Rajesh On BI and DWH

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June 10, 2010

Daily Dose - The BAP Magic Quadrant - June 10

Towards the end of last year, Gartner created a new magic quadrant for global business intelligence, analytics and performance management (BAP) service providers to analyze the market place for implementation services of these solutions. The service providers were evaluated on ability to execute and completeness of vision. So, who ended up being in the much sought after leadership quadrant? Who would you really trust with your BAP system if your life depended on it?

IBM? Accenture? Infosys? Cognizant? All of them?

Well see it for yourself - http://www.cognizant.com/images/newCognizant-images/MQ_image.jpg.

No leaders, no visionaries. And no wonder 75% of all BI projects "fail"!

Posted by Rajesh Ramaswamy at 10:45 PM | Comments (0)

June 9, 2010

Daily Dose - www.data.gov - June 9

Today’s digest is focused on a website that celebrated its first anniversary recently. You may have been to this website –.Data.gov is the first such initiative and ushers in a new era of transparency in the government.

The purpose of Data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable data sets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government.

Data.gov is a treasure-trove of data and some of the data catalogs, including data on grants, loans, toxic releases, auto support program details etc. can reveal very interesting trends to the data addict and one who is willing to spend some time converting this data into “information”. There are also links to external sites that have converted the raw data into a more readable format. Probably the real unsaid value of data.gov is that 8 other countries have taken the lead and started publishing high-value data for public consumption. So do visit www.data.gov whenever you get a chance – and use the data sets to get insights!

Posted by Rajesh Ramaswamy at 8:00 AM | Comments (0)

June 8, 2010

Daily Dose - SSIS Best Practices - June 8

Today’s daily dose is rather more mundane – it looks at some of the best practices to use when developing your ETL packages using SQL Server Integration services

- http://consultingblogs.emc.com/jamiethomson/archive/2006/01/05/2554.aspx has one of the most exhaustive lists of best practices – most of them are pretty good. Some of the information in the supporting links is even better. For his more recent posts check out - http://sqlblog.com/blogs/jamie_thomson/

- There are some very interesting musings from BI Polar: http://bi-polar23.blogspot.com/2007/11/ssis-best-practices-part-2.html. I had never been to his blog before today. Have book marked it now – should remember to visit more often.

- Finally, the best of the lot, one of the famous top 10 lists from SQL CAT: http://sqlcat.com/top10lists/archive/2008/10/01/top-10-sql-server-integration-services-best-practices.aspx

So, do you ETL? Do you have anything to add to these?

Posted by Rajesh Ramaswamy at 7:45 AM | Comments (0)

June 7, 2010

Daily Dose - What constitutes DW/BI? - June 7

Today’s mailer is inspired by one of the responses I received to Friday’s digest. To quote

“What all constitutes BI? It seems like this is a perennially big subject and is easy to get lost! Can you please help us by creating some sorts of boundaries?”

Well, the answer is not simple and I do not claim to know the right answer to this question. So let me throw the question right back at you. Consider the following 3 scenarios:

In exhibit 1, I bring you the work of Charles Minard (1781-1870), a French civil engineer. “His best-known work, Carte figurative des pertes successives en hommes de l'Armee Français dans la campagne de Russe 1812-13, dramatically displays the number of Napoleon's soldiers by the width of an ever-reducing band drawn across a map from France to Moscow. At its origin, a wide band shows 442,000 soldiers left France, narrowing across several hundred miles to100,000 men reaching Moscow. With a parallel temperature graph displaying deadly frigid Russian winter temperatures along the way, the band shrinks during the retreat to a pathetic thin trickle of 10,000 survivors returning to their homeland”. Check http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/29/Minard.png

As exhibit 2, this article from the NY Times (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/11/09/world/europe/20091109-berlinwallthennow.html), published on the 20th anniversary of the Berlin wall demolition, displays with its innovative photo mash-ups and adjoining commentary how life has changed for the better in unified Germany.

Finally, as exhibit set 3, let us move to sports. Check out the ubiquitous “worm” now well publicized in all televised cricket (http://www.cricinfo.com/zim-tri2010/engine/match/452150.html?view=graph) or the much more sophisticated Guardian Chalkboards (http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/chalkboards) that allow you to create your own interactive visualizations to analyze player/team performance. Finally, for those looking forward to the football (soccer) world cup – here is the mother of all planners (http://www.marca.com/deporte/futbol/mundial/sudafrica-2010/calendario-english.html )

Now, do any or all of the above, fall under the umbrella of business intelligence? Your answer is as good as mine. What I do know of Business Intelligence is that, like our major cities, it constantly grows, evolves and stretches it boundaries.

Posted by Rajesh Ramaswamy at 7:30 AM | Comments (0)

June 4, 2010

Daily Dose - Tree Maps - June 4

Tree Maps - an excellent method for representing complex hierarchical data.

What are Tree Maps? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treemapping

History of tree maps from the "founder": http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/treemap-history/ (Also, down-loadable tools for generating tree maps along with some excellent algorithms)

How can I create Tree Maps? Most leading commercial BI tools support creation of tree maps in their dashboards, but if you don't have access to one and want to play with and understand it, you could do worse than go here: http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/page/Treemap.html. 'Many eyes' is a great place for your information visualization needs!

A good example of tree-maps that I stumbled upon yesterday is here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10187248.stm. The interesting stuff on supercomputers is a bonus!

Posted by Rajesh Ramaswamy at 8:30 AM | Comments (0)

June 3, 2010

Daily BI-DWH Digests

After the long hiatus, I am back again. More determined to blog regularly. This will take the form of daily digests that carry information on a variety of topics in DW-BI.

Welcome to the Daily Dose series... :)

Posted by Rajesh Ramaswamy at 7:30 AM | Comments (0)