BI review & help

update: Damn, the title of this post just seems bad...

I think that after almost two and a half years of fatherhood (hey, I just invented a word!) being a parent I can write some things about my experiences. But first, a short introduction from the world of Operation Systems:

Thrashing (Wikipedia) is a case where one process in the computer is consuming huge amount of memory for a long time and therefore makes the whole system very slow. There are many approaches of solving this problem (Yeah, you guessed right: Windows doesn't treat this at all). The two important solutions (for this post) are:

• Kill the memory-consuming process (Used in Linux 4.2)
  
• Make this process "the king" of the computer: Let it run until it will end (Used in Linux 4.6)
  

These approaches can also be used with children. When a children is misbehaves you can either give him a loud "No" (No, I don't mean to kill him. A kid is not a process ) or let him be the king - just let him do what he wants. Now comes the important question: Which is the right approach? Well, I think that there's no ideal answer. It's just depends on the situation: Does the children right about what he wants? Maybe I (or his mother) promised him something earlier? What is the educational result of my action? All these things may change the answer.

The most important of all: Do what is right for your child. Not what is comfortable for you in the moment.

With Panorama SDK you can do cool stuff as I will show you in the future. Though, There are important (and undocumented) things you must know before you start. A very common task is to change the shown view views. Note that:

If you load the view using the Parameter "Alias" with the full view path (ends with  ".xml") you won't be able to change the view. later. Worse: The applet will not return an error. It will just won't respond. So, if you want to enable the dynamic change of the view, in the "Alias" parameter only enter the name of the Briefing Book where the desired view is. Next, add another parameter named "FirstView" and there enter the relative path of the view, meaning that you'll have to remove the name of the server and the briefing book's name. Don't forget to replace the back-slashes (\) in double-back-slashed (\\), otherwise... the applet won't respond. Some examples:

use: AttachParameter("Alias", "http://<myServer>//<ThePanoramaDirectoryPath>//<myBriefingBook>//<myDirectory>//myView.xml"); to show a view with no option to change it later (not recommended). Note that here you don't need to use back-slash because this is just a regual URL.

use:
AttachParameter("Alias","myBriefingBook");
AttachParameter("FirstView","\\<myDirectory>\\myView.xml");
to show a view with an option to replace it later using the CallShowView function.

I recommend always using the second method. That's because you can't know what will be the next demand of your customer. Remember that this is a very common thing to do in the BI world.

My team master always says that Oracle was left behind in the BI world because they don't have good visual tools over the OLAP cubes. Microsoft, for example, has good visual tools such as Panorama. Today I've seen that they have beautiful visualations over relational DBs which called ADF Data Visualization Components. The problem is that these tools can't look over OLAP cubes. In this link (look for Oracle OLAP Q&A) you can see what we'll see from Oracle in the future: These visual components will be able to show OLAP data. Maybe that will make Oracle really be able to fight Microsoft in the BI scene.

I had a big test yesterday in the university, so now I can blog again.

the title says it all. Enter here if you're a student. MS offers many free developers tools for students under a project called DreamSpark. Among the tools you can find: Visual Studio 2008, Windows Server 2003, Game Studio 2 (which I eager to learn for a long time, especially because I'm a gamer) and the known Express editions of SQL Server and Visual XXX (you name it).

Enjoy.

My boss called me today to ask me if some things can be achieved using our technologies (mainly Analysis Services and Panorama NovaView). These things were simple ideas of how BI can be shown to the end users. As we talked I thought of many great ideas that can be done. As you well know, one of the biggest problems in the IT world is that the user doesn't always know what he wants. Drilling down to the BI world, I can say that the problem is that the user can't dream. He can't know what he can ask for and sometimes - how easy it can be achieved. One of our many tasks as BI consultants/designers/developers is to help them dream. We can show them things that we've done and things that others have done. This is where you, the reader, can help.

Let's share ideas. In your blogs (or as comments in blogs) you can write about beautiful things you did in your organization. This can be idea or real UI that you can show. Don't worry, I'm not only-talking man. In the near future I will show here something very beautiful (and big ROI of course...) that I did. Stay tuned.

An interesting example of how simple things can look very hard. I read about the new CrossFire technology in the new GPUs (Graphic Processing Units), or display accelerators. CrossFire is a technology where you can attach two GPUs together to get doubled graphic result, such as better image and/or faster rendering of the image. In CrossFire, the default rendering method is called SuperTiling, in which the screen is split into checkboard formation. One GPU takes the black tiles and the other takes the white tiles. Another methods of rendering includes the simple ones, such as splitting the screen horizontally or vertically. My question was: Why splitting the screen in the checkboard formation is better than the other methods?

I thought that the answer is a difficult one, which includes mathematical matrixes and stuff but after a quick search I've found the answer: SuperTiling ensures that the distribution of the workload will be even for the GPUs. Let's say that we split the screen horizontally. In the right part of the screen there's a person and in the left one there's only a chair. As you know (or you don't), rendering a face is a very difficult job for the GPU. In this case one GPU will work hard and the other will "rest". The SuperTiling method will decrease these incidents. Easy, ah?

This is a good one: When you build a flat file connection to a csv file, you can preview the data. There, there's an option to skip some rows (Data rows to skip). If you'll leave it with a number greater than zero - the process itself will skip these rows!! I still wonder if this bug is By Design or not. If you wish, you can track this bug in Microsoft Connect.