Burn the Ships

Although it’s probably an apocryphal story, legend has it that Cortez instructed his men to “Burn the Ships” upon encountering the New World. This has become (in my parlance, anyway) a catchphrase for being irrevocably committed to a particular course of action. In that spirit, yesterday I blew away v1 of my website and started up this version. […]

Time (Not Date) Dimension Table SQL code

I am seeing more call for Time Dimensions. By that I mean Time-of-Day Dimensions. So now I have to retrain myself to call Date Dimensions “Date” and Time Dimensions “Time”.As a follow up to this post, here’s some DDL and a quick routine to generate a time of day table. The resolution is to the […]

Adventures with Virtualization

Those of us needing to run BI software in virtual environments are well familiar with the challenges of getting things running smoothly, especially if you are using a laptop as your lab or demo environment. We have a new set of challenges with Windows 7, and with SharePoint 2010. Challenge #1 – SharePoint 2010 requires 64 […]

Brilliantly stupid MDX debugging technique

Whenever I do something really stupid, rather than keep it to myself, I prefer to blog about it for the entire world to see. Even better – I came up with a debugging technique to save myself from my own, er, stupidity.The scenario is this: I am developing some SQL Server Analysis Services Date Calculations […]

Devils and Angels of BI Architecture

Devil: You don’t need to set up a separate star schema databaseAngel: Yes you do. We don’t want to interfere with the operational systemsDevil: It’s sooo much workAngel: We want to create a simplified schema to benefit our end usersDevil: Phooeh. ETL is BORINGDevil: Just query the source system directlyDevil: What could be better than […]

The “Million Dollar” BI Architecture Diagram

Anyone who has worked with me or taken training from me has seen some variant of this diagram. It’s not an original concept, although this version has been refined to include my personal experience with many Business Intelligence implementations, as well as my bias towards both the Kimball Business Dimensional methodology and using Microsoft SQL […]

Example Code to build and populate a Date Dimension

OK, I’ve found myself searching for this code a half dozen times over as many weeks. That tells me that I : a) Need to keep better track of my source code b) Need to share it on my blog Caveats & Comments: This is “warts and all” utility code. It could be optimized, but […]

Is Business Intelligence your company’s “Tree of Souls” ?

(Minor Avatar spoilers below – in case you’re one of the 3 people who hasn’t seen it yet)I was driving to a clients this past week and just free-associating, listening to an NPR segment about the movie Avatar and also thinking about this upcoming Business Intelligence implementation.In the movie, “Avatar”, the “Tree of Souls” is […]

Windows 7’s ‘GodMode’

Weird but cool – nice way to shortcut steps in W7: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10423985-56.html?tag=rtcol;pop or video http://cnettv.cnet.com/enable-godmode-windows-7/9742-1_53-50081662.html?tag=mncol

Dec 8th, 2009 ITA BI Roundtable Presentation

On Dec 8th, I was fortunate to present an overview of SQL Server 2008 Integration Services to the Illinois Technology Association’s Business Intelligence Roundtable. The actively-involved participants had many questions. Here are links to all of the prerequisite, supplemental, and follow-on resources we discussed: Dimension Design (aka Star Schema) Methodology: The Data Warehouse Toolkit: The […]