Dave’s Adventures in Business Intelligence

Wordpress (the software that powers this blog) is released under the GNU GPL license. So is phpBB, the board software used to run BOB. The essential purpose of the GPL license is to provide software authors the rights of copyright and to provide software users with the freedom to do whatever they want to with the software. There is a FAQ provided by the FSF (Free Software Foundation) that addresses many questions related to the GPL but I would like to call attention only to a few specific items.

I want to get credit for my work. I want people to know what I wrote. Can I still get credit if I use the GPL?
You can certainly get credit for the work. Part of releasing a program under the GPL is writing a copyright notice in your own name (assuming you are the copyright holder). The GPL requires all copies to carry an appropriate copyright notice.

Simply put, this means that even though I am releasing code under the GPL I still retain the copyright to the code. Releasing it under the GPL ensures that anyone who downloads the code for use has the right to do so, and that those rights cannot be removed by someone else. If someone were to download my code and modify or improve it in some way, then the modified / improved version must also be released under the GPL, so that everyone can benefit.

If I add a module to a GPL-covered program, do I have to use the GPL as the license for my module?
The GPL says that the whole combined program has to be released under the GPL. So your module has to be available for use under the GPL.

That restates what I was saying earlier. By releasing my code under the GPL it protects everyone. Someone could take my program and turn around and try to sell it, but anyone who buys a copy – even if there are improvements – has the right to then distribute the software for free. Code based on GPL software must be licensed under the GPL, which grants the user the right to decide what to do with it, not the owner of the copyright.

What does this have to do with anything? I just finished a project where I reworked a very large universe. During that project I used my universe comparison tool quite extensively, and I think the final testing is done. I will be posting a copy of the VBA code for download next week here on my blog. The software will include the GNU GPL license so that anyone is free to use it in any way they see fit.

Keep in mind that – unfortunately – there is already an expiration date on the software, as the BI 4.0 Information Design Tool does not initially ship with an SDK, and even when it does start to provide one it will likely be in java rather than visual basic. So enjoy it while it lasts.

Not too long ago I had a very frustrating run where certain events (and I was never quite sure what the connection was) would cause my designer session to crash. For a while it was just exporting a universe. The universe would get exported successfully and then Designer would immediately crash. Then I started having problems with Desktop Intelligence where I could not edit documents related to a specific universe. The universe itself was fine, as I verified by going into the Infoview portal and creating documents. And others were able to use the universe just fine.

Ultimately I found a post on BOB that pointed me in the right direction. The seemingly “random” events all had to do with accessing the security areas of the repository, and that pointed to a corrupted .lsi file. These files have been around for many versions of the Business Objects software. Although I don’t remember ever getting a confirmation one way or another I have always called them the “local security information” files. This file is what lets Desktop Intelligence users work in offline mode as it contains a list of universes and documents and so on that the user has rights to. It makes sense that exporting a universe works because that’s not related to security. It’s only after the export was complete that the local security information file was updated, and since my file was corrupted in some fashion that update failed.

Removing the .lsi file for that particular environment solved the problem. There’s no harm in removing this file as Business Objects will automatically regenerate it the next time it’s needed when the program realizes that it is missing.

Where are the .lsi files? The location may be different based on how the software is installed, but they should be within the application folder that is contained within the Documents and Settings parent folder. Here’s the path for me under XI 3.1:

D:\Documents and Settings\username-here\Application Data\Business Objects\Business Objects 12.0\lsi

Once I deleted the .lsi file for the offending environment – I could have removed them all because they’re automatically regenerated if they’re missing – everything worked again. That being said, there are two files in that folder that should not be deleted, and those are pdac.lsi and sdac.lsi. Those files are used to store information related to personal (pdac) and shared (sdac) connections that have been defined on the client computer.

If you’re wondering what ABEND means, it’s short for “abnormal ending” and dates back to mainframe days.

There has been some confusion around HANA the product, but also around HANA the name. Originally it was an acronym, but it isn’t anymore as detailed in this blog from SCN that clarifies just what HANA means as far as the product name goes.

A few weeks ago I attended the quarterly meeting for the Dallas/Fort Worth ASUG chapter. I didn’t get to stay for the entire day, but I did get to hear the keynote by Dr. Jeffrey Word about HANA. The talk was less about the technical aspects of HANA and more about the genesis of the idea. He started with a very interesting comparison. It seems that HANA is SAP’s iPod. Continue reading “Still More HANA: Report from DFW ASUG Chapter Meeting”

I recently started participating more on the SAP SCN forums. One question in particular served to remind me that not everybody has a decade (or more) of experience with the tools, and sometimes we need to answer beginner questions too.

For example, someone asked a question along the lines of the following:

I have a document with three data providers but there are four reports. How can I know which data provider goes with which report, and why are there more reports than data providers?

That wasn’t the exact question, but that was essentially what they were asking. For someone that is new to BusinessObjects it’s a reasonable question to ask. Especially if they come from a spreadsheet background where everything is right up in front. I thought it might be interesting to set up an Entity – Relationship Diagram for the various document components to help clarify how things work together. Continue reading “ER Diagram For Web Intelligence Document Structure”

Author Note: I realize that SAPPHIRE is old news by now, but I felt this post still had enough to offer that I would finish and publish it.

As a technical guy myself, I tend to prefer the SAP Business Objects conference or SAP TechEd over SAPPHIRE, mostly because I find more technical content at those events. However, the Wednesday keynote address from Vishal Sikka and Hasso Plattner of SAP certainly gave me plenty to chew on from a technical perspective.

Vishal Sikka

Vishal kicked off the keynote talking about HANA, and continued that theme throughout his entire (long!) presentation. In a prior post about the conference I answered the question, “what is HANA, exactly?” very simply: HANA is a database. It can be presented in a number of different ways, but ultimately that’s the function that HANA provides. I don’t install HANA to provide new functionality. In order to do anything with it, I need what I have started calling “HANA Plus One” instead. The “plus one” can be Web Intelligence, Xcelsius, or any other query tool. It can also be application code. HANA is an accelerator or an enabler. With HANA I can do the same things I did before but much faster. Or quite possibly I can now do something I wasn’t able to do before because the process took too long. (True story: A very long time ago I was asked to optimize a daily report that was taking 20+ hours to run. By the time the report was finished it was too late. With a few report tweaks and one additional database index I got the report down to 20 seconds.) Continue reading “SAPPHIRE 2011 Wednesday Keynote – HANA, HANA, and More HANA”

I’ve had a number of folks ask me over the years what it takes to be a blogger. I’m going to start with Who, What, Where, When, and Why, the five “W” questions. I will answer them in the context of being a blogger, and in doing so I hope to give you some items to consider related to opening a blog of your own. That’s the answer to the “who” question already, it’s you. With the “who” question answered, I will move on to the “what” question next.

What do I blog about?

The first and most obvious requirement is that you should have something that you want to talk about. Notice that I didn’t say you needed to have something that other folks want to hear. That’s really all there is to it. Pick a subject that you like and start researching and writing about it.

That being said, here is my first bit of advice: make your blog specific to a single topic. You might be interested in Beanie Babies, Indy car racing, European black metal bands, and vegetarianism. It’s going to be very unlikely that you will find a large audience that has all of those same interests! If you try to maintain one blog that crosses all four subjects, the odds are that a visitor is only going to be interested in about 25% of what you have to say. It is for that reason I have five different blogs, each on a different subject that I’m interested in. Some of them get more attention than others, and that’s okay. I talk more about posting frequency below. Continue reading “What Does It Take To Become A Blogger?”

I have some other posts in “draft mode” but decided to publish an overall summary of what I got out of the conference last week. First, there wasn’t a lot of “push” specifically around the BusinessObjects suite. The 4.0 release is now expected to be out of ramp up and generally available by the end of June, but that was a date tossed around during informal discussions. There was no formal announcement.

The big themes of the conference this year seemed to be HANA (their in-memory database engine), mobility (not specifically BI mobility, but mobile apps built on top of the Sybase Unwired API), and to a lesser extend cloud hosted systems. SAP announced HANA in the Cloud, which is not really new but an upgrade of the current BI On Demand web site. SAP also pointed out that they had a major “dot release” in nearly every product this year, with BI 4.0, EIM 10.0, and a number of other major new releases becoming available.

HANA

One of the important issues that everybody seemed to want to gloss over but I think is critical to understand the proper placement for this product is that HANA is simply a database. It’s not a BI or reporting solution by itself. You still need something to put the data into HANA, and something to get the data out. All it does is do those processes extremely fast. They showed HANA (in experimental form) running on a Mac Mini, running on a hefty blade server, and then on a 1,000 CPU system running from their data center. This was done to show the scalability of the product.

As everyone starts to look more closely with HANA I think it’s important for folks to understand that HANA isn’t a BI solution. It’s an accelerator or an enabler but it doesn’t do anything by itself. We would still need something to sit on top, be it Web Intelligence, Explorer, or any of the other BI tools. I asked if – since HANA was really “just a database” – folks could plan to use Cognos or MicroStrategy against it. I did not get a direct answer. What I did get was a comment that HANA can be accessed via MDX or SQL, which to me would say that any tool could utilize the acceleration that HANA provides. I don’t know that SAP will spend a lot of effort to make sure other BI tools will work well against the platform, but I can’t initially see any reason why they would not work.

It seems fairly clear to me that as a longer-term vision, SAP would like to run their entire ERP on top of HANA, with Sybase ASE or IQ as fallback alternatives for smaller implementations. The spent the entire 2.5 hour keynote on Wednesday talking about HANA. They included several customer testimonials, and then Hasso Plattner took the stage to talk more about the new database.

Mobility

I didn’t see much that was specific to BI mobility at the conference this year. Of course they were showing Web Intelligence running as a native application on the iPad, which I had already seen at the BI 4 launch event in New York a few months ago. Most of the mobility talk at the conference this year was instead focused on mobile applications built on the Sybase Unwired platform.

One of the sound bites from a keynote talked about how HANA can enable true embedded BI into a mobile application. I’m not sure if they hit every buzzword in that phrase, but if not it was close. The concept is simple. Instead of thinking of BI as a reporting system, let’s go back and revisit the idea of embedding BI into an actual application. That way a sales rep can close a deal from the same screens used to evaluate a customer. The rep doesn’t have to switch back and forth between an application and a series of reports because they’re all available in one place. An interesting vision, and one that SAP would like to say is only possible with a HANA back-end because you can delivery everything to a mobile device in an accelerated fashion.

There was some discussion about having “write back” capabilities in some future versions of the BI tools. That was all off-line and not in any way committed to by SAP. I believe Cognos has at least a limited write back capability today.

Information Steward

One of the new features of the EIM (Enterprise Information Management, which includes Data Services formerly known as Data Integrator) is a product called Information Steward. This product is used to address concerns about data quality, as it allows an end business user to log in to a system and look at the data anomalies.

http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/information-steward

Event Insight

One of the new features of EIM that I find interesting but I’m not sure how or where we would use it is Event Insight. This product is designed to monitor a data flow and trigger actions based on events. As a very simple example, if tied in to a point of sale system, it might notify an inventory manager if there is a run on certain products across a regional area. Maybe a local sports team just made the finals, and folks are going out to buy jerseys. If the company can react quickly enough, they can increase stock for this time-sensitive item and capitalize on extra sales.

http://www.sap.com/solutions/sapbusinessobjects/large/eim/event-insight/index.epx

At the BI 4 launch event, CNR (Canada National Railroad) talked about using this product to manage fuel costs and make train routing more efficient.

So far at the conference there has not been any official announcement as to when BI 4.0 will be formally released, at least not that I have heard. I would have expected them to make a big deal out of it if they were releasing it so I don’t think I’ve missed anything.

Yesterday I attended an influence council meeting on the semantic layer. The audience was somewhat sparse for something I consider to be relatively important. Derek kicked off the meeting with an introduction of what the influence council was about, and then Pierpaolo took over and drove through various demonstrations and talked about the future of the semantic layer. I gave them a whole laundry list of improvements to make to prompts.

After that I had some small meetings with various SAP representatives and other bloggers. One of the interesting remarks that came out of one of those meetings was that SAP had completely missed the mark on Android support. Of course everyone knows about the iPhone and iPad; they’re everywhere here. The Blackberry Playbook is also very visible. Both devices were used in the keynote this morning (blog post to follow on that shortly). But the comment that was made yesterday was interesting. It seems that more and more companies are having to deal with employees that want to use only one device. They don’t want a company mobile and a personal mobile, and companies are happy to subsidize a personal mobile for corporate use as they don’t have to track assets and manage upgrades and everything else that goes along with procuring hardware. By most accounts, Android phones now make up a third or more of the mobile operating environment. That means that yes, Android is making inroads into the corporate market. It’s all being driven by corporate acceptance (and support) of personal devices.

And that means yes, SAP has Android on the horizon. I’m attending a private briefing on mobile later today and will share what I am allowed to share.

Another interesting discussion I was able to participate in was related to how to address offline mode for mobile devices. How can I leverage my iPad on an airplane, for example? Can I download a Web Intelligence report and drill down through the local cube? How much data can I cache? One of the interesting distinctions made was that authored content (meaning IT or departmental generated canned reports) are good candidates for offline consumption, but self-service (ad hoc) content should really be limited to online only. I am not sure I agree with that, so I am going to think about it some more. I think that Web Intelligence (which looks absolutely awesome on the iPad, by the way) bridges the gap between authored (published) and self-service information, and that makes the answer to this question a bit muddy in my mind.

Finally, another future (or perhaps now) big thing is the concept of operational or embedded BI. In a very simplistic world, we have operational systems (perhaps mobile) and we have reporting systems. The fact is we don’t live in a simplistic world. We can’t afford to. That means with near real-time instant responses possible with in-memory cloud systems serving our mobile devices (there, did I hit enough buzz-words for one post?) we can merge and embed our BI right into our operational systems. This isn’t a new concept, it’s just being packaged under a new heading I guess. There was a discussion about having “write back” capabilities in our BI systems. It’s not like we don’t have it today (well, Web Intelligence doesn’t have it… yet) it’s just out there under a different name.

Embedded BI would be very interesting, but as I said it’s not a new concept. It’s just being revived under a new name. The Ability to enable BI content inside applications whether custom or not would open some interesting doors. Take the glamor of BI and put on your steel toed boots. Let’s get to work.