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28 agosto DIDecision Intelligence is not a new concept, but it's definitely redefining what we understand BI to be http://www.b-eye-network.com/view/8385
There are emergency based organisations that depend heavily on real time informed decision making processes and communications http://www.21csi.com/ as well as a direct somewhat blurred line back to the dark leaders of real intelligence http://www.dniopensource.org/Default.aspx - scroll down to view their distinction of DI and Open Source (OS).
I still appreciate sites such as http://www.tdwi.org/ and http://www.gartner.com/ as they were consolidated, practical views into the BI/DWH realm from the early days - BUT - I think the delineation that they have drawn by their focus on the "big players and vendors", "registration fee's" and "purchase paper" mentality has created a niche that is restrictive in some sense. Sure, it's nice to read or review a well balanced, formulated paper on technology from an objective corporate perspective, and published books are often dated by the time we swing into the next year, so never forget to cast the net wide in the search for solutions, methods, software or skills.
The Basics: http://www.learndatamodeling.com/
IP address location tool: http://www.yournetworktools.com/index.php
27 agosto Dopa-MinePattern Perception appears to to increase in line with levels of dopamine, whilst skepticism is supposedly lowered. L-dopa is oft used to help treat Parkinson's disease and I wonder if the science-medical fraternity has tried sampling a group of Analalysts and DBA's to determine if there is a correlatation. Sure, most analytical people do not project higher beliefs in the surreal or supernatural, and are always skeptical about any BI solution's result sets - but do we actually know what makes some better than others?
The Human Brain exists on a chemical reward system, and with the overwhelming wave of information being pushed at us in ever increasing amounts, it's often difficult to disseminate the good, from the bad and more importantly - from the 'not enough information - withhold any judgement calls' scenario.
We've gone from newspaper headlines to web site headlines and there are no more front page limitations - so how careful are we at ensuring we evaluate both sides of the coin - objectively?
A case in point is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MapReduce - most known via Google - and now http://www.b-eye-network.com/view/8391 - I certainly don't enough about the concept to make a judgement call, but it's always good to drag the skeptic out http://www.databasecolumn.com/2008/01/mapreduce-a-major-step-back.html
But - to be fair - I think it depends on the context of it's intended use - there are NO bad products - they all solve or service something - it just depends on how generic and/or complete that 'something' and the 'solution' is.
On the subject - did MS SQL 2005 kill Excel? There was a lot of angst and anticipation about Excel's increased capacity to handle heaps more data - but it appears to have been much ado about nothing - and I suspect we're seeing a workforce dropping the Excel and Access methods to create and run their own database and queries on decentralised servers.
I've always said - if you can't eliminate something - try and apply some structure to it http://www.jedox.com/en/enterprise-spreadsheet-server/excel-olap-server/palo-server.html
Not often you encounter a free Gartner publication http://www.stratebi.es/todobi/may08/whos_who_in_opensource_busin_156326.pdf 26 agosto Sub-ScriptionsThere's a moment each day where my cortical and limbic brains go head to head to determine the actual ROI on completing a subscription form - normally distorted by the underlying realisation that the 'free' paper that I would like read does not contain enough depth to be totally gratifying. There are some institutions that publish papers, provide subscriptions or generate feeds that are of a quality that is high enough to satisfy most info consumers, but in general, this is a pure marketing scam!
I have avoided RSS feeds, and prior to the effectiveness of current technology, ran my own http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_crawler - but, there are so many info hubs to choose from, that I prefer to retain a certain amount of randomness in info scanning, as the possiblities are endless in knowledge acquisition - anything from the recognised http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Computer-Science/index.htm to the obscure http://www.huge-entity.com/2006/02/two-reasons-why-you-dont-exist.html
So - if you're going to feed me information - give it a a good subject heading, tone down the marketing pitch - subtle beats shameless in one swipe unless you've invented a laptop battery that lasts for the average life span of a thinking human entity - and don't resend the same or a variance of the original the day after!!
BiPMinstitute.com - Updates- TCS joins as a Co-Creator!!
I fully understand the intricate value proposition in maintaining a web site - and appreciate the effort and sometimes even the content - so I guess it's either just me or .... ? 25 agosto Info TunnelingTo a certain point, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empiricism drives most industries - including BI - but the exponential rate of technological change and pace of competing solutions is obscuring some of the very basics that drive our industry - and ensuring that we become another bunch of tunnel rats like the IT personel of yesteryear.
The core BI sites also tend to get swamped by 'breaking news' re mergers or new releases - a case in point was Oracle 11 and now MS SQL 2008 - whilst a quiet happenstance such as http://www.b-eye-network.com/view/8327 slips by most.
I'm certainly not a Microsoft fan (not related to their BI or RDBMS products) - but it's great to encounter a very complete & focused site no matter what the technology http://www.ssas-info.com/VidasMatelisBlog/
But - never forget to lift your head up out of the technical trenches to do some generic reviewing from a CEO/CIO perspective - just to ensure that you know the latest buzzwords, corp speak and mind control techniques that they hope to unleash on the downtrodden work forces http://www.cio.com/
It's also great to hit area's of the planet that are not 'in the news' http://tendencias.infoamericas.com/search/content/view/27/49/
And one of my favourites - that I will even purchase in hard copy http://www.wired.com/
24 agosto Open Source/Force/FarceOpen Source, FreeWare, ShareWare - confusing to individuals, but even more so for the coporations having to try and balance cost savings and techie 'suggestions' with a viable long term architecture and software roadmap.
Everyone offers a 'FREE' downloadable DEMO, so it can be quite irritating to try and search for an alternative, unless you have prior insight as to where most of the industry recognised offerings are being collated.
Many sites will also have you clicking all the way through to the download section, only to find that most of the downloads require payment - and then will ensure that you cannot use the 'back' function to return to your search list or previous site locations!!
Then we have http://www.oss-institute.org/index.php - an anomaly in itself as it's a US government aligned iniative - whilst the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model should not be confused with http://www.opensource.org/ with the home page looking a tad dated.
In summary, it appears that the development communities are doing quite well without aligning themselves to institues or organisations - another sign of how control structures lose sight of the actualities of an industry or a free / open minded community!
They should refer to https://fossbazaar.org/?q=content/building-open-source-community and http://www.darden.virginia.edu/html/deansblog.aspx?id=15380
So - kudos to http://sourceforge.net/ http://www.theopensourcecommunity.com/ http://www.libervis.com/ et set ra .....
But - Corporates ARE taking this all seriously - http://thinktank.olliancegroup.com/index.php - and to understand how to really look at this from a true coporate perspective download last year's exco report http://thinktank.olliancegroup.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=34&Itemid=61
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Shuttleworth has been instrumental in ensuring that open source filters back to being community serving - on ALL fronts http://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/.
And I bet most of you are unaware of https://www.bountysource.com/ ..
So - the next time you talk Open Source - be aware that it's not just about another nifty desktop widget or free server utility ....... it's an unstoppable force that
is turning CElIlO's on their heads ....
23 agosto Random Flights of a Black SwanI'm busy reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Swan_(book) which is pretty interesting seeing that the author openly acknowledges that he makes his money from the trading game.
In summary - Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb promotes the idea that humans cannot predict the major / minor events which really impact our lives - that we focus too much on daily trivia - and that we look to 'experts' or glance backwards for understanding instead of existing closer to the chaos factor - where imagination is uber alles.
I agree with him - and yes, we've seen the emergence - and oft quiet decline of the 2012 theories (The Inca's and Terence McKenna's World Time Line), the Web Bot project, and some of the New Age postulations on the Reality Carnival site - and the flipside to that coin with conspiracy theory sites all providing positive proof on past events and how 'we should have known'.
Logic to me is like music - whatever seems to make sense and work for the moment, is a truth of sorts!
One has to note that Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb is not discounting event patterns or disputing certain cycles - just that any predictions, no matter how concise can, and oft do, get horribly skewed due to an unforseen event.
Statistics have been in existance almost as long as merchants started ocean trading prescious commodities and is typically based on a cover your ass/et method, by knowing all possible risks and upping the price accordingly so as to spread a very possible loss.
Predictive Analysis is the holy grail of most BI projects, but if it were such a precise science, we'd be living in another dimension where the chaos factor would be non-existant and life would be pretty bland.
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Instant SOA anyone? http://www.tusc.com/oracle/technology/wbmcusdev.html
21 agosto TrendsEvery once in a while I use http://trends.google.com/websites?q=www.cognos.com%2C+www.pentaho.com%2C+www.businessobjects.com%2C+www.sas.com&geo=all&date=all&sort=0 to have a quick look at the demographics of some random web patterns.
Sure - it's not a precise science, but the interesting metrics are the country activity graphs, and how the overall individual visits for each site all appear to follow a generic pattern with an increase in activity at the third quarter and then a total slump over December.
But - what's missing from the picture? China obviously, but that's not only due to it's www controls - but mostly related to the language barrier!!
The most common used tools from a western perspective are typically NOT used elsewhere where the language is different and/or the net savvy population is not closely aligned to the US re culture, software releases and time zones. Search engines and social networks in eastern europe have taken their own route and methinx I prefer the subcultures over there - I just wish I knew more languages.
There are black holes and alternate universes in this global net - and people exploit this http://www.friedlnet.com/product_info.php?cPath=29_22&products_id=5739&osCsid=28a6f22363adae386fdcaf37d7fda5d1 - nothing wrong with that, but I'm simply trying to prove that it's often what's lacking from the picture that counts.
On average, Google is subjected to 100 million searches per day, which accounts for close to 50% of all internet search activity. Google stores each and every search a user makes into its databases. After a years worth of searches, this figure amounts to more than 33 trillion database entries. Depending on the type of architecture of Google's databases, this figure could comprise hundreds of terabytes of information, so where is all the rest of the searching happening - and what kind of trends could be had if all the stats were combined ? No news on the Google / Panorama OLAP dance ... Unrelated Links:
20 agosto SL (SecondLife - Virtual-ly BI)Second Life - a virtual world - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life - is a place I existed in from 2005 to a few months back as Zarn Zond - current access difficult from Kuwait!
Whilst I was there, the likes of IBM and b-eye-network purchased v-islands with which to attempt virtual collaborations and seminar's, along with attempts in creating customer support services - supposedly down to a technical level.
I was working for IBM at the time, but was more interested in 'playing' with a few groups I had joined that were running private businesses, along with the odd demonstration outside some government embassy who's global policies sux! Yup - we even got water cannoned - but, it is a facinating place and I did manage to get a 3 day ban for trolling the vampiric places with a mobile dental lab for oversized incisor extractions ... and made many a v-friend whilst spouting poetry from some stunning view point in SL (yeah - you get sunsets in there too ...).
On learning that Linden Labs runs Business Objects for some of it's corporate reporting, I tried exchanging some free consulting for some virtual land - which didn't happen, but slowly we're seeing some mention in credible places as to taking collaboration to a new level.
It will be interesting to see how this all pans out ...
19 agosto The Merovingian factorThe Merovingian's origins predate the Matrix, but some quotes from this movie have struck a cord on more than one occasion:
Merovingian: Yes, of course. Who has time? Who has time? But then if we never *take* time, how can we have time?
Merovingian: Oh, yes. It is true. The Keymaker. Of course. But this is not a reason. This is not a "why". The Keymaker himself - his very nature is a means. It is not an end. And so to look for him is to be looking for a means to do... what?
Merovingian: You see there is only one constant. One universal. It is the only real truth. Causality. Action, reaction. Cause and effect.
Being a corporate entity aka Windows or Unix, doesn't stop me from casting the odd envious glance at the Mac world - and the only ownership I have in that realm is a recent purchase of a defunct iPod (30G) which I bought at a souk (market) to use a storage device. The only thing not working is the sound - but I now have a whole stack of 'free' songs, playlists and tv shows etc - and a handy mechanism for porting software and documents from work to home.
I recently joined http://ebookhood.com/catalog and now have a stack of converted books for reading on the bus - including an O'Reilly manual on Web Services,
I have now decided to buy a new functional model - mainly for Podcasts.
Me, like most - quick browse the net and typically either read a full article or download / try some software, but never seem to have enough *TIME* to watch some of the broad/pod/casts from Tech seminars.
I was banking on waiting to get back to SA to hand over the soundless iPod and some printout's I downloaded on how to open and fix this known defect to my electronic wiz kid brother - but, why wait - the value of having information on hand - anywhere - is something we try to promote aka event and data streaming to mobiles etc so why do we not apply the same in a personal capacity?
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18 agosto Da-DataLooks like Bill left - and black is back - I like the new decor with the latest 2008 Express release - which has no limit on the download re a time cap etc http://www.microsoft.com/express/sql/default.aspx
All databases require standards http://blog.sqlauthority.com/2007/06/06/sql-server-database-coding-standards-and-guidelines-complete-list-download/
And where would we be without any modelling tools http://www.codebydesign.com/ and http://www.fabforce.net/dbdesigner4/ and for those requiring some modelling information, if you're just starting out http://www.kimballgroup.com/ and subscribe to the Kimball University subscriptions.
But the basic rules can be broken down into:
1» Get Business requirements. Then for a very nice vendor independant SQL editor http://www.aquafold.com/
Portals - Liferay won the 2008 OS award http://www.liferay.com/web/guest/home
15 agosto BI-Can-DInfo Visualization aka Eye Candy is appearing everywhere these days with some amazing 'flash' technologies.
Most BI practisioners would question the practical applications of these 'pretty toys' and immediately ask: "Can you drill down into the data?".
That might be relevant to your average data churners, but one should acknowledge that 'BI' slid out of the confines of the big corporates quite some time ago to romp around with collaboration, open source, emerging technologies, marketing, crm, mobiles etc
There are no boundaries any more - just technical challenges in selecting the right mix of components and solutions to provide a stable core platform, as well as a possible edge to leverage information quicker and easier than every before - and the human eye is configured for info retrieval far beyond the usual nums and chars - colour and patterns provide a whole new realm to trigger decisons and responses - so it's about time we matured away from those icky green/yellow/red speedometers
And just to appease the forrester wave riders - here's one from the 'big 5'
But the Universe is causal re info flow http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080813/full/news.2008.1038.html?s=news_rss
And the recent 'cloud' failures (skype ..) has people looking back at P2P when they should be looking forward to http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/goodbye_p2p_p4p_is_coming.php whilst remembering that sure, Rome wasn't built in a day, but don't have anyone let you think that the eqyptians carved and dragged all those rocks over to stack them up into pyramids http://www.livescience.com/history/070518_bts_barsoum_pyramids.html
More free stuff http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis&A=/article/08/03/24/The-Web-best-free-stuff_1.html
Aside - it's the Middle East - Friday is Saturday / Sunday is Monday - something you forget when working until midnight to kick some sense into a bunch of outdated installations that all packed up after applying a hot fix - and then waking up at 05h00 to bus into work only to discover that something is amiss when no one opens up the kitchen to make coffee ..... might as well stay and re-install then (i'm going to dye the blonde out one day !!) 14 agosto BI ReviewsThe industry predictably swings between magic quadrants http://www.gartner.com/it/products/mq/mq_ms.jsp and waves http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,44724,00.html for a 'generic' review of the BI Industry re the leading vendors.
These reports - enlightening from a 'completeness' perspective are not free - and I wish they would have trend graphs displaying the amount of purchases and buyers as I strongly suspect that it's mainly tech sites / vendors and paid bloggers that make up their core customer list.
I'll reserve comments as to the classification process, and give the tech writers muchos credit for creating a rating system with leaders, whilst basically blowing trumpets for everyone.
Here's a free review if you also don't want to buy the pdf - or search - there are many 'reviews' from the 'buyers' hitting all the prime time sites lol.
12 agosto mind the GAPhttp://graphs.gapminder.org/ - and click on Gap World for the most awesome graphical display.
Talking of 'gaps' this was a pretty comprehensive ETL list http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Databases/Data_Warehousing/Extraction_and_Transformation/
And another good read if you follow the Monash crowd http://www.dbms2.com/
Free Software Lists:
Project Planning - Documents et alWe all hate it and most of us have to deal with MS Project at one stage or another.
A word of advice - get your organisation onto MS Project 2007 asap! It has some really good pre-packeged reports and, get this, it even generates it's own DATA CUBES to report off of.
The best trick one can learn with MS Project is how to use the '4 quadrant' view to sort out over allocation of resources - I'll see if I can add a snapshot tomorrow.
Being an Open Source advocate, I've tried a few alternatives but the problem is that not many will feed off of, or translate to and from mpp's.
This http://open-source-project-management-tools.blogspot.com/ is a good idea - it just seems to have stalled -I know of, or have tried most of the solutions listed there and there are always emerging solutions worth keeping track of http://openproj.org/openproj .
Keep an eye on http://open-source-project-management-tools.blogspot.com/ and join http://www.docstoc.com/.
I have my own template library that contains documents and proecdures for most IT activities as there is nothing more frustrating than having to design project documentation from scratch - and Bill - oops, isn't he giving up work to pursuit a Branson life style? - didn't put much effort into the Microsoft Templates - I just bought a bootlegged dvd of all of them and they are pathetic - you get what you pay for, so thank heavens I hit the black market in this instance.
And then some projects need to extend beyond internal management into collaborative space - http://blog.pandion.be/2008/07/open-source-project-management.html
11 agosto BI Galaxy+3 years in a Marriott in the US got me addicted to http://www.ufc.com/ and here in Kuwait I once again have access to live broadcasts!
I grew up practising Judo - the usual Bruce Lee movie influence, but there was no Jeet Kune Do on the SCoast of Africa. I then encountered some practical self defense in the SA military with your usual hand to hand type of training, and then met some guys from a special unit that used to mix their various trained and untrained fighting backgrounds.
I learnt very quickly that if you are not naturally aggressive - you need training, so I joined a traditional style on leaving the military - JKA Shotokan.
Moving up to Johannesburg I was fortunate enough to meet some chinese guys - in IT - that were training in Kobujutsu and Tai Chi, as well as someone living close to me that was training in Kenjutsu and Ninjutsu. This was an amazing time as the martial arts world was still very much a PURIST institution and the only mixing of styles was happening in places that did not advertise to the general public, underground fight clubs and individuals on a quest for knowledge expansion.
It took many years and the demise of the heavy Weight Boxing league(s) to get MMA, UFC etc to where it is now.
Why the martial arts blab - well, it struck me (sic) last night that there will always be the PURISTS who serve the general conservative population, and then the fringe groups of UNCONFORMIST dedicated practitioners who's heart and soul are committed to the pursuit of knowledge across any and all boundaries.
There is always a place for both, and as someone that has his wallet in the sector that uses the most well known technologies, but his eye and a sliver of his soul out on the fringes of this rapidly expanding BI Galaxy, I hope to always be able to encounter those sites that are off the beaten track.
Some will stay where they are, some will move on, to either colonise a new place, or to continue reaching for those black holes out on the frontiers of thought .... and technology.
Never foget the basics and always look inward and outward to keep your balance ..
06 agosto Best of Open Source Awards - BOSSIEThe list is out and it's gratifying to see the momentum behind something that the industry is severly lacking after all the big vendor consolidations.
Don't get me wrong - I don't see Open Source is an alternative for all the mainstream solutions that we see going though their own metamorphisis.
What's we're seeing is a long overdue separation of BI and Reporting. Many endeavors have used an unholy definition of BI to encompass all reportable entities via third party tool sets and it's created many misconceptions in our industry.
Real Time BI is simply reporting - and yes, it does form part of the overall view on corporate data, but it reminds me very much of my Cobol/CICS days of reporting off banking transaction systems - and it's operational reporting that we're seeing heading up the SOAP and Web Services outreach programs.
Where Open Source is really coming into play is for the two extreme ends of the BI spectrum - those that know exactly what they want and have had enough exposure to BI methodologies and tool sets, and those that are entering it with minimal experience and lots of excitement. 04 agosto Intelligent DocumentationI recently had a memory stick stolen that contained a Development Life Cycle word document that I had spent about 2 weeks creating.
This had me re-evaluate the task of recreating it and I decided to rather adopt a different approach - to use an alternative that I should have considered a long time ago.
This is actually amazing - you can create expandable tree nodes that can be used to logic branch out in a procedural path to define all the steps required for any number of processes - AND - you can have nodes link directly to a specific document / web site / send mail etc.
The absolute beauty with this is that you can collapse the entire process onto itself and then expand only those nodes that you need to i.e. a hell of alot more efficient than trying to wade through a 'top down' structured document.
Sure, there are content management systems out there - some expensive (MOSS) - others free ( http://drupal.org/ ) - but I've been itching for a valid reason to use FreeMind - or MindMap as it was when I first encountered it - and am really excited as to the practical application of this.
You can share it in browse mode via a web link - untried for me - but I hope to throw this on a server ASAP.
And - something that I have been bitchin about forever - here is a product suite that uses it's own technology to help you - the help document is RADICAL as it comes in a mind map format!! How many vendors do you know that actually use their own technology to deliver their solution?
Hint: File / Open to get to their mind map manual, and simply use that as your template - it contains almost all features in one mega map .......
--- I have a bunch of BOBJ ( http://www.forumtopics.com/busobj/index.php ) forum members that have been waiting for my XI 3.0 Dev Life Cycle document - they're gonna be a tad suprised re the format methinx lol
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