12 articles in this selection

2010/12/03

Interesting comparison of in-memory visualization tools: Spotfire, QlikView, Tableau, MS PowerPivot

2010/11/13

2010/11/13

If there is one thing that I don't want to be these days is a program manager on the Analysis Services team. After the WOW announcement at SQL PASS about PowerPivot going corporate under a new name, Business Intelligence Semantic Model (BISM), there were a lot of questions and negativity from the SSAS community and not much encouragement. Your humble correspondent did his own share of bashing and probably burned a few bridges along the way. For some obscure reason, Microsoft this time decided to keep MVPs and community leaders in the dark until PASS, so I was as unprepared as the rest of the community. I was told that corporate BI would be a major focus in Denali, which I interpreted as enhancements to UDM, only to find out that all the buzz is about BISM…To its credit, the SSAS team was quick in its attempt to cover the collateral damages as we could see in the posts below from Amir Netz and T.K. Anand....

2010/11/13

he purpose of this article is to elaborate on the BI Semantic Model and how it compares to the existing BI models in the Microsoft BI stack, specifically the UDM (OLAP models) and SMDL (report models). Very simply put, the BI Semantic Model is a relational (tables and relationships) model with BI artifacts such as hierarchies and KPIs. It unifies the capabilities of SMDL models with many of the sophisticated BI semantics from the UDM. However it does not replace the UDM....

2010/10/17

Last week I pulled a new pair of running shoes out of the box and laced them up. As much as I love running and a pristine new pair of shoes, I have no intention of giving up my bicycle or car and running everywhere in my new shoes! All these methods of locomotion have a proper place in my life. This summer, business intelligence (BI) users and technologists everywhere are eyeing a shiny new pair of “shoes” called PowerPivot. Some users are imagining a world free of IT reliance where they can run anywhere and do anything all by themselves. Others are a bit afraid of the new shoes and want to keep using the tried and true bicycle and car for everything. Many are just confused about exactly what, when and how they are supposed to use these new shoes....

2010/09/27

I recently had the pleasure of attending a Microsoft Solutions for Business Intelligence seminar in Dublin. A large portion of the day was focused around Microsoft's new "In-Memory" B.I component PowerPivot. PowerPivot enhances the B.I capabilities of Microsoft Excel and was on more than one occasion referred to as "Excel on Steroids". It is being marketed as "Self Service BI" which has the potential to empower the end user to find the answer for themselves provided they can access the appropriate data sources. This sounds good in principle but without the content management facility provided by SharePoint it could intensify the silos of information that currently exist with Microsoft Excel leading to more versions of the truth. My initial reaction to the tool is that I am quite familiar with many facets of it from my Qlikview and Qliktech experience. It is testament to Qliktech and their growth that Microsoft should adopt such a similar methods....

2010/09/19

Boris Evelson's blog with recommendations on the approach to comparing in-memory analytic tools, mainly QlikView, Spotfire & PowerPivot. With some interesting replies on the differences between these three tools.

2010/09/12

To be taken with a grain of salt: For years, BI vendors have promised a way for managers to easily build their own reports from scratch, without the help of IT staff. Now, with the release of Microsoft Office 2010, managers are finding they can do these tasks using a powerful new Excel feature, called PowerPivot. And, by its ease of availability if nothing else, this feature is promising to shake up the field of BI....

2010/08/28

One of the many things that delights me about PowerPivot is the central role played by the Star Schema. Those of you reading with a data-warehousing background would shrug your shoulders and say: “So what, what else would you expect to find at the core of a BI tool?”. Those from an Excel PivotTable background would ask: “What’s a Star Schema, why do we need one,what’s wrong with a the good old-fashioned single flattened table?”. Those from a classic MOLAP background (Essbase, TM1, Palo) might also ask: “Why do we need this extra layer? Load the cube directly from the operational data model and get on with it!”. A quick Q&A is perhaps the best way for me to explain why star schema design is a powerful skill in a datasmith’s toolset....

2010/08/18

A week or so Darren Kerfoot of QlikPower, a QlikView consultancy, wrote a thought-provoking blog about "PowerPivot from a QlikView standpoint." Please do read it: I found it nicely balanced. The thought it provoked in me, and which I tweeted, half joking, was that I might blog from the other side of the fence. I was quite surprised by the number who said I should. So here goes ... what does QlikView look like from the PowerPivot standpoint?...

2009/05/28

Gemini is designed to look as much like Excel as possible, so its data will look like a set of Excel tables. Anyone familiar with Excel 2007 tables (which is still probably only a small minority of the hundreds of millions of the world’s Excel users) will immediately feel at home. However, Gemini tables are actually stored as highly compressed, column-indexed, in-memory objects, not Excel worksheets. They are viewed and manipulated in the new Gemini client window, not in the Excel worksheet itself....

2009/03/06

Webcast from QlikTech on the future of BI