Operating Systems

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.

Quick Tip: Run As Different User in Windows 7 + 2008 R2

If you need to run an application using the credentials of a user other than yourself (or the one you’re logged-in as) in Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 (may work in other versions) all you need to do is hold shift as you right-click on the application. 

For example, in this case I would like to launch Windows Explorer as a different user…

How to Enable the Quick Launch Bar in Windows 7

I’m yet to write up my full opinions of Windows 7 but generally speaking I like it a lot but having just migrated from Windows XP there are a few changes that I find hard to live with and one is the absence of the Quick Launch toolbar. 

Thankfully it’s pretty simple to bring it back thanks to Microsoft Knowledge Base Article #975784, the instructions are very clear so I won’t recreate them in full here but essentially all you have to do is…

• Right-click on the taskbar and select Toolbars >> New Toolbar. 
• In the dialog box paste: “%AppData%\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch” and hit Select Folder. 
• Right-click on the Quick Launch toolbar and un-check Show Text and Show Title. 
• Right-click on the Quick Launch toolbar and select View >> Small Icons. 

Now you can carry on using Quick Launch as you did before by dragging and dropping shortcuts to and from the toolbar.

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.

32-Bit ODBC Drivers in Windows Server 2008 R2

Lately I’ve been taking advantage of my MSDN subscription (thanks to Ken Simmons‘ competition last month) and playing with some new technologies, initially experimenting with Windows Server 2008 R2. If you hadn’t heard prior to launch period, Microsoft made 2008 R2 64-bit only – probably the right decision to make but whilst the software industry is still making a transition from 32-bit to 64-bit there are bound to be some niggles here and there.

Being a database guy, one of the issues I noticed right away was that the ODBC Data Source Administrator accessible via Control Panel / Administrative Tools is the 64-bit version and can only be used to setup connections for 64-bit ODBC drivers. Not only was the 64-bit version missing the Postgres driver I had just installed, there were no drivers at all other than SQL Server…

It turns out that there are are two, entirely identical ODBC tools and the one that most of us will end up using initially (unless we’re lucky enough to have an all 64-bit architecture) is kept in the basement that is the c:\Windows folder. The 32-bit ODBC Data Source Administrator can be found by going to the Start Menu, selecting Run and executing c:\Windows\SysWOW64\odbcad32.exe as follows…

Once launched, you’ll see a tool that appears to be identical in every way, except that the ‘missing’ ODBC drivers are now available…

Please note that you can’t run both 32-bit and 64-bit tools at the same time so please make sure you close the 64-bit one first, it’s also worth bearing in mind that if you’re running 32-bit applications they will probably be looking for 32-bit DSNs so even if you can get a 64-bit driver for your data source it doesn’t mean that it’s the right thing to do.

As much as I understand Microsoft’s decision to stop developing 32-bit operating systems, a little bit of a helping hand during the transition period would’ve been nice - perhaps a second shortcut in the Administrative tools folder and the ability to run them simultaneously?  The whole thing seems like a confisuing mess in their own words…

The 32-bit version of the ODBC Administrator tool displays 32-bit system DSNs, 32-bit user DSNs, and 64-bit user DSNs. The 64-bit version of the ODBC Administrator tool displays 64-bit system DSNs, 32-bit user DSNs, and 64-bit user DSNs.  

To maintain backward compatibility, no resolution for this problem is currently available… to work around this problem, use the appropriate version of the ODBC Administrator tool.

I’ve made my own shortcuts to the 32-bit version and if you’re like me and constantly diving in and out of ODBC Administrator then you’ll probably want to do the same.

FTP MGET – Get Multiple Files Without Prompt

Every now and again I have to use FTP (and Secure FTP) from the command line, in fact it’s actually my preferred method as it keeps my knowledge of the syntax nice and sharp rather than relying on GUI clients (though if you do need a good free FTP, SFTP and FTPS application you should try FileZilla). 

Today I had to retrieve a set of log files from a supplier, we can use the MGET command to fetch multiple files using wildcards (e.g. *.csv) but the default behaviour of MGET is to ask the user to confirm that they want to download every file – not very convenient if you’re talking about tens of thousands of logs!  Instead of resting a book and a penlid on the ‘Y’ key (I’ve seen it done) you can turn off the interactive prompts simply by issuing the PROMPT command to toggle on/off the prompts. 

Additionally if you’d like your FTP responses to be less wordy you can use the VERBOSE command which will pare down responses to the minimum.