Category Archives: Data Architecture

Amazon EC2 Hosting and Tableau

Posted on by
Reply

Recently I started working with the Amazon EC2 (more) and have been pleasantly surprised. In about 20 minutes I was able to create my own Windows 2008 R2 Data Center Edition Server in the cloud with enough space to run Tableau Server.

Choosing one of the basic configurations from Amazon makes life easy to provision enough horsepower to run a product like Tableau Server but of course there are many more ways you can customize your instance to meet you or your customers needs. Full disclosure, I plan on offering cloud based Tableau Server hosting to my consulting clients so my idea that cloud services like hosted Tableau becoming the new standard for niche BI vendors is a clear alignment of interests.

That said, from start to finish I had a fully functional Tableau Server environment within an hour and was able to access it externally as well. One downside I see here is the lack of Active Directory integration for clients however, Tableau fully supports this, there would just be some networking voodoo needed to make it work.

Without Active Directory integration Tableau Server uses forms based authentication. This means you have to setup each user individually or by script. All in all the trade offs between trying to deploy an on-premise Tableau Server implementation and a cloud based one, the cloud one is definitely attractive.

I haven’t fully explored what all the EC2 has to offer however I can assure you that as I start offering it to clients I’ll post updates about the ins and outs of using Tableau Server on the Amazon EC2 cloud environment.

Full Device Encryption on Android 4.0

Posted on by
4

After upgrading my mobile device to the Nexus S from Google, I was poking around in the security settings when I found something new. Android 4.0 now has full-device encryption capabilities. This means that while enterprises wishing to gain the usefulness and beauty of information design presented by mobile BI vendors like Roambi but have been skeptical of data security now can rest at ease.

The full-device encryption and Android 4.0 isn’t easy however. Device owners must secure their device with a password or pin, so no fun face-unlock capabilities but for many used to dealing with corporate BlackBerrie’s I’m sure this is a minimal sacrifice.

After going to Settings > Security to enable encryption, you must provide a password or pin. The next step is for your device to reboot and encrypt all of its contents. During this time you’ll see the following screen:

This process will take about an hour. Once this process finishes you’ll now be required to enter your password to decrypt the device anytime you reboot it. Here is what that screen looks like:

That’s all I’ve got so far, I’ll update this post with more details as I get them. The main thing here, and reason I posted this is to draw attention to Android 4.0 device security for mobile BI vendors. Anyone serious about mobile BI and Data Security should start adopting this platform.

Centralized Business Intelligence

Posted on by
Reply

My approach as a BI professional has always been to organize the data into conformed structures, present that to end users for consumption in their ad-hoc analysis, and only build formal reports and dashboards as necessary. I think the conformed structures provide great consistency for BI across the enterprise no matter who is building it and allow users to get answers to questions faster.

Of course, there is no way IT can keep up with the onslaught of report requests so it makes sense to provide users with the tools to do these themselves. Typically, I would offer up a connection to a cube through Excel and now with the addition of PowerPivot I believe this type of process is going to become even more prevalent.

Some I have talked with have expressed concern of decentralization of BI by tools like PowerPivot however; I see these tools as giving users a sort of proving ground for their BI applications. If an information worker successfully creates a BI application in PowerPivot that becomes widely used across the enterprise IT does not have to guess that formalizing it into a more formal BI application will have value.

Other methods exist that I think are worth for determining the value of a BI application (eg. BI Pathway Method) however I believe this is for more formal BI versus the ad-hoc type of analysis that users clamor for on a day-to-day basis.

SSIS Event Log Business Intelligence

Posted on by
1

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

Microsoft Healthcare User Group Presentation

Posted on by
2
Me and Rick trying to decide who is going to try the mic first

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