Ben Sullins Tech

Last Thursday I presented at the San Diego SQL Server User Group (www.sdsqlug.org) a codeplex project I developed based on the SSIS Event Logs. Below are links to the codeplex project as well as the slides I presented.

The inspiration for this project comes from a former position I held managing a team of database developers in which we were responsible for all the Customer Data Integration (CDI) processes as well as the Extract Transform and Load (ETL) processes for our Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW).

While in that role I found that some of the CDI proceses were running slow to the point that it was affecting business operations. Poking around the native SSIS Event Log data it was really difficult to get any clue as to what part of the process was the bottleneck.

Now I knew that Microsoft had previously released some report packs (link) for the SSIS Event Log data that contained the logic I needed to extract this data. So I took these reports and reverse engineered them into an ETL process to load a new Data Mart (DM) based on the SSIS Event Log data.

Add an SSAS cube and some basic reports and I was now able to analyze the performance of my CDI and ETL processes easily and determine where bottlenecks exist and improvements can be made. Another interesting outcome of this is the ability to measure the improvements of changes to the CDI and ETL processes over time.

This project is designed to be generic so that anyone using SSIS can take advantage of this and gain some insight into their process performance. If you are interested in obtaining a copy of the source code please create a codeplex user account and send me a request on the project site (below).

Hope this helps!
Ben

SSIS Event Log Business Intelligence Codeplex Home – http://ssisbi.codeplex.com
Codeplex Registration – https://www.codeplex.com/site/register
San Diego SQL Server User Group – http://www.sdsqlug.org
SSIS on MSDN – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms141026.aspx

Me and Rick trying to decide who is going to try the mic first

Wow, what a day yesterday. Gave a presentation at the Microsoft Healthcare User Group Conference with Rick Garcia of Methodist hospital to two completely packed rooms. Funny thing, Rick and I had no clue we were supposed to be using the microphones because there was another room full of attendees that obviously couldn’t hear us without them.

In the presentation Rick talked about how they, with the help of Courtyard Group, have reformed their Business Intelligence (BI) organization to be driven by the end-user versus by the IT team. This is key in all BI organizations as, it is not something that IT (in most cases) will truly understand usually.

When IT is the driver behind BI initiatives what I’ve found is that users will simply take the data that IT is providing them, import it into Excel or Access, and then build their own BI from it. This is bad. From an organizational standpiont you have a valuable resource spending time collecting, formatting, and organizing data (something much better handeled by IT when given proper requirements) rather than doing the true analysis. From an Business Continuity (BCP) standpoint you are also now subject to a single point of failure since the analyst will most likely save the reports to their desktop

My portion of the presentation covered the Microsoft Business Intelligence stack and how we are using that to help Methodists IT group focus more on delivering the analysis tools to the users rather than doing the reports themselves. This falls into that category of “BI for the masses” and helping create that reality where IT’s main focus is to integrate the systems and present the analytical tools to the business users to do the analysis. This is how I believe BI works best and provides the most value to an organization. Of course, all of this is delivered in SharePoint as this is where all end-users are being driven to store, manage, and find any and all information.

I am really excited about where Methodist is going with their Business Intelligence initiative and hope to follow up with some more great details at the next Microsoft Healthcare User Group Conference.

Cheers!
Ben

References:

MS HUG Breakout Sessions: http://www.mshug.org/events/exchange_Sept2009.aspx

Presentation Slides: http://www.mshug.org/docs/exhange2009/Garcia_LeveragingSharePointBI.pdf
Methodist Hospital System: http://www.methodisthealth.com
Courtyard Group: http://www.courtyard-group.com/
SharePoint360: http://sharepoint360.com