Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms- Microsoft is the leader - My Application Platform Quotes - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

Gartner is the leader in creating Magic Quadrants.  Microsoft is now the leader for Business intelligence, according to Gartner.

The niche market is becoming quite cluttered as the big players acquire and knock-out specialized tools in favour of mass markets and commoditization.  Panorama, a company I worked with in the past, seems to have fallen a bit out of favour.  Microstrategy is becoming a leader in the BI space and I think it’s a big potential acquisition target for one of the bigger vendors, if they decide to split their stock, and if the stock wasn’t as overvalued as it appears to be in my opinion.

With the stock on the way to $140/share, Microstrategy and it’s Ipad 2 strategy appears to be working.  MSTR has a market cap of under $2 billion.  Microsoft has $217 billion. IBM - $200 billion. Oracle - $172 billion. Apple - $317 billion(!)

There should be more consolidation in the future… but perhaps MSTR will be staying independent for awhile longer…

Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms- Microsoft is the leader - My Application Platform Quotes - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

Data Warehouse versus Business Intelligence - Executing a business service with precision - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

Daniel Rubiolo blog about his view of Business Intelligence, with some great metrics on the components and percentage of resources dedicated to a BI solution.

The traditional definition of “data warehouse, or DW” from late ‘70s/early ‘80s involved the end-to-end solution for business users… from extracting data and aggregating it into special data models, the queries, all thru the applications/reports the users interacted with to consume that data.

According to Daniel, a BI project is 70% getting the data and 30% showing it off.  I would suggest it fits with the 80/20 rule in most cases.  80% of the time and effort in a BI project would be sourcing the data and gathering requirements, designing, developing, testing, and deploying a solution.  20% of the time would be adjusting and presenting reports.

This is probably why PowerPivot is such a favourite for power users, since they don’t necessarily require outside IT resources to build their models.  It becomes a 50/50 game with a faster ROI.  However, scalability and maintainability of a solution that resides on a user’s desktop remains in question.  The “hit by a bus” rule makes desktop-based custom models a potentially risky solution for a business

Data Warehouse versus Business Intelligence - Executing a business service with precision - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

Business Intelligence Recap of 2010 - Microsoft Business Intelligence - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

Emilie Bridon provides a BI recap of 2010 in the Microsoft space.

The one that has me interested is BISM.  Sounds like it might finally provide a central “one truth” version of your metadata.  However the limitation of requiring Visual Studio might kill any hopes of leveraging it from a pure business perspective.  Users that I work with need to be able to manage their data without an IT gatekeeper.

Can’t see anything else that excites me a whole lot with the BI space in 2010, except perhaps with Social media.  It was truly an acquisition and consolidation year…

Business Intelligence Recap of 2010 - Microsoft Business Intelligence - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

Michael J Swart - Database Whisperer

 

Michael posts his Study Plan for 70-433 exam and details on SQL 2005 support

Yesterday was April 12, 2011, and as far as I know mainstream support for SQL Server 2005 ended. See Aaron Bertrand’s A Quick Note About SQL Server 2005 Mainstream Support.

Michael J Swart - Database Whisperer

Upgrading to SQL 2008 R2

With SQL 2005 support expiring shortly, the move is on to switch to SQL 2008 R2 (why would you switch to just SQL 2008?)

Running upgrade advisor before the upgrade is a must.  However, some of the warnings could safely be ignored rather than changing a potentially large codebase.

I have seen many people asking how shall they move towards upgrading their SQL Server 2000 Database to SQL Server 2008. I thought of putting together an article based on my experience where I have migrated many servers from SQL Server 2000 to 2008. This particular Article is about analyzing incompatible code which is a MUST step in my view. At end of this article, I have compiled list of various errors/warning that you may come across after running analysis tool.

SQLVillage.com

Using Quest’s Spotlight?

Watch for the performance effects of running SQL Analysis on a production box.  It is running a firehose client-side trace from the Spotlight server to the SQL Server.

Based on your information, it would appear that someone in your group may be using SQL Analysis or session trace in the product. SQL Analysis is a schedulable utility that initiates a SQL Trace based on the criteria you specify - if it's enabled with the collection type default and only the options on the initial screen specified, you may be running a continuous client-side trace without any filtering to capture the various statement/procedure/RPC events. Session-level tracing initiated if someone clicks into a specific SPID (session_id) and then selects the trace tab, so it's a less likely option.

Spotlight on SQL Server Ent. 701 - ... | SQL Server | Database Management Community | Quest Software

All the Pieces: Microsoft Cloud BI Pieces, Part 1 - SQL Server BI Blog

The basics of using SSIS to load SQL Azure for a BI Cloud solution, part 1.

All the Pieces: Microsoft Cloud BI Pieces, Part 1 - SQL Server BI Blog

Migration Wizard
http://sqlazuremw.codeplex.com/

Pricing for SQL Azure
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlazure/purchase.aspx

Microsoft BizSpark for qualifying companies
http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/

Stored Procedure Recompiles and performance

Recompiles to a stored procedure can cause performance issues.  Other than WITH RECOMPILE, sp_configure, or a server restart, what else can cause a recompile?

We often use SET option in stored procedure without realizing if it can cause performance problem. I was working on Critical Database Performance issue recently arguing on SET option causing recompile without realizing which one causes or which one not. Moreover I came across in situation when some experts mentioned that "set isolation level read uncommitted" and "set nocount on" are causing recompilation. Whereas truth is these options DO NOT cause recompilation. So I thought of putting following list available handy for reference whenever we write code or optimize code or find stored procedure recompiling due to "set option changed".

SQLVillage.com

Installing SQL Server 2008 - Developer.com

Step by step to installing a vanilla SQL 2008 server.

Installing SQL Server 2008 - Developer.com

Brent Ozar - Too Much Information

Brent goes into detail about how important functional requirements are versus fuzzy requirements.

do you want it to be 10% faster, 100% faster, or 1,000% faster?”

Brent Ozar - Too Much Information

1000% please….

Statistics in SQL and Finance

Correlation is important when dealing with risk management or forecasting calculations.  The closer to 1 you are, the closer the numbers are correlated.  Consider if you purchase GOOG and MSFT stock.  Since they are both in the tech sector, they could be part of a combined selloff, which means your risk is increased if you own both in your portfolio.

The Select Sector SPDRs Correlation Tracker identifies GOOG as being 0.46 correlated to MSFT, which appears low. 

You can use Correlation for forecasting results and determining trends in SQL.  Consider this query:

SELECT (COUNT(*)*SUM(x.Sales*y.Sales)-SUM(x.Sales)*SUM(y.Sales))/( SQRT(COUNT(*)*SUM(SQUARE(x.Sales))-SQUARE(SUM(x.Sales)))* SQRT(COUNT(*)*SUM(SQUARE(y.Sales))-SQUARE(SUM(y.Sales)))) correlation FROM BulbSales x JOIN BulbSales y ON x.month=y.month WHERE x.Year=1997 AND y.Year=1998

Transact-SQL Cookbook: Chapter 8: Statistics in SQL

If the correlation is closer to 1, the numbers are similar.  Comparing various years and months of sales or expenses can easily uncover correlations.  This could also work for tracking correlation dependencies between expenses and revenue.

SQL has a number of formulas that are useful for identifying patterns and trends in your data.

Alerting for PerformancePoint and Excel

Bidoma is an email/desktop alerting engine that notifies of changes to Excel worksheets and PerformancePoint dashboards. Could be a good measure for spreadsheet controls, master data management and timely responses to KPI changes.

Our Products | Bidoma.com

Dashboard Design - the definitive guide

Paul Turley has a list of books and articles to read around dashboard design.

I will begin by reviewing these books and discuss the pros, cons and the applicability to the subject of dashboard and KPI design using the Microsoft product stack.

https://sqlserverbiblog.wordpress.com/2010/12/16/dashboard-and-kpi-designthe-definitive-industry-standard-2/