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I have a BI project to be carried out using SQL Server 2008 and Cognos 8. Client seems to be using legendary adhoc/home grown applications. Where as some reports have been using an older version of Cognos. Client has no plan or what so ever as of now but in a real hurry to migrate all older version of Cognos reports to Cognos 8 (which they consider as the brand new version). Going forward Client also want to make reports available on Sharepoint with presently migrating .Net platform.
Given past exposure, I think, looking at all the underlying data/data sources required by the business users/their reports would be a better place to start, then followed by ETL, Data Warehousing to settle Database layer. That will give full performance management control over to BI platform. Where we can proceed with a prototype engaging meta data and presentation layers for a given business user object/department.
This is more of a brain-storming question that highly appreciates relevant ideas in terms of:
Better approach/better practice for planning a BI project on SQL Server/Cognos
Does it make sense to migrate old reports to new version of Cognos using IT resources or start on data sourcing/massaging with requirements gathering from business users? (as client is thinking out loud to integrate all other departments data/reporting into this BI platform in the future.) If latter is more inlined a successful project planning, how to convince the client?
Or should I share with the client that SQL Server 2008, specially 2012 MS BI is competent in BI, so wouldn't it be a huge cost cutting to use SQL Server/MS BI package totally instaed of mixing it with Cognos? (Client had not disclose any reason why they want to use Cognos at all)
Anyone who had used Cognos/SQL Server combo for BI, please provide with suggestions/tips/watch-outs/software-barriers(limits)/tips../2cents :)
Seems like a rather subjective question but here are some suggestions. Take them all with a grain of salt, as your situation and client situation is not, and cannot be fully described here.
Requirements drive technology choice, not the other way around. Consider the scalability requirements, maintainability (industry profesional availability and rates), etc. These are your "ilities" consider them carefully, and ask for clarification from the business where needed.
Consider additional or hidden costs/savings. SQL Server comes with analysis services, integration services, and integrates well with SharePoint.
Start small and move out. Agile methodology can work wonders, even though it has its own pitfalls. Find a project sponsor, someone in the business whose needs you can meet in a timely fashion. Deliver a quick, capable and competent solution. Other business units and users will take note, and you'll get buy-in much quicker and easier than just trying to convince people with charts and promises. Start creating value as quickly as possible.
You really don't want to waterfall a massive upgrade, in a single swoop. It's extremely difficult and likely to end in failure, at least in some form. Look up some of the SAP implementations undertaken by massive companies and the lawsuits and losses that follow (just as example, not out to get SAP).
Don't be afraid of a multi-phase project. It's easier to move from somewhat disjointed individual projects that were all built off SQL Server, SSIS, SSRS, and competent, modern, design to a unified whole, in a year, when the business loves you, than from multiple languages, platforms, architects and the array of data issues that come with that.
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I'm about to start a fresh project and I'm good on normalization of the data. My question is the business I'm working for has a number of tables on MS Sql Server and some version of Oracle. Access to create temporary or even use temporary tables may be limited. We might be able to setup our own tables but chances are 50/50. The approach taken in the past has been to create temporary tables as needed for data dumps into MS Access.
If I can edit / create tables on the SQL server then I'm good, but if not I was thinking about setting up one of the spare machines as a MySQL or MS Sql Express server rather than using Access as a number of these types of projects have been completed in the past and push towards a gig in size due to the amount of data downloaded for preparing reports. Would this be a reasonable approach if I'm locked out of MS Sql server or Oracle? What would you do if your hands were tied in a similar fashion?
To provide a little more insight here, the data dumps are often used to build dozens of excel reports (mostly charts). I was thinking if I can use the MS Sql or Oracle to do all the work via triggers / stored procedures / etc. then perhaps I can eliminate the need for Access and just download the data via VBA using Excel only to reduce the amount of time it takes to build the reports.
Maybe I can use an ORM and some kind of VB.net code rather than excel to build the charts faster?
I'm open to suggestions, let me know what you all think and any questions I'll try to answer the best I can
Although setting up a PC with something like SQL Server Express or MySQL often sounds like a great idea, I strongly suggest that you get the backing of your boss before doing something of this nature. Installing unapproved software on inappropriate/unmaintained workstations is often frowned upon with extreme prejudice. Were I to do this at my current place of employment I'm confident I'd be looking for a job as soon as it was uncovered. I completely agree that just about anything is better than MS Access - however, supporting an architecture such as the one you describe, at least temporarily until you can find a better gig, is probably better than unemployment. YMMV.
Share and enjoy.
Actually the most easy solution here would be to continue to use access as a front end, and simply link to the tables on the particular server database system in question. That way you save all the money time and resources of having to pull down and build temporary local tables.
The end result is you get to continue to use Access as a great RAD tool, but enjoy the benefits of the security, performance and scalability of the server based system in question.
Our organisation lacks any data mining or analytical tools, so I'm trying to persuade them to implement a Business Intelligence solution using Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2. They've asked for a prototype, so they can get a better idea of what Business Intelligence can do for them.
I'm assuming that the prototype will consist of -
A subset of data from a critical application
Integration Services (SSIS): Used to clean the data subset?
Analysis Services (SSAS): Used to create and maintain a dimensional model based on that data subset? Data Mining?
Reporting Services (SSRS): Used to create, maintain and update a 'dashboard' of reports.
I want to show how a Business Intelligence solution with data mining and analytic capabilities can help their organisation perform better.
As this is the first time I've done this, I'd value advice from other people on whether this prototype is realistic or not. And does anyone know of any easily-accessible real-life examples that I can show them?
my thoughts …
Don’t overestimate the size (in terms of time) of a new DWH project.
Start with something not very complex and well understood in terms of business rules.
The biggest problem we have had with new DWH projects/pilots (we are a DWH consultancy so have a number of clients) is getting management support of it. Often the DWH will be sponsored by someone in IT and there is no real board level support, so the project takes a long time to progress and it is difficult to get resources for it.
The best projects we have found are ones that have levels of support in three areas: Management (board level), IT and Business (preferably someone with good understanding of the business rules involved).
Have a look at Ralph Kimball’s Data Warehouse Toolkit which goes through different styles of DWH design for different industries. It is very good!
The tools I expect you would use (I’ve added a couple of technologies here)
SSIS (ETL tool) is used to Extract (from source systems) Transform (data into appropriate form the load) and Load (into Dim and Fact tables)
SSAS (OLAP tool) is used to create/process an OLAP cube. Warning: there is quite a large learning curve on this tool!!
SSRS (reporting tool) is used to create static and dynamic reports/dashboards.
MS Excel. There are free data mining models that can be added in and when connected to an OLAP cube which will allow very interesting DM to be performed.
Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS) (comes free with a Windows Server operating systems) to deploy your SSRS reports onto.
This is a good prototype scope in terms of technologies (if you are from the MS background), but the spread of technologies is very large and for one person coming in cold to them, this is perhaps unrealistic.
The most critical thing is to get the DWH star schema design correct (and there will be a number of solutions that are “correct” for any set of data), otherwise your OLAP cube design will be flawed and very difficult to build.
I would get a local DWH consultant to validate your design before you have built it. Make sure you give them a very tight scope of not changing much otherwise most consultants will “tinker” with things to make them “better”.
Good Luck!
It's been 2 years since the question was posted and of course, there has been updates in the world of business Intelligence. We now have couple of great tools for prototyping in the Microsoft Business Intelligence World:
- Power Query (Self Service ETL)
- Power Pivot.
Hope this helps someone just getting started w/ building prototypes.
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I have developed a web application driven by a mysql database that stores information about users, site usage, photo uploads (its a photo based site) etc. I have multiple databases storing data for different aspects of the site. I want to be able to produce reports for some of the questions I will have about how the site is growing and how it is being used. For example, how many new users have uploaded over a certain number of photos this month.
What tools are available to analyse databases - i have been using a trial version of microsoft access and exporting each of the database as an xml file and importing to access, where I created the relationships and used the query wizard to generate some queries and reports. These are the activities I want to do and they produced the reports I want to have. I also want to be able to run queries across databases...
What other tools to people use for this sort of task with mysql databases? Is there any good advice / training materials about the workflow for creating such reports and managing this activity over time - eg should I take weekly exports of databases and run the queries to generate the reports?
What are people's experiences of this type of task?
all advice, input welcome.
Welcome to business intelligence, the art of making information out of data.
A usual architecture is Source --> ETL --> Data warehouse --> Reporting tools
ETL : extract transform load (today you are copying your databases but some free tools can help you change that : CloverETL, Talend, etc...)
Data warehouse : this is the place where you put your data and prepare it to be easily used in reports
Reporting tools: many free tools exist today such as BIRT, JasperReports, etc... but I strongly recommend QlikView, the personal version is free (if you don't need to share your results), it's a very easy tool to use.
Speaking as someone who used to earn a living developing on MSAccess, I would strongly recommend using just about anything else.
Crystal reports is a good option. But IIRC the free version has disappeared.
You might also have a look at JasperReports, ReportMan, BIRT, DataVision and Agata
Have a look at myDBR a reporting solution based on PHP and mySQL. myDBR is very easy to install and lets you create reports within a few minutes.
You write your reports in SQL and myDBR then takes care of the layout and display of the report. This is different from most other solutions in that it allows you to concentrate on the content of your report instead of having to spend too much time on the look and feel.
Here is a short example on how you could create a usage statistic for your site:
select 'dbr.chart', 'Column', 'Usage statistics';
select name, count(*)
from user_access
group by name;
More examples are available at the myDBR demo site.
myDBR is available as a free community version and a paid premium version (129 EUR).
If you does not want download the data every time it seems a good idea to install a software on the server. If you want a reporting software on the server then which platform do you use on server?
If you can't install software on server then you can use a PHP-MySQL Bridge. A PHP script. With a JDBC driver you can access it. Then you can use a Java based reporting tool. For example the free (yet fully functional) designer from i-net Clear Reports (used to be i-net Crystal-Clear).
I'm investigating options for reporting on data in a custom salesforce application, since the built-in reporting tool is a bad joke.
The requirements are that the data needs to be accessible on-demand through the Salesforce website (likely through a web-tab, visualforce page, etc.), and must be able to do arbitrary joins of the tables, like ANY other relational database reporting tool. It is a huge plus to be able to give much of the specific report-design power to the end user, as well. Ideally it would play well with Oracle if an external DBMS is required, though this is not a strict requirement.
I hear good things about MS SQL Reporting Services, and there has been some talk around here about Crystal Reports. I'd be much obliged to get any thoughts and opinion on the various options and approaches out there.
It may be worth looking at tools similar to Teiid. What this does is provides a standard sql jdbc interface to any data source - including salesforce. With that in mind, that means you can then use any reporting tool. It also allows you to join across data sources etc.
I'm glad you call the current salesforce tool a joke! :)
As for reporting, we use Pentaho from the open source world, which is a very powerful tool, but does take some learning. Of course, the final decision wont just come down to functionality, but cost too, and this is where Pentaho is likely to win hands down. Pentaho plays very well with Oracle, and also MySQL too. (And many more dbs)
Finally you probably want to nail down your requirements a bit more. Do you need plain reporting, dashboards, more advanced analysis? Data mining? How far do you need to go..
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I'm thinking of using ASP.NET and MySQL together on a large project. Does anyone have any experience in using these two on a large scale and are there any aspects I should be wary of? If there is a chance that there could be compatibility issues, then I may be prepared to purchase an MSSQL license, but I'd rather go the free route right now. In theory it's possible, but how easy is it to transfer a MySQL database to and MSSQL database in the future?
Thanks
(I'll make this a CW if requested).
Mysql is quite capable as a database engine, although the performance optimization techniques that apply to mysql are obviously different from those that apply to SQL Server.
Some of the largest sites in the world use mysql - last I checked, YouTube ran mysql. So you definitely don't need a commercial product to get good performance.
You will have a lot of trouble porting a non-trivial mysql database to SQL Server or any other DBMS. There are major differences between platforms. I think you'll be much better off picking one platform and sticking to it.
As for ASP.NET, well, in my experience WebForms can be a bit slow, although the ASP.NET backend itself is also very efficient, as evidenced by the numerous large ASP.NET MVC apps out there (such as StackOverflow!)
Edit - are there problems with the combination of ASP.NET and mysql? Well, that depends. The mysql ADO.NET connector is solid and performs just as well as the SQL Server connector. Linq to SQL doesn't support mysql out of the box, although there are 3rd-party products such as LightSpeed which are supposed to do it well, and of course NHibernate supports it (although documentation is a bit harder to find, but that only matters when you're getting started).
In general you'll probably find less support for mysql-related issues in .NET, you might find that mysql is a second-class citizen in the .NET community, but both technologies are solid and both are perfectly capable of talking to each other.
If you have the money, I'd probably spring for SQL Server on account of the support factor alone, or even start out with SQL Express if it's a very small site, but again, there are no serious problems using .NET with mysql.
I dont have any info on the scalabilty, however to make your transition as smoothe as possible from MySql to MS SQL, you'll want to make sure your using either the Db abstract classes, or the IDB type interfaces on your data access layer. Probably best to only use ANSI SQL while you are at it.
Go ahead with SQL Server 2012 Express Edition ( which is free) and then the migration will be made on the fly in case you need to upgrade to SQL Server 2012 Standard Edition.