Dave’s Adventures in Business Intelligence

I’m in Atlanta for the 2010 volunteer summit meeting for ASUG. One of the early announcements was the location and dates for the 2010 fall Business Objects conference. It will run from October 4 – 7 and will be hosted at the Dolphin Resort (near Walt Disney World) in Orlando, Florida.

Save the date.

In the first post in this series I defined what time-sliced measures are and why they can be useful in a universe. In the second post I described a special calendar table that was designed and built to support the requirements for this solution. I also showed how the join logic worked in conjunction with the table design. This post completes the implementation. I am finally going to work on the measure objects that a user will see.

In any universe design project I strive for the following goals:

• Deliver the correct result
  In my opinion, this is always the number one goal in any universe design.
• User friendly
  This is quite important but secondary to correctness
• Easy to maintain
  Universe maintenance is always allowed to suffer in order to provide the first two attributes on this list, but it is a worthwhile goal to strive for nonetheless

In this post I will show how all three of these goals are ultimately met by this implementation. When I am done I will have a completed universe. This post will cover slides 26 through 30 from my 2008 GBN Conference presentation. There is a link to download the file at the end of this post. Continue reading “Time Sliced Measures Part III: Making Measures”

Found this on another blog and had to share it…

You can see where I found the video and read another take on the future of “independent” Business Objects on David Taylor’s Business Intelligence Blog.

Other items on the good news front… I have been continuing to challenge the ASUG/GBN folks about the location and time for the fall Business Objects conference. The inside rumor is that the initial round of location proposals has been processed and some final decisions are being made. I suggested Maui as a location, but it seems that’s not going to be an option.

I got an exciting email earlier… it seems that I have been invited to attend (and present at) the second annual Mastering Business Objects conference in Australia. In my opinion, the conference last year was an excellent event (and I’m not just saying that because I got to go.) I tend to prefer smaller gatherings like user groups or smaller conferences because I get to meet and interact with a lot more people. Oh, and I got to go surfing.

This year the event will move a bit south to Melbourne. Here are the specific details as recently published:

Mastering Business Objects
May 31 2010 – June 2 2010
Grand Hyatt, Melbourne, Australia

I will post more details as they become available.

It’s funny because just this evening I was talking to Daniel (my 3rd grader) and he wanted to know (as he was petting one of our family cats) if any cats were poisonous. I told him that as far as I knew, there was only one poisonous mammal, the platypus. Which is native to… Australia. After a quick visit to Wikipedia I know now that there are a variety of shrews that are also poisonous, but I felt good about the fact that I at least remembered the platypus.

In the first post in this series I talked about different places I could place complex calculations. I reviewed some pros and cons of doing calculations during ETL, in the universe, or on a report. In this post I am going to focus only on report calculations. I will cover the formulas versus variables debate and show a couple of tricks to make working with variables a little bit easier along the way.

This presentation covers slides 10 through 12 from my 2009 GBN presentation titled “Return of the Variables” which can be downloaded from my conference page. Continue reading “Constants, Formulas, and Variables, Oh My!”

When working with the reporting suite from Business Objects there are many different calculation engines. A report developer can create custom formulas or variables in Desktop Intelligence, Web Intelligence, and of course Crystal. A universe designer can build custom objects using database functions in the universe. An ETL architect can design special query transformations. So where do you do the work?

This post covers slides 6 through 9 from my 2009 GBN presentation titled “Return of the Variables” which can be downloaded from my conference page. Continue reading “Calculation Options”

A frequently asked question on BOB is:

How can I calculate the number of business days between two dates?

The easiest answer is to use a calendar table with a flag for business days because that takes care of everything quite easily. You can even mark holidays along with weekend days and make the results more useful.

But suppose you don’t have a calendar table. Suppose you don’t care about holidays, you simply want to count the number of Monday – Friday days between a range of dates. Can you do that?

The answer is coming if you read the rest of the post.

Note: This technique was shown in public on Monday at the GBN conference. I had written this blog post some time ago but waited to release it until after the presentation had been delivered. The presentation has been uploaded to my blog and is available for download from the conference page.

Continue reading “Calculating Business Days Between Two Days Via Report Functions”

I have uploaded the latest pdf files for my presentations from the 2009 GBN conference. You can download them from my conference presentations page. I did two presentations this year.

Return of the Variables

Presentation Abstract

It’s time to pull out some variables again as we revisit a popular topic from past conferences. Report variables can provide a more creative, efficient, and effective means of completing the detailed analysis required for your reports. The focus of this presentation is building documents, using report functions, and reviewing variable tricks that can be used to solve reporting challenges. The presentation this year will focus primarily on the SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence product and include some of the newest features that have recently become available, but there will be some goodies for users of prior versions as well.

Universe Models for Recursive Data

Presentation Abstract

Recursive data can present a special challenge to SAP BusinessObjects developers because SQL is not natively able to process the relationships. This presentation will show several different methods for modeling recursive data along with the pros and cons of each. All of the methods shown have been used on real-world projects. Attendees will gain a better understanding of the complexities of dealing with inventory models, organizational hierarchies, and other types of recursive data.

As time allows I will be adding detailed blog posts for each of these presentations. I am cheating a bit this year. I have already written two blog posts that detail most of the “Variables” presentation:

• Using ForceMerge() To Fix Unbalanced Data Providers
  This post covers slides 13 through 18 from “Return of the Variables” and was originally released here on my blog back in September.
• Calculating Business Days Between Two Days Via Report Functions
  This post covers slides 19 through 33 of the same presentation and is already written. I need to make a few tweaks and will likely publish it on Friday. Until then the link above won’t seem to be valid, but it should work after the post is published.

That leaves only the initial portion of the presentation to write up, and I hope to have it done fairly soon. The detailed posts for the Designer presentation will take a bit longer.

I am tired. When conferences are outside of my home area (Dallas) I generally spend the days at the conference, the early evenings doing conference-related items, and the late evenings catching up on work. When the conference is here in Dallas, I spend the days at the conference, the early evenings doing conference-related items, the late evenings catching up on home stuff, and the even-later evenings catching up on work. I hope the conference is somewhere else next year, I’m exhausted.

Some highlights from my third day at the conference…

Webi 3.x Has Cool Stuff

I attended Sandy Brotje’s presentation called “What’s New for Me?” for my first session. I already knew quite a bit of what was new myself, but different people place emphasis on different features so I decided to see what she had to offer. I thought she did a great job of summarizing but also personalizing the new features that were important to her. I should send her a link to my blog post about losing an old friend because she didn’t know what the new measure icon was.

Explorer… Again?

I went to a presentation by Dallas Marks (check out his blog if you haven’t already) about Explorer. He did a short demo (using eFashion, imagine that! ) but then went into the back-end process showing how to install it. I left a bit early because I ended the day with…

Recursive Data in Universes is Hard

… my final presentation of the conference. I am fairly certain I submitted a far more imaginative title, but what came back was “Universe Models for Recursive Data” instead. It was a bit misleading because only one of the four solutions I showed can be done completely in the universe, and it’s the weakest of the four solutions. I had a good crowd for the last session on the last day of the conference, they laughed at my recursive jokes, and I gave out a bunch of BOB hats.

Good times.

So what’s next? There was a slide being shown as a backdrop during the keynote sessions that asked a question about whether there would be a Business Objects focused conference next year, and the answer provided was apparently a bit confusing. My understanding is that there will be a conference next year like this year (and prior years) but under the ASUG name. Since GBN is merging into ASUG it will no longer be the GBN Annual Conference but something similar with ASUG in front instead. I hope we can get more details out about this soon (like dates and the location) and will post here as soon as I hear anything concrete.

It’s 10:00 pm, do you know where your Dave is? He’s at home, finally, after a long but interesting day at the GBN conference. I am going to again post a few highlights from today and save some of the in-depth thoughts for later.

Computers Evolve During Stressful Times

The keynote this morning was delivered by Vicki Farrell, the Manager of Marketing Strategy from Hewlett Packard. She presented a couple of interesting points, one of which was that computer technology seems to get the biggest boost during times of economic stress. It’s at this sort of time that people really start looking to get more out of technology as a way to make up ground. She finished out her presentation with a picture of the garage where HP started. (I am sure there is a rule from HP that requires that )

Text Analytics Are Cool

I attended a presentation on text analytics that was interesting enough. I never seem to get anything that I can use in my job from these presentations, but the concept is one that I am quite interested in so I try to attend them. The presented talked about monitoring sentiment by scanning both internal project documents and external web sites. She did get a bit confused when someone asked about RSS; she thought that was some sort of sound file.

Semantic Layer Usability Testing Was Interesting

Unfortunately it was also covered by a non-disclosure agreement so I can’t talk about it.

Too Many Universe Design Sessions

I say this with my own universe design session coming up tomorrow, but I really think we had too many sessions this year. The technology hasn’t changed that much since last year (other than some improvements in SAP BW support in 3.1) and I saw a lot of the same stuff in the few designer sessions I did attend. My stuff is not the typical Designer material so I hope it will be well received by the folks that manage to stay for the last presentation slot on the last day of the conference.

SAP Mentors Rock!

One of the best sessions I attended was delivered by fellow SAP Mentor Ginger Gatling from the SAP Labs. She did a great job of presenting – in less than an hour – what SAP is, what they do, what they had for BI before they purchased Business Objects, how the product suite fits together now, and ended with tips on how people with different Business Objects skills could leverage them in the new environment. Yes, all in one hour. And she was entertaining and energetic while doing it too.

Catching Up With Old Friends is Fun

I have chatted with quite a few BOB members and other friends I have known for years through our common interest in Business Objects. That is one of the best parts of the conference for me every year.