BI review & help

When you practice on SQL Server on your local machine you don't want that its services will start up with the computer. As I mentioned before, you should declare the startup method of these services as manual (see here). After that, you can build two simple batch files that will start and stop the services. Believe me - it's very comfotable to start and stop the services with only one mouse click. The first batch file (I called it sql.bat) contains only two lines:

net start MSSQLSERVER
net start MSSqlServerOLAPService

The second one (sqlend.bat) looks like that:

net stop MSSQLSERVER
net stop MSSqlServerOLAPService

Note that I only start/stop the SQL Server and analysis services, but you can do whatever you like.

Have fun.

Sometimes the uninstall process does not succeed or even worse - the "Add or Remove programs" interface does not allow you to uninstall the product because it already uninstalled / doesn't exist / you name it. The problem is that the uninstalled program can't be removed from the list, it can't be uninstalled and it prevents another installation or re-installation. This happens a lot with Microsoft's heavy products such as SQL Server and Visual Studio but it can also happen with other products too.
What can you do?

Here's a small tip: Open the registry editor (Start -> Run -> regedit) and go to the path: My Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall.
Under this folder you'll see many folders with GUI names such as {1268CDD4-0FED-3CE6-8A9D-C3B012ABCD8F}. To know what installation it is, look for the key named DisplayName under this GUI folder. In most of these folders you'll see a key named UninstallString. To uninstall this program, copy the value of UninstallString and paste it in the run dialog. This will start the uninstall process.

This trick will not always work, but it can help you a lot. Especially with broken installation of SQL Server.

Enjoy.

Some has asked me why I don't blog anymore. The answer is simple - say hello to Hadas, my new daughter. Because of the birth we moved to a new apartment few weeks ago and in the last Sunday my wife, Noga, gave birth to Hadas. Now it is time to keep on the blogging. Be High!
P.S
Here you can see more Hadas's photos.

Well, I don't know what I expected but I'm a little disappointed. I'll split my review into two parts:

1. The Analytics - This is the main issue for my organization, so here I expected to see some new & cool features, but all I've seen is only facelift. This is probably why the new version is 5.5 and not NovaView 6.
2. The Google stuff - While this is not relevant for my organization, this was very cool and promising. I think that this relation between Panorama and Google will carry on and both sides will only benefit from it.

The greatest thing I got from the webinar is ideas of beautiful designs for sites containing Panorama applets views. The site that has been showed in the webinar was beautiful and intuitive. I just can't wait to give my customer a site that looks like it, completely sewed for him. Go on, look at the webinar and take some ideas for your site design.
If you haven't seen the webinar yet, you can download it or watch it.

My customer wanted to have the ability to show the last update time of the data in the Panorama's views' titles. He knows that I know to deliver so in a couple of hours he had it. Using AMO and the view's xml manipulation it's very simple. Just note that changing views without NovaView Desktop is not supported by Panorama so watch out before you execute this program. In your first trials, always save the books dir (by default in c:\program files\panorama\e-bi\books) before you start. Also, be aware that this won't work for automatic views. The user must enter the view's title himself and write the string "Correct For" and the program will know to write the last update time after it. This is the program's code:


The program uses xml config file that looks like this:


The program assumes that all the database has the same update time so it takes the last process time of the first cube in the database. If it's not true in your case you can change it in the method GetCubeUpdateDate.
Enjoy.

update: If you're getting trouble with XmlDocument.Load method because of hexadecimal characters in the view's xml file, look here.

Finally, that looks like the answer for our needs. IBM Business Glossary (BG) is a product that manages our business vocabulary. It enables users to create business terms (also called entities), edit them, share them and to customize them. We've seen the product in IBM, Israel and we liked it very much. Here is a brief summary of the meeting:

Managing meta data in the organization is a difficult task. First of all, you need to know what kind of MD you want to manage. There are three main types:

• Business MD - The vocabulary that contains the terms of the business.
• Technical MD - Names and attributes of data storages, tables, columns, etc.
• Operational MD - How the information flows inside the organization.

The BG gives common language to the organization and connects the business to the IT. First of all, it creates a contract - everybody knows exactly what is a "high value customer" for example. That supposed to be the end of confusion about business terms. It also helps to understand things, exposes knowledge and connect all the technical details.
In BG, all the terms has the same common attributes, such as name, description, example, related entities, etc. The users can define more custom attributes if they want. The product also manages the Data Stewardship, meaning that every entity has a father/manager. It can also have two fathers - one from the business and one from the technical aspect (Update: Not in the current version). The terms are divided into subject areas/context. This way you can go to a subject and learn it all by going over all its entities. You can see and use its custom attributes. For example, you can have a link there to reports that contains/lists that entity.

There's much more to say about BG. All I wanted is to give a brief overview of what it is and you can see if it can help you. I'll give my pros and cons for this product:

Pros:

• Making order in the organization - everybody knows what you talking about when you say a term. Every entity has a defined father/business-expert.
• Manages business knowledge over time. You can take a new employee and instead of taking other's employee's precious time to teach him everything, just tell him to go over the business glossary. (I'm not naive, but it will reduce time)
• Fast lookup time - I want to know in which tables in the databases an entity is placed. I can find it in seconds.

Cons:

• Security - BG has almost no security module at all, meaning that everybody sees everything.
• Doesn't support services yet. I would like to see which services exposes and which services consumes an entity. I want to call the service, provide it with input and see the output.
• The stewardship module is still weak. In the meantime, there is only one father of an entity.
• The custom attributes are the same for the entire vocabulary. What if I would like to have a custom attribute only for one subject area?
• There isn't a hebrew interface yet. The interface can be only in English, Spanish and French (if I'm not wrong).

For conclusion, I think that the product is good, even very good. The problem is that its development has to go on several iterations before it can be used a variety of organizations. It just doesn't have all the features that a business vocabulary must have. Wait a year and you'll see a wonderful product.

On June 10th, Panorama will show us the new version of NovaView - 5.5.  The show will be only on the web (that's why it called a webinar). We will see the new reports, flash-based dashboards and the results of the cooporation with Google. You can see the brochure here. I would happy to say that I'll see you there. The only problem is that we won't see each other and that's why I think that a real conference is better than a webby one. On the other hand, it's much simpler and cheaper to do a webinar so I can understand that move. Never mind, I'll see you in other time.

One more tip about installing the database samples: I believe that installing them is not enough. In order to improve your skills you need to have a deep knowledge of them. Therefore, don't deploy the SSAS project to the server and that's it. Build it yourself. Yes - create a new project called MyAdventureWorks or something like that and build all the objects by yourself. Indeed, this will take time and strength but this is worth this. After you'll do all the tricky things yourself then you really got it in hands. Learn the AW project and be a master.

Everybody is talking MDM so we decided to go to IBM and talk with Darren Cooper, which is an expert on this subject. Darren gave some sense into this term and explained us exactly what it is and what it is not. There's a lot of confusion out there about this, so it is important to know things before you deploy them or buying a new MDM product...
This sketch can explain a lot of it:

Following the arrows, you can understand what is going on in this picture and what it is all about:

• The operational systems contains some common critical data which we're tired of duplicating and maintaining all the time. So, we push this data (red in the picture) to the MDM in real time. This is it. That's MDM. From now on, we play with this golden egg and gets all the benefits from it.
• Hey, we have all the critical data in one place, so why shouldn't we push it to the clients whenever they need it? After we have MDM it doesn't make sense to give it to them through the Op. systems, is it?
• Wait a second! A client is using an operational system. Will the critical data be saved in the Op. Systems? You guessed right. Be aware that now the client will send data to both places - MDM and Op. System.
• MDM is not a replacement for the DataWarehouse. Their purposes are not the same and each one cannot perform what the other is doing. So they need each other. The DW is taking data from the MDM like it taking from any other system. On the other side, the MDM is taking data from the DW whenever he need it.

I believe that now you have more clear understanding about MDM. There are many points that should be discussed about this but it is too soon right now because we're only learning this, so I'll just point them out.

• Security - We have all the critical data in one place. Very dangerous...
• Flexibility - The MDM should react very quickly to every change in the other systems of the organization. Clients cannot wait long for the MDM to change for every movement in the organization.
  
• Availability - It should be always up and cannot crash too much because everybody is relying on it.
• Updated - The definition of MDM says that it should be always updated, but it's not always necessary. The IT architects should find these scenarios where they can ease on the MDM.
• Formats - Every Op. systems has its own standards and formats, and the MDM has to support all of them.
• Interation with other IT teams - You should build trust with them because you're taking their critical data from their hands. If your MDM will malfunction they will be happy to take the advantage of the moment and take their data back to them.
• Implementation - Building MDM is a very long process. The IT architects has to design its different modules and build them one atop of the other.
• Conflicting Data - Which system has the last word? How can we handle these cases? Oh yes, it will happen. It always do.
• Viewer - Do you need MDM viewer? How should it look like?
• Make sense - This is maybe the most difficult subject. BI is a bunch of attributes without any inner sense between them. MDM should fill the void by supplying knowledge given by its many critical attributes. How should you do it?

As you can see, there's a lot to talk about. If we'll decide to implement MDM in our company I'll be happy to share here. Good luck to us all.

I thought that it will be a simple next,next,next installation, but it turned out that it is more complex than I thought. It is not something very hard to do, but there are some tricky points, especially when installing it on my PC and not on a dedicated strong server.
The installation starts as a simple wizard. Just go on with it but pay attention to this screen:

Here, you need to specify account for every service installed. Because it is a CTP installation and not a real server installation, you can make easy life for yourself and just use an administrator account for all the services because security is not an issue now. In the bottom of the screen, enter account and password of an administrator account and click on "Apply to all".
Now, for the really important note - the startup type. There are three startup types in windows services:

1. Automatic - The service will wake up with the operation system.
2. Manual - The service will start only by a process or an admin user.
3. Disabled - The service can't start at all.

This choice is very important. If you're making the installation on a dedicated machine then you can choose Automatic because you'll need the service to be always running. But - if you installing this on a personal computer then you don't want these CPU & memory consuming services to be up all time long. In this case you need to choose Manual and start these services only when you need them. When you do, you start them by typing "services.msc" in the Start -> Run dialog and then find the service and click on start. I don't see any reason the choose the Disabled startup type in this screen. By the way, there's a new type in Vista called "Delayed", which starts the process only after the Automatic ones have been started. This option doesn't exist here and I don't see any reason to use it anyway.

Now for the big problem - installing the sample databases. The samples are not a part of the CTP so you'll need to download them from codeplex. Make sure that you download the samples that fit your CTP version. If you don't have the latest CTP then don't download the latest samples. Find your version in the releases section. After you have downloaded your samples, start the wizard. When you get to this screen:


you'll get stuck (if you haven't read this first, of course) with this message:

Error 27502. Could not connect to Microsoft SQL Server '(local)'. [DBNETLIB][ConnectionOpen (Connect()). SQL Server does not exist or access denied. (17) [I copied that for the ones who will find this by google search]

It got me a while to resolve this, so this is what you need to do before you install the samples:
Open the SQL Configuration manager (Start -> Programs -> Microsoft SQL Server 2008 -> Configuration tools) and enable TCP/IP protocal in the server:


That should solve it. After that, go to the directory "c:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Tools\Samples" and there you'll find the samples with a document that explain how to attach them to the server.

I hope this is helpful to those who got stuck and those who haven't got stuck with it yet. Enjoy.