Dave's Adventures in Business Intelligence

With apologies to Rhymin’ Simon

Folks, I do apologize that I have not been posting much. I have a ton of backlog that I need to get through (and code to release) but sometimes real work takes over. The good news is that I’ve written a number of reports over the past month and a half that should prove to make for interesting blog posts, once I get time!

I’m in the airport making use of the free wifi. Service quality is much better than at the conference. We heard from some of the SAP folks that they spent “a fortune” on extending the conference center networking facilities. Then he shrugged and said, “We’ve got 5,000 geeks in one place, and they all have at least three devices. What are we going to do?” I can understand, I guess. He went on to mention that they found some folks were running torrents which sucked up a ton of bandwidth.

I spent yesterday for the most part hanging out with the Mentor “wolf pack” talking about a variety of things. There are some interesting things coming from the SCN community that will be worth watching.

I had a chance to talk to Bridgette Chambers, CEO of ASUG, about the collaboration agreement we set up with BOB. We talked about some ways to leverage our resources but agreed that we won’t really have time for anything of much significance until early next year. Stand by for more details on that front.

One thing that TechEd clearly has as an advantage over SBOUC is size. We would not be able to bring in Lifehouse for a live concert. They were great to hear live.

We found out last night that President Obama is flying in this afternoon so we went to the airport early to avoid complications. So far, so good.

I plan to write up a more detailed post comparing the two recent conferences after I get home. See you then.

I use a web statistics package from Urchin. They were originally a separate vendor but got assimilated by the big “G” a few years back. I have not tried to completely evaluate their data collection process, but I have played quite a bit with their reports. One of my favorite bits of information is the list of countries that have visited BOB. Periodically I post this sort of information on the board, but I’m not sure how many other people are interested other than myself. 🙂

A few days ago I was visiting another site and they had an interesting list with tiny little flags and numbers. I clicked the flags and was taken to a site called Flag Counter. There was a very simple process for setting up my own counter (I did not even have to register) and so I did. You can see the results here on my blog (over on the right sidebar, you might need to scroll down some to see it) and also on BOB.

Within ten minutes of implementing the flag counter code on BOB there were over 15 countries listed. That was fast. 😆 Now we have recorded visits from 119 countries (how they classify countries is interesting) and it has been just less than 24 hours since I started the counter. One interesting fact: Folks living in the United States provide approximately 40% (less than half!) of the total visitors to BOB. Costa Rica is the newest country to visit (as I type this). Within the United States, California has provided the most unique visitors, with New York and Texas in second and third. Considering these are three of the most populated states that makes sense. I have collected 50 of the 51 states (District of Columbia counts as a state), so if you know anybody from South Dakota that uses BusinessObjects make sure they know about BOB. 😀

As I have been typing this, someone from French Polynesia showed up, taking Costa Rica’s spot as the newest country to visit.

There is a “pro” version of the flag counter that provides more advanced statistics, but they suggest that I should contact them first if I am going to send more than a million page views monthly through their servers. Considering we see an average of 3.5 million page views a month on BOB, I sent them an email. 🙂 I hope we can leave the flags up as I think they make for a interesting (and fun) piece of data for the site.

And we’re all about data, aren’t we?

Related Links

• FlagCounter.com
• BOB

I generally have several goals when attending a BusinessObjects conference. In no particular order, they are:

• Make sure that my sessions are delivered effectively and provide value to those that attend
• See what is coming new from SAP BusinessObjects
• Reconnect with old friends and see what they’re up to
• Attend a few sessions and try to learn something

Maybe those are in the right order. 🙂 Both of my sessions were delivered on Tuesday which left me (in theory) free for the rest of the conference. I did manage to reconnect with some old friends as well as make some new ones. I did attend some sessions to see what’s coming new in the semantic layer in 4.0. I participated in the first-ever ASUG Influencer Summit, and will post more on that in a bit. I also worked with Bridgette Chambers (and many others) to finalize the agreement related to the new collaboration agreement between BOB and ASUG, which you can read more about in the announcement post on BOB.

I went to Epcot on Wednesday night and stayed until midnight. I got a bruise from somewhere, probably on my second or third mission to Mars. 😆

Ultimately due to the lack of wireless (something that many folks have provided feedback about) I did not blog much while there. That’s why the last two days are going to be wrapped up here, and will seem a bit short. It seems easier to write while I am in the middle of everything instead of back at home. But here goes. Continue reading “SBOUC 2010 – Day 2 + 3”

I’m not participating in this podcast, but Jamie Oswald gives me a nice (and appreciated) shout-out. Along the way Jamie, Eric, and the rest of the crew talk about “must see” presentations and other plans for the BusinessObjects user conference coming up in a few weeks. It’s worth a listen.

SBOUC Pre-Conference Podcast

If you’re in the Dallas / Fort Worth area, and you’re not familiar with the local ASUG chapter meetings, tomorrow is a great chance to get introduced to the event. We have some wonderful speakers lined up, and then there’s me. 😛 Ginger Gatling is speaking, and she is a real dynamo when she gets behind a podium. I always enjoy hearing her speak. My friend (and ASUG Crystal SIG Chair and Reportapalooza competitor) Brian Durning is going to deliver a Crystal presentation. I’m going to update an old presentation of mine from six years ago, and make everything work in the new Web Intelligence Rich Client (WRC). It was a bit frustrating that so many things had to be updated. I have one trick with filters that I have not managed to get working on the new platform because the functions don’t work the same way now, but that’s another blog post.

If you’re not a member of ASUG yet, then why aren’t you? ASUG announced earlier this year that membership for BusinessObjects-only customers is free (that’s FREE) from now until the end of 2011. Seeing a local chapter meeting is one way to take advantage of that. Getting a discount on attending the fall conference in Orlando is another. Connecting to www.asug.com to review old recorded podcasts is still another way to see what ASUG has to offer, so why aren’t you doing any of these things? 🙂

Related Links

• DFW ASUG Chapter Meeting

In the “good old days” we used to have a somewhat primitive form of object-level security. In the universe a designer could pick from one of five security access levels for each individual object. The settings were public, controlled, restricted, confidential, and private. The text was just a placeholder; behind the scenes the values were stored in the OBJ_M_ACTOR table as as value from zero (0) to four (4). As long as a user had a security level that was greater than or equal to an object security level, that user could see that object.

Last week I was asked to discuss security objects on a universe, and of course I thought about this. However, it seems that there is no matching setting in the CMC anymore. In my experience, nobody used this feature very much (it’s not very flexible and it takes a long time to set up) but it seems weird that it’s just gone from CMC.

Is anyone using this feature? If so, how to you configure the user side of the system?

Next week I will be presenting a webinar for the ASUG Crystal SIG. The details:

SAP BusinessObjects Universe Development for Non ERP Data
Date: Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Time: 12:00 p.m. ET
Duration: 60 minutes

Join the ASUG Crystal Reports SIG for their upcoming Webcast, Accelerate Your SAP BusinessObjects Universe Development for Non-ERP Data.

In this Webinar you will understand what an SAP BusinessObjects Universe is, how to identify and resolve the most common structural issues facing a universe developer and how to quickly resolve them against non-ERP data.

Why the emphasis on “Non ERP Data”? When I build a universe on top of a cube (whether SAP or other source) I don’t have many issues to solve. Everything comes in based on the structure of the cube. With SAP using Crystal in more and more places, I wanted to make it clear that I was not going to be talking about cube sources but relational sources instead.

It will be a quick (one hour) overview universe design, including a couple of loop resolution techniques and I think I also talk about fan traps.

That’s what I had yesterday. And the day before. Which was also yesterday. Confused? I know I was when I got home.

I got up about 5:30 am local time in Australia. I was in the airport by 7:30 am, and checked in for my flight by 8 am. They had extra security checks… I got flagged. That meant I was pulled out of the boarding line and was one of the very last people to get on the plane. Which I was able to do by 10 am. We took off, flew over the Pacific Ocean, and landed in California at 10 am. That meant that I landed in LA before I had taken off in Australia. I guess getting to do Friday over (twice) made up for the fact that I lost my Saturday on the way out.

In any case, I got home safely and with some interesting tips and exciting memories from the Mastering BusinessObjects conference in Melbourne. The spring conference season is over (at least for me) so now it’s time to start planning for…

… summer vacation. 😆