Cognos bought Celequest. That’s good in my opinion, in-memory db’s are interesting and BAM (business activity monitoring) is on top of marketing wave.Links on topic:Official press-releaseCraig SchiffShawn Rogers
Break-back (write-back, back-solve, anyway you like) is crucial for performing what-if analysis. Being a techie lately and, moreover, writing a PHD on OLAP subject I wanted to find out how that technique is realized in Cognos EP, MS AS and others. Well, they don’t write that in documentation for sure. But there’s a very good [...]
Intalio makes Open Source Business Process Management (BPM is Business Performance Management, adding an S you get a completely different product). It seems that OS community lacks only some OLAP-server with breakback(write-back, back-solve, call whether you like) to get the planning\budgeting system. Mondrian cannot do that, as far as I know. In analogue with Ms [...]
Going to install/toy with it in free time. And just before I’ll be more informed, the current view is:I think the strong points of Ms BI(CPM\EPM, call it whether you like) are:1 None (or little) integration problems. All niche-BI vendors spend a lot of effort integrating acquired products (for ex, Cognos with Adaytum&Frango, BO with [...]
Had a meeting with Hyperion guys from UK. They were mostly on BI side, we were interested mostly in Planning. Hyperion BI is totally ruined by absence of meta data layer. Renaming columns by views to get business-user perspective is considered weird nowadays. So nothing that interesting on BI. Essbase caught our attention surely — [...]
Had a wonderful evening yesterday, trying to recover a lost database. Well, got a lot experience with MS SQL and found a very useful program – Lumigent Log Explorer. Recovering failed anyway. Had to redo it manually. When toying with gentoo, I’ve found a post, consisting of mostly “I’ll always use logrotate” “I’ll always use [...]
Acquisition trend affects open-source world as well — Pentaho “acquired” Weka, data-mining toolset to put another brick in their all-covering-BI-wall. Weka is a new name to me, so I’ll toy with it for a while. Just need a sample dataset to get started. Only one at hands is aggregated list of client site EP errors [...]
There’s a rather interesting theme out there, on Cognoise. How do you document EP models? And moreover, how do you document changes? Do you change initial project definition after implementing change requests? This is not a Cognos-only topic. I digged the net for various approaches, but found nothing more or less suitable. In general, I [...]
Ok, I’m slow, but I get there in time. Well, mostly. Craig spreads the word about Ms recruiting experienced BPM sales-force to start PerformancePoint campaign. And Charlie points to a couple of PerformancePoint interviews and a new-to-me resource EyeOnBI. Interviews are about nothing, but anyway it’s 6-9 months to serious PerformancePoint launch, so it’s time [...]
In heavy production we sometimes encounter situations, when Contributor COM+ or dllhost.exe grabs a lot of RAM and fails (or some contiguous memory errors). Cognos support recommends restarting COM on some schedule to fix such problems. In my experience this helps. Restart is very fast (less than a second) and rather reliable. So here are [...]