Carrying on from my earlier post, there is an interesting post by the founder of DATAllegro on his blog here, stating that now Microsoft have purchased DATAllegro they will be migrating their appliance from Ingres/Linux to SQL Server/Windows.

Over on the Microsoft BI Blog there is a post lauding how they have rave reviews for DATAllegro warehouses with data volumes over 200+ TB and amasing query response times.

So what will the move to Widows and SQL Server bring?

What will the migration path be like?

How will customers feel about the requirement to constantly apply windows patches to their “appliance”?

How many 200TB SQL Server/Windowswrehouse sites are out there at the moment?

Given the move from one technology stack to another is always fraught with difficult (just think SAS FM, SPM and ABM) then I would hate to be a DATAllegro customer with a 200TB warehouse at the moment.

Great post over on Hexware’s blog with recommendations on what you should be documenting as part of your BI / Data Warehouse project.

I know of a couple of SAS Data Warehouse sites that are using a Wiki as a collaborative environment for documentation and we are using Mediawiki on a SAS BI/DW project I am working on at the moment.

We are using the Wiki to document all our processes, development standards, business rules and content (when we get time of course).

One of the things I struggle with is how to integrate the technical metadata, that resides in the SAS Metadata Repository, with the business metadata we are storing in the Wiki.

To that end at sasInct we are developing a web service that will interogate the SAS Metadata Repository and then display the results via a Mediawiki plugin. The goal is to enable the technical metadata to be streamed to the Wiki in realtime and remove the need to copy and paste etc, or maintain two version.

We are also starting to make use of the description fields in Information Maps to provide business metadata to users when running a report, but we haven’t come up with an approach yet of how to populate that from the Wiki, or how to enable a user to click on an object in a report and open the relevant Wiki page with the business metadata.

Feel free to comment if you have done something cool in this space.

So Microsoft has announced they are jumping into the Dara Warehouse Appliance market by purchasing DATAllegro.

Over on Richard Hackathorns blog he ends with “So, is Netezza next to be acquired? …by Oracle?”

Well that would be interesting, that would leave Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and HP at the DW appliance forefront (although I see IBM’s offering as nothing more than a server with DB2 installed on it compared to appliances like HP’s Neoview)

That would leave SAP/BO out of the pack. I think it would also put more pressure on HP to buy SAS, and I have posted before about why this is likely to happen.

The BI Consolidatin is getting broader and broader (although not faster and faster), as is conolidation in general.

We have seen Applications such as:

• Peoplesoft
• JD Edwards
• Great Plains
• Axpta
• Navision
• Siebel

BI Tools such as:

• Hyperion
• ProClarity
• Cognos
• Business Objects
• Applix
• Crystal

Application Servers:

• BEA
• Are there any others?

Data Integration and Data Quality such as:

• Dataflux
• Informatica

Activity Based Management, Budget and Planning, Consolidation, Scorecarding:

• ABC Technologies
• Armstrong Laing
• Adaytum
• Hyperion
• Outlooksoft
• Pilot Software

So DW appliances are happening now, I wonder what is next.

(as an aside I have always been surprised that database vendor consolidation never really happened, apart from Oracle buying RDB that is)

So my prediction ….

Well I hope it is the big vendors buying up Saas Web 2.0 products, so they can move into Software as Service and Web 2.0 design led interfaces.

But more likely it will be hard core analytic’s with HP buying SAS and SAP buying SPSS.

After that it will be consolidation of companies near the top tier, rather than additional capability. Past examples:

• Peoplesoft brought JD Edwards, Oracle brought Peoplesoft
• Cognos brought Applix, IBM Brought Cognos
• Business Objects brought First Logic, SAP brought BO
• and a few others I can’t remember

Now which shares to buy, if anybody has a SAS Enterprise Miner model on the effect on shareprice for the purchasor and purchasee flick it my way!

Found another cool visualisation techique while surfing.

It interactive visualisation of baby names ranking over the last 100 hundred years over at NameVoyarger

I have added a new article to our resources area, so that I can periodically add any more dashboards or visulaisation techniques that appeal.

You can can find them at:

sasInct – Dashboards and Visualisations

I always forget what portlets are installed by default in the SAS Portal (compared to the many I add to test etc)

So quick note for myself to remind me (sourced from Understanding Portlets)

(more…)

I have started doing some work looking at integrating Graphical Information Systems (GIS) with SAS environments (more on that later).When looking at the benefits of doing this integration 3 come to mind:

1. Using the spatial dimension within analysis (i.e show me all customer within a 100k radius of our Auckland office)
2. Displaying spatial attributes (i.e show me the boundaries of the property at 100 Queen St, Auckland)
3. Visualisation of data/information on geographic maps (i.e show me the ethnicity of people in Auckland as a pie graph, by city)

When thinking about advanced visualistion of data I have always found that GIS tools seem to deliver this better than most other tools (hence point 3). An example can be seen in the middle of the “Business Intelligence Visualizing Your DatabaseVisualizing Your Database” pdf presentation from ESRI.

Now SAS has some advanced graphing capabilities, just checkout the examples at
“Robert Allison’s SAS/Graph Examples!” to see some in action.

But these are fairly static and still require manual code, if you are using the GUI front ends (i.e Web Report Studio, OLAP Viewer) the options are still fairly limited (not that any other of the large BI vendors tools that I know of are any better).

You could try the SAS BI Dashboard Framework, but it is in my experience fairly difficult to use and maintain (some would say it is still a beta product, but 9.2 will bring a more robust version)

It is one of the reasons we are working on building our Flash Graph Portlet.

But if you look around the web while you start seeing some pretty sexy , not to mention useful ways to visualise data. An example:

• Boston Redsox Home runs

Is sexy visualisation the way to go? Well whenever I stumble across any kind of award for dashboards or visulaisation, they are always fairly plain, with lots of text and a few bar graphs.

Checkout the winners of the MicroChartsCompetition No speedo’s or heat maps there.

So whats your thought. Is it that visualisation is sexy and dashboards are not?

Do people expect to see sex and sizzle in a demo before they buy a product, but the users just really want easy access to lots of information?

While you mull that over checkout the SAS/GRAPH Dashboard Samples over at the SAS support site. Lots of good examples of both award winning dashboard styles, and speedo’s plus downloadable code examples.

The current release of SAS Web report Studio (3.1/SAS 9.1) doesn’t allow you to define cascading prompts, by this I mean allowing a user to select a country and then based on the country selected allow them to select a state within that country.

However in a paper presented at SAS Forum 2008 titled SAS Web Report Studio Tips and Techniques (Paper 064-2008 ) there is an innovative way outlined on how you can provide this capability by using linked reports.

The approach they have worked out is to create a report for each level of prompt and link the reports, enabling the user to select the appropriate value on each report (i.e first report they click on country from a list, then second report shows states etc) and then be linked to the next report where they can select the next parameter value, and so on and so on.

Great thinking outside the box!

I posted earlier about a blog outlining presentations from a series of BI vendors.

One of the interesting posts was titled “IAP: Business Objects, an SAP company, but why SAP?” (right near the bottom), which mentions that Business Objects has an OEM agreement with SAS to provide analytics capability. I believe that is a typo and BO have actually partnered with SPSS.

The interesting thing is whether this is a first move before SAP purchases SPSS. It would certainly round out their BI stable and make them a credible end-to-end player.

Will be an interesting partnership to watch.

(0r was this an intentional typo and SAP is actually going to buy SAS? That would reduce a lot of mistakes in company recognition given the similarity in names

I have been doing a bit of research around SAS 9.2, whats coming and when.

There was an interesting presentation over at http://www.sascommunity.org/mwiki/images/3/3c/NewsCorner_SAS_Club_16.pdf which (apart from not being in English) was dated Nov 2007 and outlined a road map for the delivery of 9.2. It outlined:

Phase 1 (Classic) – Q1 2008

• Base, ETS, Graph, STAT, OR, QC, Share, Access,Connect

Phase 2 (Platform) – Q3 2008

• Enterprise Guide, Data Integration Studio, Web Report Studio, Olap Server,

Phase 3 (Solutions) – Q4 2008

• SAS Solutions
• SAS Analytics: Enterprise Miner, Forecast Server, Model Manager

Ignoring the dates (they have obviously slipped but no official news on how much that I could find) the phasing seems to still be true, with Phase 1 already released.

In trolling around I did manage to find some information on what is being delivered in Phase 2, so I have posted them over on our main site at :

SAS 9.2 Information

Of course if you were lucky enough to attend SAS Forum 2008 and have anymore information feel free to post a comment with some juicy details.

An interesting blog by Richard Hackathorn over on b.eye. It seems Richard sat through 18 – 1 hour pitches by a number of BI vendors, (interestingly SAS and IBM/Cognos were missing from the role call) and blogged his thoughts in real-time during the presentations.

After skim reading the blogs (and ignoring the blog cloud, interesting how often Teradata was mentioned) two key things stood out for me:

1) In terms of Data Integration real-time (or near real-time at least) is going to be the next wave, predominately on the back of DW “Appliances”

2) In terms of BI Front ends, mashups is going to be the buzz word for a while.

I think real-time data integration has been talked about for long enough that the capability now exists in the DI products in some form or other, and that the driver towards real time reporting from large ERP systems (think Oracle and SAP), means that this wave will actually start happening in the real world.

This is especially true with the pre-dominance of DW “Appliances” hitting the market.

As for mashups I am not so convinced. Orginally Portals were going to deliver this nirvana, then the introduction of JSR 168 would supposedly allow all portals and BI tools to talk to each other. Mashups just seem to web 2.0 for the BI vendors (who lets face it are still way behind the SaaS wave) to actually deliver with their current 1-2 yearly release cycles.

Will be interesting to see who from the big BI vendors starts talking mashups first, and who actually delivers. My guess is the new tier BI vendors will lead the way with this one.