My colleagues Matt Feltham and Ian Marritt were presenting at the SQLBits V Conference last year, and the videos from the sessions are now available online. Titles link to the SQLBits site, Screencaps link to the videos directly in Windows Media format. Note that although the video templates indicate this is “SQLBits III in September 2008”, this was in fact that last SQLBits conference in 2009!

Matt Feltham – Data Visualisation with Bing Maps for Enterprise

Ian Marritt – An Introduction to Master Data Services

The rest of the sessions from SQLBits are available here: http://www.sqlbits.com/News.aspx?Title=SQLBits%20Videos%20available%20now%20available

Day one of my SharePoint 2010 adventure and I'd like to share a workaround that I've found quite helpful as I've run across some minor difficulties in deploying my solution.

After making changes to one or more web parts in my solution I'll occasionally receive the following error while trying to redeploy:
"Error occurred in deployment step 'Retract Solution': the language-neutral solution package was not found"

I have yet to discover the underlying cause of this error, but I've found the simplest solution to be to temporarily adjust the active deployment configuration of the project.  Here's what I did:

 * Right-click on the SharePoint project and choose "Properties"
 * Select the "SharePoint" tab
 * Create a new active deployment configuration selecting all of the available deployment steps except "Retract Solution" (no need to worry about the retraction steps obviously)
 * Click "OK" to return to the SharePoint properties
 * Select your new active deployment configuration from the drop-down list and save your changes.
 * Redeploy your solution
 * Don't forget to change your active deployment configuration back to the proper selection (most likely "Default")

Hopefully this will take care of your deployment error as easily as it did for me.

One thing I’m really looking forward to in 2010 is the release of OBIEE version 11g, sadly we have been looking forward to this for a while, but it seems the wait is nearly over. I thought I would list some of the new features I am most looking forward to, based on the demos and presentations I have seen over the last year and various notes I have scribbled.

1. New start page for the UI – This doesn’t seems to have changed much from one demo to another over the last twelve months, which is a good sign, it looks more up to date and similar to other vendors offerings. There is a familiarity to graphical browsing by folders that most people should feel comfortable with.

2. OLAP support – As the core of Altius’ Oracle business are Essbase and Hyperion planning, I see better Essbase support as critical to successful deployment of OBIEE as the reporting platform for such applications, whilst the support in version 10 is ok, and Oracle have worked to iron out many of the bugs, there is still a lot that could be done, things like switching between member names and aliases, and full support for attribute dimensions.

3. Pivot tables – ok this is a bit cheeky as it could be included above, but it is such an important item. Although there is a lot one can do with the current pivot tables once one knows the tricks, the new pivot tables with member based drill in place will be a massive improvement.

4. Improved charting and visualization – I must admit to not having seen a lot of these much vaunted improvements, but the mock ups looked good. In truth these probably represent OBIEE catching up with some of the competition, but they are sure to be eye catchers welcomed by the sales team and things like range or time line sliders do also add value through improved usability.

5. Mapping and spatial integration – Although possible in the current version of OBIEE, it isn’t that straight forward and users have high expectations thanks to the likes of Google maps .

6. Scorecards, KPI’s and cause and effect maps – Not every ones cup of tea, and not suited to all deployments, but these have been BI staples for a long time and appear in a number of other vendors offerings.

7. Action framework and BPM – As the need to audit and regulate grows, these two things could become increasingly important, especially where a business needs to ensure a particular course of action based on business rules.

ADF and customisation – Last but not least I’m really keen to see how customisation and extension of the OBIEE core can be handled in ADF. ADF already has the widgets to use an OBIEE repository as a data source, it will be interesting to see how the other side of the relationship works.

Something I remembered after my last blog was that whilst using OBIEE on a WebLogic platform I realized that there would be differences in the deploying of custom css classes. The usual rules regarding the custom.css file found in

OracleBI\web\app\res\s_oracle10\b_mozilla_4\custom.css

and copied to OracleBIData\web\res don’t appear to apply, and obviously the location in the oc4j_bi folder isn’t going to apply either.

After much fiddling about it turns out the only way that appears to work is to copy the s_oracle10 folder and save a custom version to your systems equivalent of this location: C:\bea\user_projects\domains\WL_OBIEE\servers\OBIEE\tmp\_WL_user\OBIEE\u23xcw\war\res. It appears that this is the only location it needs to be copied to.

Create your custom class.

Apply your class to an appropriate report element, and save the changes.

Clear your browser cache and refresh the view.

To alter the class just edit the file.

Clear the browser cache and refresh the view, couldn’t be simpler.

N.B These colours were chosen just to make the demo obvious!

Having recently installed OBIEE in a multi server environment using WebLogic for the presentation services, I thought the following might be useful especially to those unfamiliar with WebLogic. As you are probably aware WebLogic has replaced Oracle Application Server as the go forward AS product, but at the moment there isn’t an integrated installation option for OBIEE, presumably this is being saved for OBIEE v11. When you install, opt for the ‘Basic’ option and follow the steps as if intending to use OC4J.

Once you have installed OBIEE, it’s best to create a dedicated WebLogic domain and server, all this really means is creating a new instance of web logic which will run in it’s own JVM, and can therefore have it’s own memory allocation etc.

Create a WebLogic domain.

The Weblogic configuration wizard is so simple to follow I haven’t bothered with screen shots for each step.

Launch the WebLogic Configuration Wizard.

Select the option to 'Create a new WebLogic domain'.

Generate a domain configured automatically to support the following products: (default selection only)

Enter username and password.

Accept the default SUN SDK.

Select ‘YES’ to alter the default Environment and Services settings.

Do not alter the RDBMS settings, click next.

Change the Listen Port for the Admin server to 7002 or as appropriate to your system.

Do not configure any managed servers.

Configure the machine setting appropriate to the machine your are installing on.

Assign the Admin Server to the machine.

Review the domain, click ‘Next’.

Enter an appropriate domain name and accept the default location.

Click the ‘Create’ button.

Check the ‘Start Admin Server’ box and click ‘Done’.

Your new domain will appear under ‘User Projects’ (assuming you accepted the default location). Start the Admin Server, wait for the process to complete (cmd window) then launch the admin server console.

Once logged in, this is what you see.

.

The next step is to create a new server instance.

Name your server and set the listen port, these will become important in the OBIEE URL.

Click ‘Next’, then ‘Finish’, you will now see two servers listed, click the OBIEE server to open the properties.

On the ‘General’ tab the settings should be as you entered earlier, select the Machine name from the drop down list.

Click ‘Server Start’.

In this screen you need to set the following, plus anything appropriate to your environment:

Java Home:

C:\bea\jdk150_12

Java Vendor:

Sun

BEA Home:

C:\bea

Root Dir:

C:\bea\user_projects\domains\WL_OBIEE_domain

Classpath:

C:\bea\jdk160_05\lib\tools.jar;C:\bea\wlserver_10.3\server\lib\weblogic-spring.jar;C:\bea\wlserver_10.3\server\lib\weblogic.jar;

C:\bea\wlserver_10.3\server\lib\webservices.jar;

Click ‘Save’, then on the Domain Structure navigator panel click servers to return to the Summary of Servers, click the Control tab and check the box next to OBIEE and click Start.

The next step is to actually deploy the OBIEE presentation services on the WebLogic platform.

Create a new folder with a clearly descriptive name, such as OBIEE_Deployment, and copy into it the Analytics.war file from the OracleBI\web folder, now open a command prompt.

At the command prompt type the following command to unpack the analytics.war archive.

You will see a scrolling list of messages beginning ‘inflated: ‘ as the file is unpacked.

Once this process has completed, the exploded archive can be deployed. Return to the WebLogic admin console and follow these steps:

In the navigator, click ‘Deployments’.

Click ‘Install’.

Select your deployment folder, and click next.

On the next screen select ‘Install this deployment as an application’, and click 'Next'.

Select OBIEE as the deployment target, and click 'Next'.

Name your deployment, and select the appropriate security model.

Ensure the deployment folder path is correct and select as shown below.

Click 'Next', and on the next screen click Finish.

Under the current setup the URL for OBIEE would be something like

http://Address/OBIEE_Deployment/saw.dll?Dashboard, to eliminate the _Deployment element of this, drill into the OBIEE properties and click the configuration tab, scroll down the screen and enter an appropriate name.

Your URL will now be a bit tidier,

http://Address/OBIEE/saw.dll?Dashboard

Apologies for the length of this post, but I hadn’t seen all this information together in one place before.

Want to try out PowerPivot for Excel 2010 yourself, but don’t have time or resources to build a demo system? Now you can get 2 hours in a virtual lab (Powered by Hyper-V) to get to grips with it:

Click here to connect to the Lab (IE Only since it needs ActiveX):

https://cmg.vlabcenter.com/default.aspx?moduleid=ad3bd3e9-8d2b-498d-94fa-e41e1b09730d

It’s not too slow considering the number of people which must be assaulting the servers right now :)

Ignore the CPU in the above screenshot, the important things to note are the nearly 4 million rows loaded into memory on a box with 4GB of RAM, and the VertiPaq engine is not pushing very much memory at all.

Adding a calculated column (note the 4 million row count), and the Intellisense in the Formula bar.

The Calculated Column (Profit) was applied against all 4million rows and the screen refreshed. Shown also the contents of the PivotTable drop down.

The Pivot chart and table with Horizontal and Vertical slicers shown (lab steps on the far right).

Note that there’s some weirdness in this lab as you follow it through which doesn’t quite match up to the intended results in the lab screenshots (i.e. selecting the GeographyKey as the slicer will give you the ids, not the Country names as depicted in the screenshots), but it gives you an excellent grounding in the basics of getting data into Excel through PowerPivot and applying the slicers and working with the chart and PivotTable (PowerPivotTable?) controls.

Give the Virtual Lab a try today and see PowerPivot in action for yourself!

Hat tip to the PowerPivotGeek for this one.

In a naming move that will surprise very few people that have seen generations of Microsoft naming conventions come and go (Numbers .. no random letters … no names … ah no wait, the numbers were better …), Microsoft Live Labs have just announced Microsoft Live Labs Pivot. Not to be confused with PowerPivot. Which is more .. erm … powerful.

So, what is Live Labs Pivot?

Currently it’s invitation only, but it’s essentially a consumer oriented data visualisation experiment for exploring large amounts of web based data (so called Collections).

Can we call it BI if it’s really intended for consumers to go exploring? Perhaps we should coin the term CI for Consumer Intelligence. You heard it here first (EDIT: or perhaps not).

Technology wise, it’s a WPF client using Microsoft’s SeaDragon DeepZoom technology and the visualisations are primarily collections of images to represent data points. So it’s pretty, but is it useful?

Looking at the introductory video (and you really should, static images don’t so it justice), you can see that actually, Microsoft have used their flash whizz bang WPF and SeaDragon UI to create a genuinely immersive experience for exploring large amounts of data in an engaging way. I dare say even Stephen Few would be pleased to see that the elements which comprise the volumes on individual bars on a bar chart are actually expressed as small visual representation of the individual component:

When you filter and sort the elements smoothly fly in and out and really give the user a sense of how they contribute to the whole.

It seems fast, it looks good – it’s something that I would want to use. This is about making information from huge public data sources more discoverable. It’s clean, it’s simple – someone has been paying attention to usability amidst the eye candy too.

Bing recently tied up with Wolfram Alpha, combining the benefits of traditional search with the brave new world of the Answer Engine.

With the recent announcement of Microsoft PinPoint (Dallas), Microsoft’s Information Services business – billed as “enabling developer and information workers to instantly find, purchase, and manage dataset to power the next set of applications – powered by premium content”, they’ve also got the capability to provide some more serious content to plug into here too. I wonder if they’ll be adding “Pivot enriched” options with those Dallas datafeeds which include the necessary image collections to fulfil that rich Pivot experience?

As BI consultants we know the power of information – Microsoft are leading the next generation of internet consumers into an age when this kind of data visualisation and intelligent data discovery is the standard, not the exception, and consumers will start demanding ever more open and cleanly defined data from providers to enable these kinds of ad hoc query experiences.

Consumer Intelligence – Shiny tools for the masses. I like it!

I await my invitation with interest Live Labs team :)

Another excellent utility to have in your toolbelt – a free utility from Microsoft’s Mark Russinovich’s sysinternals stable – Disk2VHD. In a nutshell, converts a physical hard disk to a VHD while it’s still online through the wonders of Volume Snapshot

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ee656415.aspx

“Disk2vhd is a utility that creates VHD (Virtual Hard Disk - Microsoft’s Virtual Machine disk format) versions of physical disks for use in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). The difference between Disk2vhd and other physical-to-virtual tools is that you can run Disk2vhd on a system that’s online. Disk2vhd uses Windows’ Volume Snapshot capability, introduced in Windows XP, to create consistent point-in-time snapshots of the volumes you want to include in a conversion. You can even have Disk2vhd create the VHDs on local volumes, even ones being converted (though performance is better when the VHD is on a disk different than ones being converted).

The Disk2vhd user interface lists the volumes present on the system:”

Sadly, this cannot be used on Windows Server 2000 … which was the server I was looking to P2V :( Ah well …

Yesterday at Tech·Ed Europe, Microsoft announced the official release of their Bing Maps v1.0 Silverlight control. This is great news as the Silverlight 3.0 offering of the Bing Maps control takes their existing Ajax control offering to the next level by providing a richer user experience. This is especially evident through the deep zoom capabilities offered by Silverlight and overall richer graphical features. To see an example of the user experience the Silverlight control offers take the Bing Maps World Tour. This World Tour site, which incidentally is hosted in the Windows & SQL Azure cloud, displays the latest location data and imagery Microsoft has uploaded to their data centres as well as portraying the deep zoom technology mentioned above.

New features that come with the Bing Maps Silverlight control release include the following:

• New Geocoders for the UK and Germany, allowing more accurate and comprehensive address and postcode look-ups in these countries.
• All Bing Maps services have now been moved onto the Content Delivery Network (CDN). The CDN is part of Microsoft’s cloud computing strategy which involves rolling out data centres world wide. So in essence this will improve performance as it means the Bing Maps services are now available for retrieval from a data centre closest to you geographically.
• Bing Maps now provides the HTML code to embed a map of a selected location in your own web page via their ‘Share your map’ button. This is depicted below.

• Multimap and Ordinance Survey integration.
• Inclusion of the London Underground map overlaid on the map of London. My colleague Ed Gillett beat me to blogging about this feature, see his blog post here for more detail. This new feature also includes links to Transport for London for route planning which is a nice integration touch.
• Draggable routes – when requesting directions from point A to point B, points on the suggested route can be dragged to a create a modified route according to your choice.
• Culture selection – selecting a culture enables the country names, points of interest, street names etc. on the map to be displayed in the relevant language.
• Silverlight API for Javascript – the Silverlight Bing Maps control has been wrapped as an API for targeting Javascript developers so they can leverage the goodness of the Silverlight control without having to learn the Microsoft .Net and Silverlight technologies. This enables them to migrate from the old Javascript centric Ajax control with greater ease.

All of these features are great additions to an evolving data visualisation tool and with the promise of bi-monthly minor releases we can expect the Bing Maps control to go from strength to strength.

The SQL Azure Team Blog just pointed out that the November CTP for SQL Server 2008 R2 also includes support in Management Studio to connect to SQL Azure. Nice to know, and something I’ll be looking to blog more about as I investigate Microsoft’s SQL services in the cloud in more detail soon.

UPDATE: The downloads for just SSMS 2008 R2 are here (32-bit) and here (64 bit) (hat tip to the SQL Azure Team Blog again)

The Bing rollercoaster continues with the introduction of Tube Maps for London, with some nice TFL integration there too …

And this is also closely integrated with the “Birds Eye” view providing more detailed aerial photography too …

Bing is shaping up to be the Mapping platform of choice and Microsoft are continuing to provide excellent innovation with their solution.

These 2 extra shiny bits are not in the main install with SQL Server 2008 R2 Nov CTP

 MDS is located on the iso at:

<drive letter>:\MasterDataServices\x64\1033_ENU

StreamInsight at

<drive letter>:\StreamInsight\x86\1033_ENU

Seems that MDS is only available in the 64bit version then! Next task... build/find a 64 bit build to look at this.

For those that haven’t been able to make it to this year’s PASS conference, Brent Ozar has been doing an excellent job blogging from the event:

http://www.brentozar.com/archive/2009/11/sqlpass-keynote-day-1-liveblog/

There’s some interesting stuff here and worth a read.

Amongst the tidbits of information is the fact that Madison will now be formally called Parallel Data Warehouse Edition, with hardware vendor support from Bull, Dell, HP, EMC, and IBM. As noted by Brent, there’s no news on SAN hardware support at this stage.

Another new SQL Server edition is Datacenter Edition which will support unlimited virtualisation and up to 256 logical processors. I’d like to see the hardware which uses it :) Perhaps Microsoft have a few welded shut containers running Azure on Datacenter Edition already?

StreamInsight was discussed in the context of McLaren pulling real time data from F1 cars. Oh for the chance to play with data coming straight off F1 cars – nonetheless, in the more mundane world, live data streaming from RFID, sensors or weblogs make for another compelling area for SSIS integration and subsequent real time data visualisation.

Quote: “You need to transform your role into data professionals – helping the business make decisions with data, not just being custodians of it.”

A call to action for “old school” DBA’s to recognise the importance of the BI tools at their disposal and the new management tools in SQL Server 2008 R2. It’s something that’s at the core of our business – having the data isn’t enough – deriving information from it in a timely and accurate way is essential for success.