The morning’s main talk came from SAP’s Technology Evangelist, Timo Elliott (for those of you from the SQL Server world think of a cross between Brent Ozar and Andrew Fryer) who delivered a punchy and informative overview of the ‘big ticket’ enhancements coming in 4.0.  The main themes of Timo’s talk an of the day in general were the forthcoming enhancements in the Enterprise Analytics space including the recently acquired Column-Oriented data store Sybase IQ and AP’s latest iteration of In-Memory analysis, HANA (High-performance ANalytical Appliance).  HANA will run on hardware from vendors such as IBM and HP with upwards of 1TB RAM and sit between SAP BW and other large data sources providing lightning-fast (up to 350x faster in SAP tests) though later iterations of HANA will all-but replace the current storage engine behind SAP BW (planned late 2011) and ultimately will replace the entire data storage infrastructure behind SAP’s ERP systems and potentially other third-party applications.

Timo’s enthusiasm for these new technologies clearly showed and having been in the industry (and the company) for 20 years it’s worth noting that he described the advent of large-scale in-memory analytics as a “once in a decade” leap in capability and for Enterprise-class organisations I’m quite sure it will be but having worked in much smaller companies I’m somewhat sceptical about how much of an impact it will make at the lower end of the market.

Another major theme for the day was the advent of Analytic Applications, essentially packaged BI and Data Warehouse products pre-built for specific industries (e.g. Healthcare, Retail, Manufacturing) or for departmental purposes (e.g. Finance, HR).  Demoed by Jeff Veis and Andy Hirst, these applications are presented as a series of dashboards but since much of the underlying KPI definitions and data architecture are already built they can reduce implementation time to as little as 12 weeks vs. 6-9 months for a ‘from scratch’ implementation.  It’s easy to be sceptical about this as we all tend to believe that our problems are unique but each application is focused so closely on a particular industry/department that even if they’re only able to meet 70% of the core requirements out of the box the simplicity and reduced timescales ought to be well worth the sacrifice, especially since they’re customisable after the initial setup.

The third major theme of the day was Data Quality, in fact in addition to the session on Information Steward by Barry Dodds and Dave Pugh four other speakers made a point of telling the audience that everybody in the room had data quality problems – it’s probably true but I couldn’t help feeling a little nagged by the end of it all!  The tool itself seemed very capable and for a DQ application it was remarkably visual and included dashboard-style elements (to paraphrase Barry) “using analytics to improve analytics” which despite being a cool soundbite is a actually a very sensible approach to take.

Also announced was the new Complex Event Processing engine Event Insight, essentially these CEP engines (like Microsoft’s StreamInsight) take an incoming stream of events in real-time from operational systems and provide monitoring and alerting capabilities as well as processing for more traditional reporting and dashboarding.  Additional products mentioned but not thoroughly explored were a collaboration tool sapstreamwork.com and a new unstructured text processing engine that is able to parse free text such as Twitter feeds and provide “sentiment analysis” as well as tagging various context indicators including geography.

Roadmap wise we were told to export more along the lines of Pervasive BI, Big Data, Social / Collaboration and more in the Mobile BI space.  On the latter we should expect enhancements to the existing Business Objects Explorer mobile app as well as a native WebI application, mobile platforms mentioned included Blackberry, Symbian, Windows Mobile, iPhone, iPad and even the RIM Playbook but oddly no mention of Android.  I’m not sure if it was left off of the slide by accident or there are legitimately no Android plans, I’d assume the former since Android is almost certain to become the market leader in terms of wide-spread adoption.

In addition to the Business Objects staff there were also a couple of external speakers both of whom gave interesting talks…

Tony Harper of Capgemini who spoke on the general topic of Mobile BI, highlighting the increased user expectations presented by high quality consumer-oriented smartphone and tablet apps as a particular challenge.  The talk was thought-provoking and in particular it Tony’s statement that Mobile BI projects will be “sending information farther from the walls of the data centre than ever before” really underscored one of his main themes that providing so many people in so many disparate locations live access to your data will significantly stretch both performance and data quality and these expectations should be factored into Mobile BI projects from the beginning.

Following Tony was Alys Woodward from the research firm IDC who gave a good talk on the factors influencing BI uptake within organisations listing the most important contributing factors as being as Degree of Training (including training on KPIs as well as the tools), Design Quality (of architecture and processes), Non-Executive Involvement (i.e. get the business users involved), Importance of Governance and Use of Performance Management Methodology (the last two being important drivers in organisations where they are relevant).

Don’t forget to check out my ”What’s New in Business Objects XI Release 4 / SAP BI 4.0?” post too for more detail on the core Business Objects product stack.

The first words on the first slide of Varik Torsteinsen’s talk were: “4.0 is here”, followed swiftly by a contradictory “well, almost”!  The product is currently in “ramp-up” phase with selected customers being given access to the 4.0 software downloads but will most likely reach General Availability at the end of May.  The current supported migration path will be from XI R2 SP2 or XI R3.0 or above, there was no specific mention of migration tools or process.

Possibly the largest single change might be the introduction of an entirely new Semantic Layer and the replacement of the Universe Designer tool with the Information Design Tool (IDT).  The new semantic layer includes elements from the old Data Federator product (which presumably no longer exists) and allows a single universe to combine data from multiple sources, a great leap forward for BO but something OBIEE (nee Siebel Analytics) has been able to do for a while.

Some of the small (but very welcome changes) include support for 64-bit operating systems, enhanced virtualisation support, additional monitoring and a re-written auditing back-end.  Along with the functional changes there was the usual biennial nomenclature shuffle that Business Objects tend to put us all through, the main changes being…

• Xcelsius will now be called SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards.
• InfoView will now be called BI Launchpad.
• Dashboard Builder will now be called BI Workspaces.
• Voyager and Pioneer will now be called SAP BusinessObjects Analysis.

Crystal reports still exists and appears to have a new and slicker UI, the dashboard builder (BI Workspaces) has also been improved and should result in much faster design-times.

Web Intelligence doesn’t seem to have changed fundamentally (don’t get me wrong, this is a good thing) though there have been a number of enhancements that will prove popular including the addition of new chart types including variable slice height pies, scatter bubbles, polar bubbles, tag clouds, box plots, heat maps and tree maps.  There are more tabs and tab-like options available in the UI to allow access to additional functionality, documents can be pinned in the BI Launchpad and will retained the pinned status across sessions – a great way to make sure you always look at your data assurance report!

The Query Panel also now has a Data Preview pane at the bottom-right and direct visibility of the data in the Data Provider is now possible, though I didn’t see whether the raw data could be saved independently I’d assume it can be.  Reports can now be based on Excel documents, Analysis Views, BeX, text-files, Web Services and you can even create a report with no data provider at all.  Copying report elements from one report to another is now possible, the chart/table will move and also bring the Data Provider along with it – it appeared that this was instant as well so it potentially may not even require another request to the database.

I’ve still got a lot of questions that I didn’t get a chance to answer today (Grouping?  Free-hand SQL?  Hiding?) but what I did see was worthwhile although I would say that perhaps WebI still looks a bit slower than it ought to although that could be down to using laptops for demos.  I hope my round-up helped, I did leave some things out so please feel free to ask if you’ve any other questions.

SAP Business Objects Enterprise Daylight Savings Brief

Applies To: All Business Objects Enterprise XI r2 FP6.3 and earlier, and XI 3.1 SP3+ (FP3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5 ) Environments.

Brief: Due to Daylight Savings Time changes that went into effect on March 13, 2011 in the Americas and are scheduled for March 27, 2011 in Europe there is a potential of scheduling issues and excessive failed instances to appear on Recurring Daily Schedules in Business Objects Enterprise XI r2 FP6.3 and earlier as well as XI 3.1 SP3+ environments. If you encounter any issues please refer to the SAP Knowledge bases below for workarounds and resolutions and if required please raise a Message for Processing to via the Service Marketplace.

I’ve installed the fix pack recommended here: https://websmp210.sap-ag.de/sap/support/notes/1448881 and I’ll post an update after the weekend to say whether or not it worked.

UPDATE:  The instance of Business Objects that I manage appears to have crossed the clock change boundary without any duplication of scheduled reports so either the fix pack mentioned above did the trick or the issue itself did not occur!

Hot on the heels of my Business Objects problems with Firefox, I’ve now encountered an issue with Internet Explorer 9 (again a new release), again with the Java / Tomcat version.  Whenever I click to view or modify a report I receive the following error message…

Thankfully everything is fine in the IIS / ASPx version but nonetheless I am still advising my users not to upgrade until either Microsoft or SAP are able to provide a fix.

• Enter “about:config” in the browser’s address bar. 
• Search for “html5.parser.enable”. 
• Double-click the row to set the value to “false” (row should also go bold to indicate change). 

There is a possibility that it may cause HTML5 compatibility issues down the road but it solved the issue I experienced in XI 3.1 so thanks Milos! 

Mozilla released Firefox 4 yesterday, touting speed improvements as one of the key features so I installed it to see if it would make a good client for Business Objects.  Unfortunately it seems that there is a bug whereby Firefox fails to recognise that Java is correctly installed and so whenever I go to modify a report using the Java Query Panel I see the following screen…

… and when I click on the “Install Missing Plugins” button I end up with the following message stating “No suitable plugins were found.”…

I tried re-installing both 32-bit and 64-bit Java runtime packages and it made no difference whatsoever, I then reinstalled Firefox 4 with still no change.  For now I’ve gone back to Firefox 3.6 and it works like a charm so until I see an updated version or a decent workaround I am advising my users not to upgrade.

Despite the fact that the data looks like text whenever I tried to return the data into an application, I tried SSIS, SQL Server Linked Servers and Business Objects, each time the data would come back unusable or an error would be returned.  Business Objects gave me the key by declaring “This is a BLOB.” as you can see in the following screenshots…

SQL Server Integration Services

SQL Server Linked Server

Business Objects Desktop Intelligence

As with my recent post about loading data into MySQL with SSIS the saviour turns out to be an ODBC configuration setting, this time in the Metadata tab of the MySQL ODBC driver.  All you have to do is check the “Always handle binary function results as character data” and instantly your problems will be solved…

Out of a crazy fit of completeness I also took screenshots of the final results and it’d be a shame to waste them so here they are…

SQL Server Integration Services

SQL Server Linked Server

Business Objects Desktop Intelligence

Market Trends

To start, I’ve taken a series of snapshots from the excellent Google Trends showing global search volumes for each of the Big Four offerings to measure the level of interest.  It’s reasonably clear to see from the graph below that interest in OBIEE shows a small but steady growth whilst Reporting Services shows a marked decline and the other two offerings remains roughly static (maybe a small decline?), this surprised me given that with the release of 2008 R2 I think that Reporting Services is really getting to the point where it offers a legitimate choice in the BI marketplace.  Perhaps the issue that Microsoft have fragmented their BI offering to include a mixture of terms with Excel, PowerPivot, SharePoint, Analysis Services and Reporting Services all making up the BI stack and nobody really knows what to call it?

This year has also brought an increased emphasis on Mobile BI with the iPad and iPhone fast becoming common executive playthings, Business Objects making it’s Explorer and Xcelsius products available on Android in addition to the iPhone (Explorer only).  MicroStrategy took the mobile emphasis a step further (perhaps to help stick their head above the crowd) by announcing a strong focus on the mobile BI market and offering a free 25-seat licence for their Mobile Suite.  Despite a strong focus on marketing Mobile BI I’m still not convinced that any of the vendors have really hit the nail on the head with their solutions in that whilst many offer pretty visualisations and slick interfaces most seem to lack the kind of simplicity that helps to present information quickly and succinctly, even the frankly beautiful independent product RoamBI just feels a little overdone when it comes to actually using it.

Major Product Releases

It’s been quite a year in the BI & Database world with the launch of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2, Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) 11g and IBM’s Cognos 10…

Microsoft’s launch is effectively a moderate evolution of SQL Server 2008 in most areas with little change to the database engine, it’s ETL tool Integration Services and it’s OLAP engine Analysis Services.  That said, R2 did bring some handy incremental features which will be especially welcomed by the budget-conscious with an increase in the DB size of the free Express Edition from 4GB to 10GB and the addition of Backup Compression to Standard Edition.  There were some interesting additions with PowerPivot, Master Data Services and StreamInsight thought I’m not sure that either will find a natural home for a good year or so as busy DBAs and developers struggle to find the time to try these new features out.

Despite the major jump in the version number Oracle’s release too seems to be mainly an evolution and as a great fan of the product I’m quite considerably relieved since Oracle could quite easily have been over-zealous in integrating their ‘own’ tools like Discoverer and Warehouse Builder with bought-in technologies like Siebel Analytics (which became the bedrock of OBIEE), Hyperion’s Essbase and Sunopsis (now Oracle Data Integrator).  One of the less exciting but fundamentally important additions is that the semantic layer employed in OBIEE will be directly and immediately compatible with future releases of other Oracle products in the CRM, ERP and Finance application spaces.

I’m not as familiar with Cognos as the other two tools having only experimented with Cognos 8 for a couple of weeks but from everything I’ve read it seems that Cognos 10 was certainly a major milestone in the product’s lifecycle.  Aside from the shiny sounding features such as Social Networking and iPad support (actually a very serviceable looking mobile BI app) there are some very cutting-edge additions to the product including a statistical engine drawn from SPSS and Active Reports which allows users to explore and analyse offline data including interactive email reports.

The Future?

No good review and roundup article ends without a nod to the future and whilst I’m not keen on making absolute predictions there are a few developments I’ll be keeping my eye on for 2011 and beyond.

The main event I’m anticipating is the release of Business Objects XI Release 4, I’ve not seen too many concrete details about functionality but over the last few years Business Objects have seen themselves distracted by the Crystal acquisition (including the shoe-horning of their core product into Crystal Enterprise) and in turn their acquisition by SAP.  As a regular and long-term user of Business Objects I’m really hoping that they’ll blow away some of the cobwebs and deliver some new functionality as well as rounding off some of the edges that in previous versions feel a little unfinished, it would be great too if they finally included the key functionality from the legacy desktop client (which many long-term customer still rely on) in their core Web Intelligence product (Freehand-SQL & Grouping – I’m looking at you).

Another area to watch in Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing as well as the wider enterprise market is cloud computing, Informatica’s ETL in the Cloud offering has seen improvements and adoption throughout 2010 and it’s almost a given that Microsoft will be adding some degree of ETL capability to their SQL Azure platform. I’d expect an announcement if not a release along these lines in the coming year, though it’s possible that ETL comes behind providing cloud based analytics (something SSIS guru Jamie Thomson suggests).

In a broader sense I’m expecting to see a little more interest and pickup in the open source BI market, I’ve been saying this for a while (“this time next year, Rodders…“) and I might be wrong for some time to come but I always keep an eye on companies using an Open Source model such as the ETL vendor Talend who recently acquired Sopera (a middleware and SOA vendor), BI vendor Jaspersoft and all-rounder Pentaho.  With the global economy still suffering a hangover from the sub-prime mortgage crisis and banking collapse people have been looking for cheaper alternatives and open source companies provide a great way to achieve that, though some of Talend’s high-end offerings are almost comparable in price with other commercial products.

Another possible area to watch out for is the area of Personal Intelligence, essentially Business Intelligence for the individual.  A colleague and I spoke about this back in 2008 and we could both see that as people increasingly become data-aware they’ll start to look inwards and aim to measure things about themselves, one obvious starting point is fitness and we already have sites to log and chart your weight and calorie intake as well as the brilliant Nike+ product that measures your pace, time and distance during a run using either a sensor in your shoe or GPS (iPhone app), see the sidebar of this blog or below (one of my runs on the Nike+ site) for examples of the output.

It’s a mix of steps to take with a few hints thrown in, for the trial run I built a one-box solution (DB+BO on the same server) which isn’t necesarily good practice but works well as development box.  Please bear in mind that this is by no means exhaustive and there’s no substitute for reading the Business Objects documentation…

• Create a domain user under which you Business Objects services will run.
• Install SQL Server 2008 R2 Express (you could use MySQL I but I prefer MSSQL).
• Ensure that SQL Server runs under the domain account (can be done during setup or afterwards).
• Create databases for the CMS + Audit DBs, create a user that you will use to authenticate with.
• Install any necessary ODBC drivers.
• Open Windows Firewall and allow inbound traffic on port 8080 (for Tomcat).
• Setup CMS + Audit ODBC Sources using c:\windows\sysWOW64\odbcad32.exe
  (see: 32-Bit ODBC Drivers in Windows Server 2008 R2)
• Configure IIS to Enable 32-bit Applications + .NET Application Pool = Classic
• Install Business Objects (everything but MySQL).
• Open CCM, stop services and set SIA + Apache to run under domain account.
• Grant permissions on C:\Program Files (x86)\Business Objects to domain account.
• Restart services.
• Click “Update Objects” button in CCM (this solved an issue where some Authentication options were unavailable in the CMC).
• Log in CMC, configure AD Authentication - it’s best to follow the Windows AD SSO NTLM instructions in Business Objects Documentation.
• Run Import Wizard (I may post some tips later on but it’s quite straight-forward).
• On Windows 7 PCs go to Control Panel  >> Java >> Advanced >> Security and tick “Enable Mixed Mode (run with protection)” – this solved an issue for WebI users.
• Set user input locale correctly (I’m in the UK and I had to do this on the client for each user).

I hope that helped, if you have any questions please leave a comment and I’ll see if I can expand on the above.

I obtained the latest driver (5.1.7) from MySQL’s standard ODBC Connector page, installed it and added a System DSN without a hitch, the odd part came when Business Objects was returning only one row from a query that should return a couple of hundred.  Having run the same query on XP (I’m parallel running now) I suspected that the problem must be with the ODBC configuration so I attempted to delete the DSN only to receive the “Invalid attribute string” error…

A little Googling later led me to MySQL Bug #56233, in the discussion Fred Zappert frames the simplest solution suggested which is to uninstall version 5.1.7 and install version 5.1.6 instead.  Oddly MySQL don’t make it especially clear how to get hold of previous minor versions of the ODBC drivers but you can get it from here: mysql-connector-odbc-5.1.6-win32.msi 

Alternatively you could always visit bisql.net’s Tools, Utilities and ODBC Drivers page where I have a link for 5.1.6 which I’ll keep in place until the next Windows 7 compatible driver is released.

I tried the same query as a Freehand SQL query in DeskI and received the same error, after banging my head against the problem for about 15 minutes I decided to take my favourite solution – I went for lunch!  On return the solution seemed blindingly obvious, at the very top of my query I’d included a comment but in the comment I’d included a question mark – as soon as I removed the “?” the query ran without a hitch.  I’m not quite sure of the reason behind this but I suspect that one of the Business Objects, ODBC or MySQL layers treats the “?” as a reserved character to indicate a parameterised query – if anyone has the answer i’d be interested to know.