BI review & help

I decided that I should blog about the world of BI.

My company has just bought Panorama's NovaView, which is a BI tool that focus on the UI level. this tool shows beautiful dashboards, including metrics, charts, cubes and more. I think that it worth looking - it's just beautiful.

So, as a beginning: What is BI? the google definition ("define:BI") says: "Technologies that help companies make better business decisions". I think it summarize it up quite well, but I can add one more thing: Technologies that make/help managers and decision-makers to see, or to understand much better what they have in their hands, what have they done so far and what can they do with their resources in the future.

What I'm learning right now is the Panorama tools, advanced MDX and some other stuff.

Wish me good luck.

As I have said in the introduction, I recently left the .Net department in my company. We worked on a very interesting GIS application, using ESRI's ArcGIS line of products.
In the day before our deadline, I've found a really serious but also foolish bug: In many places in our product, the date looked like this: 13/41/07, 20/56/07, and so on.
When I've seen that I immediately knew what happened. Instead of formatting our DateTime data as dd/MM/yy, we used dd/mm/yy. As you probably know, "mm" is the minutes and "MM" is the month, so the dates had the minutes instead of the month.
That was a foolish mistake which caused us to reopen the solution and running many tests all over again. bummer.

What have I learned from this?

1. Always remember the DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) principle (from the pragmatic programmer). If our DateTime format was stored in one place, the change could be much more simple.
2. Tests have to be more specific: "Check that all fields are OK" is not enought. Many programmers checked these pages/modules and nobody found this bug.
3. I believe that code review should had cover this bug. The code review must be in high quality.
   

Hi,
My name is Miky Schreiber.
I'm a programmer in a big computer company in Israel.
Recently I been moved from a .Net department to BI (Business Intelligence) department in my comapny.
In this blog I'll try to cover some interesting BI stuff.
Along with that, I'll write about everything else that interesting me, such as:

• Jewish life: Halacha (jewish way of life), Jewish wisdom and more.
• Politics, specially in Israel
• Technology, web and computers.
• Philosophy and life
• Everything else that comes around

Enjoy your reading.