Dave's Adventures in Business Intelligence

Lots of interesting things happening at the GBN conference today. I will share a few nuggets now, many of which I hope I will have time to expand on in the future. In no particular order…

Data Federator Combined With Semantic Layer

One of the things I heard last week was reiterated in public at the GBN conference today, that being that in XI 4.x (no scheduled release date, but could be 2010) the Data Federator product will be embedded directly into the semantic layer. What does this mean? Among other things, it means we can have multi-source universes.

Explorer (Accelerated) Is Still Hot

The keynote from John Schwarz featured yet another demo of the accelerated version of Explorer.

Xcelsius Is Still Hot

It’s hard to turn around without seeing another presentation for Xcelsius.

Old Stuff Still Works

My presentation had slides in it that I lifted from the very first Variables presentation in 1997. It still works. Steve Krandel updated a presentation from five years ago. It still works.

Text Analytics Should Be Hot

Several years ago Business Objects acquired a company that did really cool stuff in the unstructured data (text analytics) space. They should be getting more press; their systems have been integrated into Data Services now. I am planning on going to a text analytics presentation tomorrow.

I also signed up for a “usability session” on the new semantic layer tomorrow. It should be another good day.