Business Objects

Trends in Business Intelligence & 2010 Review

It’s the time of year when magazine editors can’t resist the urge to fill their glossy wares full of ‘thing of the year’ articles, the print equivalent of the mid-season “clip show” that has plagued many a TV series.  Well, if it’s good enough for them it’s good enough for me so here’s my rather unstructured and unscientific take on Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing in the year that was – 2010…

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.

Installing Business Objects XI R3.1 on Windows Server 2008 R2

Recently I migrated a Business Objects XI Release 2 deployment to XI Release 3.1, a relatively straight-forward process but as always there are a few gremlins to avoid.  Unfortunately the final playbook I used had too many sensitive details in it but during my trial-run I did make a few notes that served me well as a rough workflow and I thought it might be worth sharing.

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.

MySQL 32-bit ODBC Invalid Attribute String 64-bit Windows 7

Having just migrated my development PC to Windows 7 I’m slowly encountering perculiar issues as I setup all of the software and connections I used to have in Windows XP.  This morning I was trying to write a Business Objects report against a MySQL database and because Desktop Intelligence is a 32-bit application if I want it to talk to MySQL I have to use the 32-bit driver. 

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.

BusObj + MySQL – SQLBindParameter State 07001

I recently encountered a strange problem in Business Objects whilst trying to create a derived table against a MySQL database and whilst the query was a complex one it executed without fault in the MySQL Query Browser so I knew that wasn’t the probem.  The error message I encountered was “SQLBindParameter not used for all parameters”…

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.

Business Objects DeskI: DA0005 “No column or data to fetch”

This is just a quick tip to help people fix an odd error I encountered whilst runing a Freehand SQL query against a MySQL 5 database, I’d used prompted queries against MySQL previously so that wasn’t an issue  – I’m speculating a little but in my case the data provider used subqueries and both the inner and outer query were prompted which is a little unusual. 

The error I received was DA0005 “No column or data to fetch”…

The solution came from the brilliant BOB Forums (original post here), the solution was to edit the odbc.sbo file which on my default installation found in:  

C:\Program Files\Business Objects\BusinessObjects Enterprise 11.5\win32_x86\dataAccess\connectionServer\odbc

You’ll need to add the following in the relevant section, in my case I added it under Generic, Generic ODBC and MySQL 5. 

<Parameter Name="ForceSQLExecute">Always</Parameter>

After closing and restarting DeskI everything was fine, please bear in mind that if you’re running a client/server installation and your Inforview users need to run the report you’ll need to change the settings on the server too.

Quick Fix: DeskI Query Panel Appears Invisible / Off Screen

For the last couple of weeks I’ve had an extremely unusual problem in Business Objects Desktop Intelligence (DeskI), whenever I went to edit a Data Provider nothing would happen.  Initially it looked like DeskI had hung but hitting escape returned me back into the report, I figured that because the Query Panel is modal it must be launching but for some reason I couldn’t see it. 

After a little bit of searching I managed to find the solution on the excellent BOB Forum (original post here) and I just had to reproduce it since I found it quite tough to find but hats off to Marek Chladny who came up with the solution – if you’re ever in the UK let me know and I’ll buy you a beer! 

1. Go to Edit Data Provider. 
2. Press Alt + Space
3. Press M
4. Use the arrows to move the Query Panel back onto the screen. 

Marek mentions that this only works if the Query Panel isn’t maximised, also I assume that since this uses standard Windows keyboard shortcuts it might work for any other application where you have a similar issue.  As for how it came about, I have no idea – it may be something to do with occasionally using a single-screen PC to remote-desktop into my dual-screen desktop.