Posts Tagged ‘Brent Ozar’

SAP BI 4.0 / Business Objects XI Release 4 Launch Rundown

Today I attended the SAP BI 4.0 launch event at the Royal College of Physicians in Regent’s Park London, the first major launch event for Business Objects since being firmly under the SAP banner lending it a degree of expectation amongst the BO user community.  With all said and done the day had a slightly unusual structure, interleaving the “new features” sessions with “the future of BI” and “other interesting stuff” talks so the remainder of this post covers the main themes of the day and the “big picture” topics whilst I’ve broken out the new features into a “What’s New in Business Objects XI Release 4 / SAP BI 4.0?” post.

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.

SQLBits 7 – Friday Conference Rundown

Many people only attend the free ‘Community Day’ of SQLBits and I can understand why given the cost (£125) for the Friday sessions but if SQL Server is how you make your living I really do think it’s worth the money.  It’s not even that the Friday sessions are significantly different in content, it’s really just more of the same high level of quality you get on Saturday but when it comes to SQLBits more is definitely better.

It’s always a tough choice picking which sessions to attend so it’s often best to go with speakers you know will be good so despite having spent the entire previous day with Maciej Pilecki in the SQLBits Training Day I made my first session Maciej’s SQL Server Statistics talk.  Despite a few initial technical gremlins the talk went well and gave a few insights into how statistics are used by the query optimiser with the key takeaways being to always keep both AUTO_CREATE_STATISTICS and AUTO_UPDATE_STATISTICS turned on, to consider turning on AUTO_UPDATE_STATISTICS_ASYNC (does not force queries to wait for stats to be updated but subsequent queries will benefit) and to run sp_updatestats after any major updats or to reindex your tables periodically.

My next session was Brent Ozar‘s Virtualisation and SAN talk, this gave me a whole load of questions to go back to my SAN Administrator with as well as a whole load of tests I intend to perform before I deploy my next Data Warehouse on a Hyper-V guest.  One concept that was completely new to me was the Balloon Driver that hypervisors use to encourage Windows to free-up RAM, since SQL Server is a good citizen it can end-up flushing the entire Buffer Pool and wrecking your performance – the solution is to ensure that Dynamic Memory is disabled in the Hyper-V Manager.  Some great related resources can be found at…

• BrentOzar.com/go/SAN
• BrentOzar.com/go/PerfMon
• BrentOzar.com/go/SQLIO

The lunchtime sponsor talk I chose was the one from Quest that covered IT Horror Stories, it was a brilliant session with plenty of audience interaction and steered clear of pimping any specific Quest products but instead just showed that the people that work there are experienced, pragmatic and generally just nice guys.  I think this approach is far better than the extended product demos that many software companies tend to give as their lunchtime sessions as they’ll only be of interest if you’re genuinely considering the product and if you’re not they’ll do little to increase brand awareness with a room full of bored people on Twitter of Facebook.

After lunch I went for Buck Woody‘s talk on Business Continuity which provided a few simple paths and the crucial tasks to help get people started on a business-relevant disaster recovery strategy.  I was particularly impressed with one of the central themes of the talk which was (I’m reading between the lines a little) that even if you think it’s ‘not your job’ to put a DR plan in place, it’s likely that as the company’s ‘Data Professional’ people will still look to you in times of failure and if you’ve already done all of the planning you’ll be the guy with a calm head solving the problem and if you’re not that guy – start getting your CV ready.  Despite having heard the name and having read a few of his blog posts over the years I’d never heard Buck speak and he’s great so if you get the chance to see him you definitely should.

Well that wraps-up the day nicely, I’ll be posting Saturday’s round up soon after I’ve written it!

SQLBits V: Highlights from Friday Morning

Having attended the SQL Bits conference in Newport last month I decided to collate the little tips and tricks I learned at the event, here are my highlights from Friday morning’s talks.

Simon Sabin kicked off the talks with a session on SQL Server 2008 Development Features, I’ve not had a good chance to try them out myself since I’m not on 2008 yet but the real highlight is the addition of the DATE and TIME data types – see my other post DATE and TIME Data Types in SQL Server 2008.

Management Studio now includes Intellisense which as been available in Visual Studio for a long time, it will automatically offer suggested keywords as well as table/object names whilst you type and can dramatically speed up your SQL writing.  Also new in SSMS is the ability to debug your code and step through it line by line, the debugger will even step into and out of stored procedures and user-defined-functions – this will be a life saver for anyone working with a complex web of SPs.

Following Simon’s talk I headed into the intriguingly names T-SQL Tuning with Colin Chapman, Enzo Ferrari, and The Stig by Brent Ozar – with a title like that how could I not go?  The talk turned out to be a great one and Brent’s a very entertaining speaker but all the time you get the feeling that he really knows what it feels like to be a DBA with production issues.  Most of my notes from Brent’s talk don’t type-up well but he’s got some excellent resources on his site at http://brentozar.com/go/faster so please do check those out, my personal ‘take homes’ from his talk were to mine the DMVs for performance data, to use mirroring as a way to manage uptime during OS/SQL patch cycles, use a text-file to build a change log on servers and to read the Microsoft whitepaper on index defragmentation.