largely because SQL Server 2005 gets everything—or just about everything—right. BI pros—or BI pros in Microsoft-centric technology shops, anyway—think Microsoft’s Office-based BI strategy could do for business intelligence front-end tools what SQL Server and its all-in-one BI stack have done for the business intelligence back-end. More to the point, many say, Microsoft’s push into BI client tools is primed for success largely because SQL Server 2005 gets everything—or just about everything—right. "

Chris Webb's BI Blog: Business Intelligence Architecture and Design Guide

Chris Webb's BI Blog: Business Intelligence Architecture and Design Guide: "
A number of other bloggers out there have already mentioned this, but I thought I'd post the link just in case anyone missed it: the Patterns and Practices group at Microsoft have just released the final draft of the 'Business Intelligence Architecture and Design Guide'. You can download it here:
http://www.gotdotnet.com/codegallery/codegallery.aspx?id=00895184-067e-4183-b186-48d9f104aaaf"

Free Forrester White Paper—Integration in a Service-Oriented World

I'm a big fan of SOAs and truly believe it is a major trend in the future for large companies. Here is a FREE Forrester White Paper—Integration in a Service-Oriented World

"Gain insight from Forrester on how the cost and complexity of integration projects can be significantly reduced through the use of SOA. Also, see how SOA promotes other objectives, such as greater flexibility to enable faster response to change and acceleration of development projects that reuse existing services.
Start Exposing Web Services and Composing Processes Now. Click the gray button to the right to download your FREE Forrester White Paper—Integration in a Service-Oriented World."

Great Overview on the current Grid computing technologies

ongoing · On Grids: "This is an introduction to the state of the art in Grid Computing in mid-2006. I start with some definitions and motivation, look at grid economics, survey the kinds of infrastructure that are out there now, and touch on future directions. The introduction is “brief” in the sense that it does little more than touch the surface of the subject, but it’s still immensely long for a blog. [Update: MapReduce is here and multi-node today! It’s called Hadoop.]"

Improve DTS to SSIS package migration with DtsToSsis-Prepare

Two weeks ago I wrote a tool to ease and improve the migration of a DTS package to a SSIS package. I named the tool DtsToSsis-Prepare, it is available with full source code at www.sqlbi.eu and now I wrote a larger article that describes the needs that DtsToSsis-Prepare try to solve.

For people who are too lazy to click a link, I extracted a part of the article in this post.

This is a DTS package before treatement: UDL connections are used to easily change connection parameters.



If we try to migrate this DTS package into an SSIS package, we obtain this result.

Link

Competitive Advantage in Retail Through Analytics: Developing Insights, Creating Value

An organization trying to implement analytics should plan for the natural evolution of the analytics process. For an entrant into analytics space, the need is to establish credibility for data analysis using simple techniques rather than advanced models (see Figure 3). Similarly organizations with a mature DW/BI foundation and a culture of data analysis should progress to the advanced stages and create analytical models, which enable improved decision-making. Thus, in the beginning, the level of analytics is dependent on the current familiarity and sophistication of the data analysis process in the organization.

Link