Black Clouds on the horizon

Last month’s outage of Amazon may have serious repercussions on the future of Cloud-based services and storage, and even business intelligence offerings in the cloud.

Like rolling blackouts, a disconnect from the cloud can kill business.  Uptime, especially for a large cloud provider, has to be seamless.  Like a hydro plant, it just has to work.

Although downtime for BI tools usually doesn’t equal the urgency of downtime for mail or web hosts, more than a day could be a killer for some apps.

Amazon outage sparks frustration, doubts about cloud - Computerworld

Lars Bjork of QlikTech, on Order vs. Bureaucracy - NYTimes.com

“Order is where you put a process into place because you want to scale the business to a different level.  Bureaucracy is where nobody understands why you do it. “

Lars Bjork of QlikTech, on Order vs. Bureaucracy - NYTimes.com

I would add, bureaucracy is where you put approvals for daily processes in place that exceed a single level of the company organization structure, and the company structure looks more like a family tree than a nicely trimmed hedge.

SQL Server Destination Vs OLE DB Destination and 64-bit Oracle Drivers

For some reason, SSIS team dropped the ball when dealing with 64-bit and SQL 2005.  Cryptic errors and non-working packages, and command-line workarounds were everywhere.  SQL 2008 has a “use 64-bit” option when scheduling the package.  However, there are still challenges with 3rd-party drivers.

Here’s a workaround to get Oracle 64-bit drivers going.

* Install Oracle 32 and 64 bit drivers, 11g i think, maybe first install 64 bit then 32 bit
* Install Attunity Oracle provider 64 bit
* Copy Visual Studio directory to new dir: C:\ProgFilesX86\

Should work now both in designtime (BIDS) and runtime (SSIS). Oracle is sensitive to () in the path of the calling app so everything under Program Files (x86) will fail. After normal installation of SQL Server, simply copy VS dir and start devenv.exe from there.

Use Attunity:s .NET provider in SSIS. Really fast and stable.

SQL Server Destination Vs OLE DB Destination

Glenn Berry's SQL Server Performance | Semi-random musings about SQL Server performance

Microsoft has always put limitations for licensing purposes on SQL Server.  Express edition could only use 2GB of RAM.  Standard edition was a laggard in terms of features in Analysis Services.  Most of the time this required our customers to purchase Enterprise edition, and possibly sacrifice a scale-out architecture for scaling-up.

Scale-up might not let you get around these limitations with SQL 2008 R2.  Datacenter edition might be the only option for those customers with > 8 CPUs.

What is new for SQL Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition and SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition, are more restrictive hardware license limits compared to the SQL Server 2008 versions of both of those editions.

SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition had no limit for the number of processor sockets, but was limited to 64 logical processors. SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition imposes a new limit of eight physical processor sockets, but will theoretically let you use up to 256 logical processors (as long as you are running on Windows Server 2008 R2). However, this is not possible, currently, since it would require a processor with 32 logical cores. As of April 2011, the highest logical core count you can get in a single processor socket is 20 (if you are using the new Intel Xeon E7 series). Also, the RAM limit for R2 has changed from “operating system limit”, as it was in the 2008 release, to a hard limit of 2TB.

SQL Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition  has a new RAM limit of 64GB. This lowered limit may catch many people by surprise, since it is very easy to have much more than 64GB of RAM, even in a two-socket server. You should keep this RAM limit in mind if you are buying a new server and you know that you will be using Standard Edition. One possible workaround for this limit would be to have a second or third instance of SQL Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition installed on the same machine, so you could use more than the 64GB limit for a single instance. The physical socket limit for SQL Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition is still four processor sockets.

Glenn Berry's SQL Server Performance | Semi-random musings about SQL Server performance

A Glimpse at Project Crescent - SQL Server Reporting Services Team Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

Project Crescent seems to fall into the “shiny tool” space that Crystal Xcelsius occupies.  From a presentation standpoint, it pops.  Will it be a daily reporting workhorse?  Let’s see.

Click on the Crescent logo below to play the Project "Crescent" teaser video and experience Project “Crescent” from the Microsoft Company meeting where we originally showed over 70’000 people for the first time this unique ability to bring data to life:

See the complete keynote at PASS Summit 2010 here: http://www.sqlpass.org/summit/na2010/

A Glimpse at Project Crescent - SQL Server Reporting Services Team Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

Coming out of Microsoft there are a few tools that really made me turn my head a couple times and go “wow”.  Data Analyzer, an OLAP tool from early 2000 was one of those.

It had the ability to save as PowerPoint, which Reporting Services and even Excel couldn’t do.  It was discontinued after Office XP.  It took PerformancePoint to bring that “export to PPT” feature back to life.  And I didn’t know more than 2 people who actually knew what it was or used it more than twice.

Another tool I found innovative was Site Server 3.0’s Content Management link map.  It was decision tree style 3D interface that let you browse through your site like a spider’s web, with the capability of zooming into the web.

Looked something like this but in 3-D!

The Wikipedia article on Site Server just about sums up many Microsoft “Product as a Solution” offerings targeted at the gray area between technical and business users.

On this front, Site Server's main advantage was its low cost. Another feature that might have been a source of confusion was the taxonomy management system. The tools used to maintain item metadata were very basic and required a degree of technical familiarity foreign to most business users.

Site Server was discontinued after it’s 3.0 release in 1998.

Sounds a lot like PerformancePoint Planning.  Let’s rephrase that.

On this front, PerformancePoint Planning’s main advantage was its low cost. Another feature that might have been a source of confusion was the model management system. The tools used to integrate data were very complex and required a degree of technical familiarity foreign to most business users.

In the end, all things were absorbed by Sharepoint, except perhaps for that cool link visualization tool, and PerformancePoint Planning. 

Perhaps, in the next version of Sharepoint, Microsoft will have another cube model builder with integrated dimension data management and a powerful set of financial reporting tools.  Maybe even a cool 3D hyperlink visualizer too…

Canada Post - Householder Counts and Maps / Nombre de chefs de ménage et cartes

Building an application requiring map or postal code info for Canada?  Learn about the number of residences or businesses by postal code using this service by Canada Post.  Also includes PDF boundary maps.

http://www.canadapost.ca/cpc2/addrm/hh/current/indexp/cpALL-e.asp

Another service (paid) provides an updated database of postal codes with detailed address and lat/long information.

http://www.zipcodeworld.com/postalcodegold.htm

Canada Post - Householder Counts and Maps / Nombre de chefs de ménage et cartes

Insights (Business Intelligence) Demo 1 Version 3 - iwdemos - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

Sharepoint Insights demos for BI.

Overview

This SharePoint and Office 2010 demonstration Content Pack provides the content and scripts to support Insights Demo 1.  The goal of this demo is to demonstrate and communicate the value of Business Intelligence (BI) in SharePoint 2010. We highlight some of the “eye-candy” components that pop, and demonstrate some of the Enterprise Content Management (ECM), social media, and enhanced search capabilities of SharePoint 2010 along the way.  Please note that this demo is not designed to “sell” a particular feature, BI solution, or application. Rather, it seeks to demonstrate a sweep of Microsoft BI solutions (except SRS). We aim to show that BI is not merely a backward-looking set of data analysis tools to be used by executive management or financial analysts.  Providing flexible BI solutions with SharePoint makes key business data accessible to mid-tier employees in an organization, to be used in daily decision-making and planning.  It is intended for use with a specific Virtual Machine listed in the Installation & Setup section.

Insights (Business Intelligence) Demo 1 Version 3 - iwdemos - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

Resources for Learning about Microsoft Business Intelligence - SQL Server and the Data Platform in the Field - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

A verbatim repost of a great training linkfest from Clint Kunz.

• If you are a technical developer, dba, administrator, etc... and need to quickly learn about the suite of tools that Microsoft offers to enable Business Intelligence, check out:
  • Knight's Microsoft Business Intelligence 24-Hour Trainer.
• This book recently released the 2nd edition as of this posting, is a great way to map the latest Microsoft's technologies to the Kimball methodology for Data Warehousing:
  • The Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit, 2nd Edition: With SQL Server 2008 R2 and the Microsoft Business Intelligence Toolset
• Subscribe to this Blog there is a very detailed set of technical training that will take you deeply into each aspect of creating solutions using each component of the Microsoft BI Stack:
  • Roger Doherty's SQL Server Evangelism Blog .
• Here is the direct link to the announcement of the Training Kit:
  • Announcing the SQL Server 2008 R2 Update for Developers Training Kit
• You can find SQLInsights on the MSDN Training and Certification Resources page at the following URL:
  • http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9761002
• Link to Bruno Aziza's Business Intelligence Blog:
  • http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bi/

Resources for Learning about Microsoft Business Intelligence - SQL Server and the Data Platform in the Field - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

WMIC - Windows Management

With 6000+ attributes available to monitor in Windows XP this command line tool is very underrated.

WMIC.exe

Windows Management Instrumentation Command.
Read a huge range of information about local or remote computers. Also provides a way to make configuration changes to multiple remote machines.

WMIC - Windows Management

Gartner Predicts the Future

I wonder what BI tool they’re using for that one… must be something in-house.

Four key BI predictions to help organizations plan for 2011 and beyond.

Gartner Business Intelligence Summit e-newsletter