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Today I want to offer up a challenge to all those watching this video. Find something in the room you’re in that has never had any data associated to it. Go ahead look around. Unless you find yourself watching this in the middle of no man’s land, chances are, that a very high percentage of everything around you has been represented by data at some point in its lifecycle. Amazing isn’t it…? So in many ways you can imagine that our digital world of data is a representation of the physical world around us. And indeed it would be nearly impossible for organizations to accurately describe themselves if they didn’t have access to this data today.
Articles
I’ve been in the Business Intelligence space for over 10 years now, but I still find it hard to carry on small talk with the average Joe about what exactly I do for work. So for all the Joe’s out there that really want to know what Business Intelligence is, you’ve found the right video.
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The new SAP BusinessObjects 4 platform introduces a number of enhancements which have both front end and back end benefits. This recorded Video presents and demonstrates how these capabilities will change your BI experience.
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Successful Data Governance programs must be owned by the business, but the people concerned are commonly IT. How can we hope to bring Data Governance to Business Sponsorship and eventually Full Ownership?
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Have you ever seen those shows on TV where they reveal the house of a person that hoards stuff? One of the things that I immediately noticed when watching those shows is that the Hoarder was always caught up in a conflict of whether they would ever need that object again. Well today I’m going to share with you a similar habit in the business world. I call it Legacy Data hoarding.
Articles
Today I’m going to share a simple exercise which will help you see the power of using a Columnar database for certain tasks.
To illustrate this exercise I’m going to use a good old excel spreadsheet, populated with some baseball Statistics.
Articles
Often when Business and IT come to the same room and begin talking, there are breaking points where the Business get’s lost in the technical terminology. When it comes to data, I’ve noticed this breaking point often starts when the words Dimensions, Measures, Hierarchies, and Grain are used. This short video is meant to provide some clarity as to what these items are.
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Sometimes we don’t appreciate just how complex some of these multibillion dollar organizations can be these days. I mean, just imagine managing data for thousands of different products and 10’s of thousands of customers.
This would actually be really easy if everything held still and didn’t change. But in the real world data is changing ALL THE TIME. Acquisitions are being done; corrections are being made to faulty records, marketing departments are changing product names. And it starts to look like IT is fighting a losing battle with the harmony of its corporate data.
Articles
Often I’m placed into situations where I need to explain the role of a data warehouse, and how an organization can benefit from it’s use.
So to answer this, let’s approach each problem we commonly see Data Warehouses addressing.
Articles
Sometimes in the IT world we have names for features and capabilities that seem to be tailored for Business User confusion. One such word is Metadata.
Admittedly when I first heard this word I struggled to conjure up my rusty Greek prefixes. However the concept of metadata is actually quite simple.