Dave's Adventures in Business Intelligence

I have a “recent comments” plug-in installed here. It shows the five most recent comments in the sidebar. What I really want is a link that will display recent comments in the main body of the page. If anyone has a link (I have looked all over, and found only code for comments in the sidebar) please let me know. Thanks.

I got the acceptance notice a few days ago. I will be condensing my two-part “ninja” presentation into one part and presenting it at the combined SAPPHIRE / Business Objects conference in Berlin in May. At some point I will (eventually) get around to completing the write-up of the various sections here on my blog.

Hopefully before the next Insight Americas conference. 😆

A few days ago I finally got started on what will become a series of posts about fan and chasm traps. The post was “Do I Have a Fan Trap?” and it included a definition of a fan trap in a universe and showed a basic solution. However, it also mentioned that the basic solution would not work in most cases, and that contexts would be required for a more complete solution. If you are new to the Universe Designer, or even if you just have not worked with contexts that much, the first step is understanding exactly what a context does for you. That is what I hope to do with this post.

Continue reading “What Is a Context Anyway?”

The full client applications (Business Objects aka Desktop Intelligence) have had VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) for quite some time. The initial release of 4.x included a scripting language that was “like” VBA but was not quite the same. When 5.x was introduced they switched to Microsoft VBA. I have written more than a few VBA utilities over the years, some of which are published on the Integra Solutions library page. Today I want to share a utility that I put together to help migrate universes in a Teradata environment. I should point out that this utility does not require that you use Teradata; it can be used in any database environment where you need to do a mass-update to the owner or schema name.

Executive Summary

This utility is designed to automate the update of the schema or owner name in a universe. The host application is Microsoft Excel since the Universe Designer application cannot be a VBA host. You enter the “From” and “To” schema names into cells in the XLS and run the macro. At completion you will have a universe where the schema (or owner) has been updated.

Continue reading “Using the Designer SDK to Ease Migrations”

One of the original Dungeon Masters passed on when Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons, died today. There have been plenty of people who have had an impact on the lives of millions, but Gary hits closer to home. He had an impact on me.

I started playing Dungeons and Dragons in 1980. I kept playing through college and beyond. I met some really great people along the way, and remain friends with many. I even have a Dungeons and Dragons themed website that has never quite received the amount of attention that it deserves. I would be willing to bet that the percentage of people that work in the information technology industry today that played D&D is quite high. Hm, maybe I need to figure out how to do polls on my blog. 🙂

Even this web site shows touches of Dungeons and Dragons. The logo in the top corner, the text that changes under the blog title, even the title itself can all be traced back to origins in some fashion or another related to D&D. I have many fond memories of playing the game into the wee hours of the morning. I have what feels like acres of shelf space dedicated to D&D books and other materials. I have created worlds. 🙂

Thank you, Gary.

I started to write this a long time ago, but a few things (okay, lots of things) got in the way. I did manage to write a brief introduction a while back but that’s as far as it got. So today I want to write at least a little bit more about fan traps in particular.

Continue reading “Do I Have a Fan Trap?”