In my first post in this series, I talked a little about the basics of cloud BI and Microsoft’s Windows Azure public cloud platform. I gave a brief glimpse of what services Azure offers for BI. So to begin with, let’s recap the Azure data services offerings in terms of the cloud computing models available. Azure’s […]
Blogs from this Author
Microsoft’s Power BI: just another hugely compelling feature
This article was pointed out to me by a colleague, and I found it a pretty compelling read: How Microsoft helped this bar figure out that vodka was costing it a fortune. Of particular interest to me is the Natural Q&A feature, which is mentioned prominently. Now, my time in the data warehousing trenches tempers my […]
Microsoft Cloud BI: An Introduction
As with “All Things Cloud” for the last year or so, Cloud BI is a subject of much buzz. But if you look around, aside from a few niche vendors that have developed Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) BI packages, there’s not a lot of clear information or even thinking. Something close […]
Creating Dynamic OLAP cubes from Custom Field data, pt. 2
Last time, we discussed arriving at a BI/DW solution for the problem of source application “Custom Fields.” This time, I want to look at the OLAP design, and the mechanisms that make it work in Analysis Services. As you may recall, we were working on designing a multi-tenant SaaS analytics application. Our greatest problem was in […]
Microsoft’s Power BI: a peek at the future?
So, have you heard about Power BI yet? The whiz-bang new cloud-centric BI front end tool from Microsoft? Well, this video from the 2013 WPC breaks down the story — in a very entertaining manner… So, having watched, let’s assume we all remember Mariah’s chart-toppers and instead review the greatest hits of the Power BI […]
Creating Dynamic OLAP cubes from Custom Field data, pt. 1
A source system that contains dynamic or customer-defined data fields is both an old problem and a sticky one in the DW/BI environment. A standard approach of flattening the dynamic data into name/value pairs is recommended for a relational-type database. But what about multidimensional modeling or OLAP storage? Name/value pairs are just the beginning. To […]
New Year’s Data Resolutions
It’s 2013! Will this year be the Year of Self-Service BI? Or the Year of Mobile BI? Or perhaps (for the second year running) the Year of Big Data? Trend-watching is fun, but what does it tell you about making real business decisions with respect to your growing Enterprise Reporting or BI needs? Maybe not […]