Cubegeek

Google BI

The pieces are coming together and I'm preparing to move away from my current technology set. I'm going to make a blind jump into the future and prepare myself for that thing which will be Google BI. The first step is a fairly good understanding of Bigtable and figuring out how to apply what I know vis a vis best practices and apply it to that technology. I will chronicle that here and try to become a better programmer.

Stay tuned.

Cubegeek Wiki is UP

The Cubegeek Wiki is now operational and ready to grow. Ideas and contributions are welcome.

Inside Dirt: ASO vs MSAS

The Cubegeek has gotten some inside scoops that are big news for Essbase fans. The first is open information which I have no compunction from sharing, but it is significant when you think about it.

Item the First: Hyperion & MDX
George Spofford, who is widely acknowleged as the Joe Celko of MDX, has been hired by Hyperion. In that capacity, he is responsible (in some way) for the commitment to MDX in the Essbase product group. It is thus very likely, especially given Hyperion's past participation in open OLAP standards (APB-1, XMLA), that Essbase is going to implement the full set of MDX functions.

Spofford's new book is entitled 'MDX Solutions : with Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2005 and Hyperion Essbase'.

Item the Second: ProClarity & Essbase
I have it on very reliable information that ProClarity is very seriously looking at adding Essbase support to their product line. This is fabulous news to me, having been certified back in 2003. ProClarity guys are top dogs in MDX programming. Back in 2003, they were acknowledged as the people who had made the best (and only) wizards that generated optimized MDX. More properly said, they were the company, along with Panorama, that debugged the Microsoft API for them. I have a good feeling that they're not going to have that kind of headache when dealing with Essbase. I hope Miss B. at Hyperion goes after them so that they feel welcome into the Essbase Ready family.

There have been many times when I would have loved to stick Essbase on the back-end of ProClarity, especially when it comes to iterative development of new KPIs. ProClarity is a sweet front-end and its server layer is very good about handling things other than query stuff - like documents and spreadsheets. It's a low-maintenance middle tier and handles books of reports very well. Anyway, I'll keep my ear to the ground on this one.

Item the Third: Performance
A document exists that shows some performance benchmarks of Essbase ASO vs MSAS. I've seen this document with my own eyes, and it has names on it of real people - some of whom I know personally. Now this document is older than 6 months, and who knows what has changed since then. But the bottom line is clear. ASO kicked MSAS butt.

The notable notes that I took from this was that unoptimized MSAS is fairly crappy. Who knows where it is now, but even after MSAS was optimized ASO queries processed 40 times faster. There were, as always, qualifications on this. When the Hyperion guys say that sub-second queries are the only acceptable queries, parsing 'better' goes beneath the radar of ordinary mortals. However when it comes to benchmarking, this is computer *science* after all, not computer politics.

Additionally, the results showed that MSAS used a lot less disk than the equivalent ASO models. On the other hand the results showed that ASO scaled much better for concurrent queries. So on the whole, for little applications with few users, it's a push which makes cheap (free) MSAS the winner. When you scale up, ASO wins. That means you have to define 'scalability'.

The great thing however is that the what most people will want from ASO is that it does what Essbase used to be unable to do.

Apple on Intel

I just realized that on June 9th I predicted that Apple could make money on Intel. That same day, they announced that they were switching from IBM. I'm sure it was coincidental, and I'm pretty sure that I hadn't heard the news. Anyway, it's exciting to me because I've been trying to get Darwin to run on my ThinkPad forever. It don't work. I'll try again when I get VMWare installed.

Now check this out:

..Dell (the company) has for several years fearlessly—and lucratively—sold servers loaded with Linux, the operating system Microsoft reviles and dreads. And as the industry's top dog it wields more bargaining power with Microsoft than other PC-makers. So I emailed Michael Dell, now the company's chairman, and asked if he'd be interested in the Mac OS, assuming that Apple CEO Steve Jobs ever decides to license it to PC companies. (For now, Jobs says he won't.)

"If Apple decides to open the Mac OS to others, we would be happy to offer it to our customers," Dell wrote in an email. It's the first time any PC industry executive has openly shown enthusiasm for selling machines with Apple's software. Though that's all Dell would say for the record, I suspect his interest is not unknown to Jobs. So, as I said in this column last week (and in an article in the new issue of FORTUNE), the ball is in Jobs' court.

So the question is whether or not Apple can be as successful in the consumer electronics business as Sony has been in the computer business. The iPod says a resounding yes, and that's essentially going to be an annuity for Apple forever. Sorry Diamond Rio. But Jobs is going to have a tough job following up on the iPod, unless...

You see the next killer app is obvious. It's the phone. An Apple Phone that did the equivalent of the Treo 650 would be the hardware that changes everything. An iPhone that integrates all of the iLife applications and iPod storage could compete on a huge level, if the price was right. It would be a huge leap for Jobs, but so was his move into the music business. It wouldn't be a huge leap for Apple customers who have demonstrated their love for insanely great hardware.

So the move for Apple into Intel suggests to me that Jobs is ready to start specifying hardware requirements again. Doing it for a short stint into the computer world could get him to the place Sony is, with enough savvy to start branding all sorts of consumer electronics.

Think about it for a minute. We have a bunch of no-count consumer electronics companies who build products with no soul whatsoever. Circuit City & Good Guys house brands, Magnavox, Allegro, LG, JVC and a dozen others. Just anybody who makes a DVD player is a competitor for Apple if they step up. The Apple brand could be devastating.

Looking for Talent

Speaking for myself, I am looking to bring some talent on board.

I've got a dilemma. I have lots of work and not enough bodies. Here in Southern California, we are pulling down so much business, that I need a clone army. Unfortunately I don't have an emissary to send to planet Camino.

I am looking for four profiles of candidate to work in major accounts using Hyperion technology in Southern California for the Western Region. If you are somebody or know somebody who fits one of these general profiles, I can get you started quickly.

Profile #1. Oracle Old Head
You are a master of PLSQL and you use Toad. You're plenty comfortable on UNIX and have done your share of VLDB. You've been around since Oracle 7 and you've built all kinds of DW implementations. You may even have a passing familiarity with Express. People take you for granted and don't use half of your knowledge and quite frankly the projects are getting boring. You've been thinking about getting into a new technology or two, like Informatica just because the pay is good. You don't want to waste your time with upstarts.

Hyperion Technology Acquisition

I'm ramping up some of my comments over at the HYSL Yahoo board and bringing some exclusive details here. There has been some speculation there that Oracle might acquire Hyperion. I think the HYSL board is doing everything it can to avoid that fate and may be looking to do some acquisition itself. With their recent OEM announcement about Tableau, i think they're being pretty wise about making the Hyperion platform very robust. As I have said and others have speculated, Tableau is very exciting stuff.

On the acquisition side, there are only two pieces missing from the Hyperion platform puzzle. One would be an application API and toolkit that would be widely acceptable to the development community and the second would be an ETL tool.

There might be a third, depending on how closely Hyperion integrates with Teradata's Active DW strategy, which would be some links to EAI and messaging streams, but there's not a real demand for that in Hyperion's marketplace - certainly little the HYSL sales guys might pitch.

Right now all HYSL needs to do is concentrate on getting Essbase covering all the bases that MSAS will cover, and I'm pretty confident that they'll be able to pull it off materially.

The buzz had been that the ETL acquisition would be Ascential. Way back in the day, I did some joint presentations with them when they were Data Stage. But IBM bought them recently and are rebranding it under Websphere. The strange thing about that is that IBM purchased the other half of the company before and made Ascential in the first place. But ETL is ETL and in 18 months, Hyperion engineering could bolt whatever goodies it has to EIS and integrate the whole thing nicely. Hyperion would be a full service DB company and with the next generation of MySQL do most everything with no outside assistance. So let's put two and two together shall we? The VP of sales at an upstart ETL company called Pervasive is Chip Harmon, who used to run Hyperion Sales in the US. Pervasive's stock is just above 4 bucks and they have fewer than 300 employees. Their specialty is Midcap accounting. This could be a match made in heaven.

Hell on earth is getting data out of the little accounting packages like MAS, Solomon and Great Plains. That's where I lived for two years, mucking around with SQL Server, MSAS and ProClarity. If Hyperion can hit the pricepoints of that whole sector, there's only one word for the result: Domination. That's what I'm hoping for.

Read My Lips, HAL

The locus of my discontent which has overcome my otherwise sunny disposition is a particularly gimpy data pump created by Vignette that the mother company has decided to OEM. Why? Because you don't have to write code! Which means it's a perfectly idiotic tool for those of us who do write code.

So I have come to discover that this gnarled piece of caca between an AS/400 and a SQL Server doesn't pay much attention to SQL code if you don't also draw the little field connector lines in it's idiot proof visual drag and drop fecal-torium. Instead of something simple like just writing a spool phrase as one would in Oracle's SQL dialect, this crap collector makes you grab a little text object from a toolbar. Try to imagine a DTS connection object with about 50 properties. IT'S A FLAT FILE FOR CHRISSAKE! I connect this monstrosity to my query object but not before I have to manually click the 'add field' button as many times as my query is bringing over columns.

Now here's the killer. Imagine you determine, an hour and 3GB later that you'd like to make your query results a little smaller. It's not enough that you remove fields from your select statement in the gawdawful query object, you also have to pretty much destroy your flat file object and recreate it from scratch. This is something it takes a veteran like me all day to figure out.

What a waste.

I take that back. What's so absolutely perfect about this product is that it allows you to generate executable code that you can drop into obscure directories on your customer's servers. Only you know what they do and only you can fix them. That's evil genius.

Welcome To Cubegeek

Today is the first day of the Cubegeek blog, which I will refer to from here on out as Cubegeek. It will update the old thing called Cubegeek which is now known as Cubegeek News. Cubegeek News has been around a couple years and gets a little bit of traffic but nothing works quite like blogs for networking. As soon as the subdomain is up and working, this blog will move to the root.

In the meantime, a brief introduction. I'm Michael Bowen and I work for a medium sized consulting firm. I'm a former employee of Xerox, Pilot Software, Arbor Software and Hyperion, and I've got over 20 years in the business, with about 6 of them with my own businesses. I specialize in Business Intelligence which is the broad results-driven end of ERP, DW, OLAP and BPM. If you don't know what those acronyms stand for, this blog might still be worth your while, because I'll be talking about them regularly.

My aim is to raise the general awareness of the practice of Business Intelligence and serve as a general outpost for both professional practitioners of the art and science of BI as well as for users and owners of BI systems.

I will regularly talk about vendors and products, technologies and trends, tricks and techniques as well as issues peripheral to the industry. I'm also willing to entertain guest bloggers under the Cubegeek banner. I will also talk about experiences at customers but i will preserve the anonymity of those customers as well as individuals at those sites, but I'll probably get very specific about their systems. I am perfectly flexible about this and have no desire to be like 'f-d company'.

My bias is towards products that work, period. As well, I have limits with my own personal experience, so I'll say straight out that much of what I say may sound biased. I'm not going to go out on a limb talking about grandiose theories and abstract methodologies, but hardball systems stuff that works. I hope I don't rub too many people the wrong way. I don't know everything, but I'm enthusiastic about what I do know because I love the field and I love building systems.

As Dozer said, we're in for exciting times.