Dave's Adventures in Business Intelligence

Wow, lots going on. It’s the end of day two and I’m only now sitting down to write my first blog. Then again, much of what I am going to cover has probably been mentioned in a tweet or two. 😉

We started on Sunday with our 3rd annual Influencer Summit. We opened with a recap of the prior year activities from each of the four SIG chairs. The four strategic SIG areas were Product Direction, Education, Support, and Integration. One of the interesting results of the pre-conference survey was that these four areas were still the top vote recipients as areas of concern. My take-away from that is that while we have definitely made progress, there is still room for improvement. One important difference this year was SAP representatives were in the room for the entire session this year so they were able to witness and participate in the entire process. I’ll be honest; if you attended the conference this year and didn’t try to come to the Influencer Summit, you should come next year. We’re getting better and better at how we run these (we had to make some new processes up as we went along because we were doing something new) and the more people and viewpoints that SAP can hear, the better.

ASUG provided an “app” for the conference this year which has been fantastic. I don’t have a paper schedule, we don’t have to fill in paper evaluation forms that will later have to be transcribed into digital form for analysis, I don’t miss important updates during the day… in short, it’s exactly what a conference app should do. Excellent addition to the event.

Because of the app, I can tell you exactly what I did (and when) on Monday. 🙂

My first session on Monday was a follow-up to the Strategic SIG panel. Unfortunately there were not a lot of people there. One of the action items that I got out of the session Sunday and the lack of attendance on Monday is that we need to do a better job of figuring out how to communicate what the SIG is doing. It’s important to get that message out, so that more folks can participate.

Visual Intelligence First Look

Also on Monday I got my first look at Visual Intelligence (aka “Visi” in keeping with our normal name-shortening practice) which was first shown at SAPPHIRE / Annual Conference earlier this year. It’s an interesting offering. It’s a desktop client but requires a 64 bit operating system, so that knocks out a whole bunch of potential users on older operating systems. It uses local data but can also connect via Freehand SQL. It will also connect to HANA. Universe support is supposed to be out very soon. What is it? It’s a data collection, analysis, and visualization tool. Yes, another tool. I will admit that I left that session feeling… underwhelmed.

But the price is right; you can download a free 90-day trial and see what you think.

Later Monday evening I had the opportunity to catch up with Timo Elliott and expressed my “underwhelmed-ness” about the tool. 🙂 He had a different way to look at it, which I am shamelessly stealing and representing here. The conversation went something like this:

Me: I did see Visi today for the first time.
Timo: What did you think?
Me: Meh
Timo: It’s like second gear.
Me: ???

The idea takes more explanation than that, of course, but I don’t want to keep trying to relate it as a conversation. Timo suggested that today many businesses have first gear (Excel) and third gear (data warehouses or data marts) but nothing in the middle. Excel is first gear. We can grab data and do some basic analysis and visualizations, but each time we get new data we have to reinvent things. And merging two (or more) different sets of data in Excel is problematic at best. To do full blown data cleansing and merging we often move to the next step of a data warehouse, which is far more complex than the Excel model and therefore third gear. Timo’s view is that Visual Intelligence provides a second gear which can smooth the transition from first gear to third. I can see his point.

What about transitions between gears? Is there a transmission holding all of this together? It turns out that Visual Intelligence can start with Excel data, so there’s an easy link between first gear and second gear. Ultimately I am told that Visual Intelligence can export its results to HANA, which could become the start of a full-fledged warehouse. But at each point I am just moving the data from one gear to another; the work that was done is lost. I don’t think I can export a visualization into Explorer, for example, for use once the data is in HANA. I can’t transport a visualization into Xcelsius either, or Web Intelligence. So once again SAP has presented us yet another tool that we have to figure out when to use.

John Schweitzer Keynote

John Schweitzer took the stage on Tuesday morning for the opening keynote speech. He and Adam Binnie recreated “Back to the Future” complete with a skateboard powered by a flux capacitor. They needed it to process the 1.21 petabytes of data. 😉 It was an entertaining skit, even if John messed up and called Adam “Adam” a few times rather than “Doc” as he was supposed to. 😆 I’ll post some more thoughts on the keynote when I get time.

Semantic Layer Influence Council

One of the primary benefits of ASUG membership is the ability to participate in influence councils. I have been privileged to be a member of the Semantic Layer influence council over the past year, and while I can’t tell you anything (or I will have to … you know) I can say that I am extremely pleased with the direction of the conversations and the progress being reported. Each council runs for a year, so this version will be retired and a new one will start. If you’re an ASUG member you can check on asug.com for details on when the new council opens up for applications. If you’re passionate (or at least have a passing interest) in the direction of the semantic layer, I encourage you to consider applying for a spot.

Go, Universe, Go!

I delivered my presentation titled, “Go, Universe, Go!” today just before lunch. I’ll have the session posted for download from my blog hopefully this weekend. To be honest, I covered a couple of topics that I’ve covered in some depth before here (shortcut joins and index awareness) but I also covered aggregate awareness, so expect a blog post (or two) on that subject soon.

Developer Wars!

The evening closed with the Developer Wars presentations and awards. All I can say is that if you were here at the conference and didn’t go to this event, you missed out on a lot of great fun. The teams all did fantastic, the judges tell me that the final scores were extremely close, and John Schweitzer did an awesome Simon Cowell impression. Gabe Orthous did a mean Johnny Depp impression as a member of the Irate Pie-Rates, a dragon mascot asked for chicken, and the red-tie and blue-tie candidates came to a consensus showing that apparently even politicians can make BI work. The fourth team did not do anything for costumes, but they presented four bags of groceries to the food bank, and their sponsor (Decision First) decided to award their final day booth prize ($250 gift card) to the food bank as well. The food bank provided the data for the different teams to use during the challenge.

It was great fun, and I think all of the participants agreed that we need to do it again next year.

Wrap Up

It seems like every year I have new folks coming up to me and telling me stories about how BOB or my blog or something I have done has helped them solve a problem. If you are one of those people, please know that I genuinely appreciate the fact that you share your stories with me. Knowing that I have helped people is something that never gets old, so thank you. 😎

There is a “satisfaction” poll running right now on BOB that asks folks how they feel about the Web Intelligence experience in BI 4.x. If you’re currently using BI 4, please consider logging in to vote. (Only registered BOB members can vote on polls.)

BI4 Web Intelligence Satisfaction Poll

Thanks

A while back I published a blog post that claimed that Mount Everest was not the highest or even the biggest mountain on the Earth. Today I am going to make another startling claim: the recently closed 2012 Olympics were won not by the United States, China, Russia, or even host country United Kingdom. No, the 2012 Olympics were won by: (drum roll please) Grenada. Yes, that Grenada. The country that most USA folks probably didn’t even know existed until it was invaded by Clint Eastwood in Heartbreak Ridge.

Continue reading “Who Won The Olympics? It Depends How You Ask The Question…”

My second guest post at The Decision Factor has been published so you can catch up on more Business Intelligence lessons from Captain Kirk:

Business Intelligence Lessons from Star Trek — Part Two

As a community, BOB started out in the middle of the 1990’s, known then as the BUSOB-L mailing list. We converted over to a web-based bulletin board format in 2002. If you do the math, that would mean that 2012 is our 10^th birthday. I spoke with Courtney Bjorlin (follow her on Twitter @cbjorlin) of asugnews.com a few weeks ago and reminded her about our milestone, and she wrote up a fun top-ten list in honor of that anniversary.

If you haven’t read it yet, and you’re a fan of BOB, you definitely should give it a read.

What About BOB? 10 Reasons BOB Is Every BOBJ User’s Friend

My first guest blog post was published last week, complete with an error on my part that was immediately called out in the comments. 😳 I was writing about Captain James T. Kirk and the Star Trek series. Somehow, with “James” on my mind, I credited a “James Roddenberry” as the creator of the series! Obviously that was wrong, it was Gene Roddenberry.

The post was updated, and I addressed my error by responded to the comment…

Part one, titled, “Business Intelligence Lessons From Star Trek” is out now. Part two will be out in a week or two. Please check it out!

I’m willing to bet that over half of my blog readers know what the “T” stands for in James T. Kirk… before googling the result. 😉

I’ve been asked to provide some blog material for another site called The Decision Factor. I’m get to be a guest blogger! My first post for that site will be published soon, and it’s titled “Business Intelligence Lessons From Star Trek.” You know you’ll want to read it, and it won’t be published here. My guest blog posts for that site won’t be the technical solutions I often publish here, but instead will be more high-level conceptual business intelligence topics. They won’t feature any specific product or solution, whether from SAP or otherwise.

My posts will be tagged as part of the “BI 101” series. The first post in that series is out now, and was written by Christine Mykota. It’s titled, “Turbocharge Your Career with Intelligent Business Intelligence.” It’s worth a read, even if she doesn’t mention Captain Kirk… 😉

This afternoon SAP is hosting a virtual launch event for Visual Intelligence. You can read about it and register here.

BAM! That’s what you’ll be saying when you revolutionize the way you make business decisions. When you register for the forum, you can:

• Hear from Howard Dresner of Dresner Advisory Services, who will present his learning from Wisdom of Crowds Business Intelligence Market Study®.
• Attend the virtual launch of SAP® Visual Intelligence software, which means chances are, you’ll see what it can do long before the rest of your competition does.

I had a question from a business user the other day. I was confident that I knew the answer as soon as I saw the first part of her question. 🙂 To be sure, I waited until we got through the entire discussion. Her question started off with:

I am doing date math — using nvl to set a date to jan 01 2099 when it is null…

Right at that point I could have made good money by betting that she was getting a “non-numeric character was found where a numeric…” message. Sure enough, I was correct. The code she was trying to run looked like this:

NVL(TABLE.DT_COL, '01-JAN-2099')

What’s wrong with that? On the surface, nothing. She was looking at a specific date column from a table, and if that date was null, she was replacing it with a specific (constant) date value. Or at least that was her intent. The problem was that the intentions were being interpreted differently depending on where the report was refreshed. It was working in Desktop Intelligence and failing in Web Intelligence. Why was that, and how could it be fixed?

Oracle Implied Conversions

The problem is that if I don’t specifically tell Oracle how I want my string to be converted to a date, then it will make a guess. Oracle will attempt to parse the string and determine the date, and it will look at the NLS_DATE_FORMAT for hints. However that configuration setting can be overridden by a variety of factors. Business Objects also has a variety of places where date formats can be specified and they can get in the way too.

The way I have generally solved this is to remove any guessing from the process by explicitly defining my date format. Rather than provide the code as written above, I would do the following:

NVL(TABLE.DT_COL, TO_DATE('01-JAN-2099','DD-MON-YYYY'))

Now my string is converted to a date using my supplied format mask, and the dreaded “non-numeric found…” message can be avoided.

I made this suggestion to my business user, and after a quick universe update all of her issues were resolved. The bottom line is that I don’t always have to explicitly define everything, but if I have a chance to do so, I generally try to do so. It may take me a little longer up front, but it will me save time in the long run. Even if someone changes the Oracle standard date format on my server the code I provided will continue to work. 😎

One of the marketing strategies from Business Objects has always been to tout their semantic layer as the “single version of the truth.” Which brings me to today’s quiz on geography:

1. What is the highest mountain on Earth?
2. What is the tallest mountain on Earth?
3. Which mountain on Earth has the biggest elevation gain?

Continue reading “It Depends On Your Reference Point”