Microsoft SQL Server User Group 5th October 2007
This was very interesting from a Reporting / Dashboard point of view!
Time was also convenient as Microsoft has just released Performance Point Server, their Hyperion/Cognos/Business Objects replacement product!
Stephen Few has two books out – one called “Show me the numbers!” and another called “Information Dashboard Design”.
I am definitely leaning towards getting his latest book …
He was a manager of a Business Intelligence team but wasn’t happy with a lot of standard charts and tables produced as they only served to confuse top executives!
So he quit to work on finding better ways to communicate with graphs and tables!
Most modern charts might look fancy but they don’t often help decision makers or anyone looking at them to really glean information.
He walked us through many examples of ones entered by software vendors in competitions plus from the software user documentation and in most cases showed how they weren’t effective in telling the story.
So it appears many people mislead without knowing as opposed to the old days when people lied with statistics.
He mentioned a book called how to lie with statistics and how this was a best seller!
Some vendors have some amazingly confusing charting features which are up there in the stratosphere for confusing people!
There was a charting guy called Edward Tuftie back in the 80’s and most of his ideas still hold in today’s reporting but very few use them.
This was more about what not to use versus what to use..
e.g. 3D charts look good but the human eye cannot work out the shades and angles.
Often tables can convey information better than charts.
Vertically orientated labels are very difficult to read.
Tables are good for individual values or mixing different types of data e.g. % and $...
Fancy terms like spark lines and blink graphs were thrown around…
Small multiples was a concept by Edward Tuftie in 1983…
This involves breaking up one chart into many charts.
E,g, Sales Per Month for different products.
Breaking this up into a chart for each product all on one page.
E.g. if you have 8 products then break this up into 8 mini charts!
That way one can glance at the figures to better see which product / products need attention etc.
But be careful as most people can only remember 4 chunks of information at a time!
10% of men cannot distinguish between green and red!
So often using shades of the one colour is better than having a traffic light approach!
He does this one day training and gets people walking out and making reports so much more informative!
At the end of the day a Dashboard should highlight what’s important.
Although in a discussion at work it appears that company annual reports use alot of pie charts as they don't want to easily show any anomalies etc to their readers!
So you are not always required to make numbers pop out of the page for decision makers ....
Some tools to investigate include:
Juice Analytics – used to have a free excel addin.
MicroCharts for Excel – bought by XLCubed? And there is a product called Chart Tamer?
http://www.xlcubed.com/en/Products_XLCUbed_MicroCharts.html
Tablo and Spot fire were also mentioned
When I did some checking on Juice Analytics foud this article which shows one of the silly things people do with charts that can easily mislead.
http://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/2007/06/excel-2007-and-lie-factor/
Found MicroCharts at BonaVista?
http://www.bonavistasystems.com/
Tom Bizannes is a SQL Server Professional in Sydney Australia.
http://www.smartbiz.com.au
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Performance Point demo at .Net User Group Wednesday 19th September 2007
The turnout was smaller than usual!
Maybe the topic was more suited to the SQL Server user group!
First the news then the demo on Performance Point which will mean more business for companies who write cubes!
Office 2003 service pack 3 is out!
Office DevCon is coming at Microsoft over the weekend of 3 and 4th of November.
Bit like a code camp
Adam couldn’t stop talking about facebook and how much time he spends on it.
They even track how long staff use facebook as he is worried they might get as addicted as he is.
Simple things like seeing who has the fastest broadband connectivity or who has travelled the most etc…..
Cool sites were mentioned like trailfire.com where you can make a trail of your searching along with comments.
Useful? An example was looking up info on css and seeing the trail to sites with good info.
One could also use this to make a trail of places you are going to see…Good for travellers?
There’s a free High Performance Computing event this Friday at the MLC Centre.
This is by Frank Chism, world expert in high performance computing, discuss the future of cluster server technology
Frank admits to "over 40 years in HPC" and is "not looking to leave any time soon because I couldn't afford the cool toys I get to play with if I have to buy them myself."
Andrew Coates from Microsoft also talked about the OpenXML standard going to ISO…
There are some links regarding this and what was funny was how they even held events in New Zealand to explain this in more detail but the Kiwis rejected the proposal and we discussed is that because they are so anti-american?
The OpenXML standard apparently is more flexible than ODF and standardises even the older Microsoft office formats.
For more information goto:
openxmlcommunity.org/
openxmldeveloper.org/
Those who follow second life will like the inline protest of ibm staff against the 50 virtual offices that ibm runs as the profit has gone up but their bonuses have gone down!
workers-shape-up-for-big-blue-with-ibm
techcrunch.com/ - IT news – has rss feeds….
iScrybe for online calenders was mentioned as worth taking a look
They explained that SSW workers only do things if they get an email…talk about an inbox nightmare!
They didn’t want to use outlook as it was a problem with people coming and going…..
So they asked a business person to come up with a way to email monthly/quarterly tasks to staff and Google Calendar got a good wrap as it allows sending to many and can be shared easily.
You can even write code to talk with Google Calendar.
What I found perplexing was they mentioned SharePoint but then dished that as not be easy to set up re-occurring tasks!
From my view point their requirement is a little crude as one likes to know if a task has been completed and this didn’t seem to be their business requirement!
Performance Point:
There are three different parts to this.
M A P
M – Monitor / KPIs – based on Business ScoreCard Manager…
A – Analyse – They bought pro-clarity and what a Kool tool! ….This alone is worth it!
P – Planning (Planning/ Forecasting/Budgeting etc) from BizSharp – have yet to see anything about this but the business users like this part!
The main competitors are: Business Objects / Cognos and Hyperion.
At about 20K USD and $200USD per user, one of the guys from CBA where they use this said that was a good price.
Business Objects drill through isn’t as good…
Cognos is used by many in a similar way that reporting services is used….
There are guys at Microsoft who only deal in one of these three areas..and Adam only walked us through a canned demo of the first two.
So this is the new Hyperion Killer – Hyperion is a great tool, Ajaz enabled and using Bindows.net which is a very cool bit of Ajax technology that has been around for a few years.
Performance Point should lift the demand for SQL Server cubes being built although it can query normal odbc sources….
It works with SharePoint and was annoyed at Adam’s comment that you need Moss when it states either wss3 or moss!
It even states Office 2003 in the requirements…
This will be released soon so we should see the final specifications then.
The target market is decision makers and Ceos and Operational Managers will go gaga over this!
Regards,
Tom Bizannes
Sydney, Australia
Maybe the topic was more suited to the SQL Server user group!
First the news then the demo on Performance Point which will mean more business for companies who write cubes!
Office 2003 service pack 3 is out!
Office DevCon is coming at Microsoft over the weekend of 3 and 4th of November.
Bit like a code camp
Adam couldn’t stop talking about facebook and how much time he spends on it.
They even track how long staff use facebook as he is worried they might get as addicted as he is.
Simple things like seeing who has the fastest broadband connectivity or who has travelled the most etc…..
Cool sites were mentioned like trailfire.com where you can make a trail of your searching along with comments.
Useful? An example was looking up info on css and seeing the trail to sites with good info.
One could also use this to make a trail of places you are going to see…Good for travellers?
There’s a free High Performance Computing event this Friday at the MLC Centre.
This is by Frank Chism, world expert in high performance computing, discuss the future of cluster server technology
Frank admits to "over 40 years in HPC" and is "not looking to leave any time soon because I couldn't afford the cool toys I get to play with if I have to buy them myself."
Andrew Coates from Microsoft also talked about the OpenXML standard going to ISO…
There are some links regarding this and what was funny was how they even held events in New Zealand to explain this in more detail but the Kiwis rejected the proposal and we discussed is that because they are so anti-american?
The OpenXML standard apparently is more flexible than ODF and standardises even the older Microsoft office formats.
For more information goto:
openxmlcommunity.org/
openxmldeveloper.org/
Those who follow second life will like the inline protest of ibm staff against the 50 virtual offices that ibm runs as the profit has gone up but their bonuses have gone down!
workers-shape-up-for-big-blue-with-ibm
techcrunch.com/ - IT news – has rss feeds….
iScrybe for online calenders was mentioned as worth taking a look
They explained that SSW workers only do things if they get an email…talk about an inbox nightmare!
They didn’t want to use outlook as it was a problem with people coming and going…..
So they asked a business person to come up with a way to email monthly/quarterly tasks to staff and Google Calendar got a good wrap as it allows sending to many and can be shared easily.
You can even write code to talk with Google Calendar.
What I found perplexing was they mentioned SharePoint but then dished that as not be easy to set up re-occurring tasks!
From my view point their requirement is a little crude as one likes to know if a task has been completed and this didn’t seem to be their business requirement!
Performance Point:
There are three different parts to this.
M A P
M – Monitor / KPIs – based on Business ScoreCard Manager…
A – Analyse – They bought pro-clarity and what a Kool tool! ….This alone is worth it!
P – Planning (Planning/ Forecasting/Budgeting etc) from BizSharp – have yet to see anything about this but the business users like this part!
The main competitors are: Business Objects / Cognos and Hyperion.
At about 20K USD and $200USD per user, one of the guys from CBA where they use this said that was a good price.
Business Objects drill through isn’t as good…
Cognos is used by many in a similar way that reporting services is used….
There are guys at Microsoft who only deal in one of these three areas..and Adam only walked us through a canned demo of the first two.
So this is the new Hyperion Killer – Hyperion is a great tool, Ajaz enabled and using Bindows.net which is a very cool bit of Ajax technology that has been around for a few years.
Performance Point should lift the demand for SQL Server cubes being built although it can query normal odbc sources….
It works with SharePoint and was annoyed at Adam’s comment that you need Moss when it states either wss3 or moss!
It even states Office 2003 in the requirements…
This will be released soon so we should see the final specifications then.
The target market is decision makers and Ceos and Operational Managers will go gaga over this!
Regards,
Tom Bizannes
Sydney, Australia
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
SQL Server User Group last Friday 9th February 2007
The pizza was hot and the beer was cold….which is better than the other way around!
There was mention of SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 being released this week with some extra in adding data mining and profile via excel!
Apart from the long waited fix for Reporting Services, this should be a welcome update.
Warren Thornthwaite (co-author The Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit)
spoke about Dimension Modelling and gave us some good tips
and a very quick walkthrough what is normally a 4 day course.
He suggested for those into Business Intelligence/Data Warehousing to get on their Design Tips email list.
Go to the Kimball Group Web site http://www.kimballgroup.com/
His emphasis was good and the approach I like…
He said that most of the Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence effort should be based on finding out what the users do.
Not necessarily asking what they want as they most often don’t know!
Warren also did not believe in doing Business Intelligence demos, as the users will only see a small picture of what is possible.
Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence can greatly improve a company’s reporting which in turn affects their bottom line. This is hard to demo!
Basic approach is to de-normalise dimensions for usability and normalise facts for performance.
Modelling is best at the lowest level of detail then everything is more flexible.
Dimensions come from asking who,what,when,where,why and how. E.g. Product, Date, Client..
He normally uses a star schema.
Biggest bottleneck can be standard naming across an organisation.
e.g. Area versus region. But if this are not the same, then there is a case of having both fields available.
The problem comes when different divisions talk about their report by area verus the other divisions report by region!
Or maybe the same name is used for different reasons. E.g., Region there might have to be a Sales- Region versus a Marketing-Region.
As he stated, very few problems are technical, most are political.
Warren said he has seen Data Warehousing/Business Intelligence work on every platform and also fail on every platform.
His formula is to deliver value to the business as quick as possible rather than do the “easy” things first…
He normally draws up a Bus Matrix (Business Matrix) and mentioned a spreadsheet tool in his book, which they use to document and even start create the Data Warehouse/ Dimensions!
This matrix has processes/value chain items down the left and the dimensions across the top as multiple divisions will want to access the same dimensions.
The one tricky item but most important is slowly changing dimensions and how there are catered for.
Whenever someone did not cater for this initially, it was a nightmare to incorporate, so he always does these at the beginning.
E.g. A customer changes state so the previous sales figures per state will change unless this is catered for…
There were several approaches including do nothing, create a new dimension when a attribute changes etc.
He discouraged snowflaking and normalising the model and that with SQL 2005 the case for snowflaking is no longer there.
Other fancy terms were thrown around such as Junk dimensions for putting all those little lookups into one dimension – but be careful how many are added!
Also many to many dimensions – bridging tables or in SQL termes – intermediate fact tables.
A lot of value in Data Warehousing/Business Intelligence is the ETL Process – (Extraction, Transformation and Loading Process)
In addition, initially you mirror the Relational Model in Analysis services.
All in all his book sounds compelling although still have to finish and build all the projects in Practical Business Intelligence with SQL 2005 which is a great book to get you up to speed on Data Warehousing/Business Intelligence. It included the same concept of surrogate keys as Warren suggested….
Regards,
Tom Bizannes
Databases and Business Intelligence
http://www.smartbiz.com.au
There was mention of SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 being released this week with some extra in adding data mining and profile via excel!
Apart from the long waited fix for Reporting Services, this should be a welcome update.
Warren Thornthwaite (co-author The Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit)
spoke about Dimension Modelling and gave us some good tips
and a very quick walkthrough what is normally a 4 day course.
He suggested for those into Business Intelligence/Data Warehousing to get on their Design Tips email list.
Go to the Kimball Group Web site http://www.kimballgroup.com/
His emphasis was good and the approach I like…
He said that most of the Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence effort should be based on finding out what the users do.
Not necessarily asking what they want as they most often don’t know!
Warren also did not believe in doing Business Intelligence demos, as the users will only see a small picture of what is possible.
Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence can greatly improve a company’s reporting which in turn affects their bottom line. This is hard to demo!
Basic approach is to de-normalise dimensions for usability and normalise facts for performance.
Modelling is best at the lowest level of detail then everything is more flexible.
Dimensions come from asking who,what,when,where,why and how. E.g. Product, Date, Client..
He normally uses a star schema.
Biggest bottleneck can be standard naming across an organisation.
e.g. Area versus region. But if this are not the same, then there is a case of having both fields available.
The problem comes when different divisions talk about their report by area verus the other divisions report by region!
Or maybe the same name is used for different reasons. E.g., Region there might have to be a Sales- Region versus a Marketing-Region.
As he stated, very few problems are technical, most are political.
Warren said he has seen Data Warehousing/Business Intelligence work on every platform and also fail on every platform.
His formula is to deliver value to the business as quick as possible rather than do the “easy” things first…
He normally draws up a Bus Matrix (Business Matrix) and mentioned a spreadsheet tool in his book, which they use to document and even start create the Data Warehouse/ Dimensions!
This matrix has processes/value chain items down the left and the dimensions across the top as multiple divisions will want to access the same dimensions.
The one tricky item but most important is slowly changing dimensions and how there are catered for.
Whenever someone did not cater for this initially, it was a nightmare to incorporate, so he always does these at the beginning.
E.g. A customer changes state so the previous sales figures per state will change unless this is catered for…
There were several approaches including do nothing, create a new dimension when a attribute changes etc.
He discouraged snowflaking and normalising the model and that with SQL 2005 the case for snowflaking is no longer there.
Other fancy terms were thrown around such as Junk dimensions for putting all those little lookups into one dimension – but be careful how many are added!
Also many to many dimensions – bridging tables or in SQL termes – intermediate fact tables.
A lot of value in Data Warehousing/Business Intelligence is the ETL Process – (Extraction, Transformation and Loading Process)
In addition, initially you mirror the Relational Model in Analysis services.
All in all his book sounds compelling although still have to finish and build all the projects in Practical Business Intelligence with SQL 2005 which is a great book to get you up to speed on Data Warehousing/Business Intelligence. It included the same concept of surrogate keys as Warren suggested….
Regards,
Tom Bizannes
Databases and Business Intelligence
http://www.smartbiz.com.au
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)