How do you make sure business metadata your clients will be using for reports meet their needs? I generate an Excel spreadsheet with lists of measures and dimensions and their properties and present them to my clients for reconciliation. They review the definitions and suggest names that are more intuitive for the business. They also [...]

The following resources can help you decide what data analytics and reporting solution you need for your organization. What objectives can business intelligence help me achieve? Business Intelligence for the Strategy-Focused Organization Is Building a Data Warehouse the Right Solution for Your Business? Why Building a Data Warehouse Is Not the Right Solution Business Intelligence: [...]

Virtualization offers multiple benefits to production technological environments. But what virtualization means to you, individual software developers/consultants? To me, it allows to: – Prevent one application from impacting another, including times when upgrades or changes are made; – Duplicate a standard environment and speed up new system configuration; – Deploy different technologies on a single [...]

If you are starting in business intelligence development and would like to get a sense of scope and get familiar with basics, you can: Watch Business Intelligence Webinars provided by Pragmatic Works Get to know the Report Builder Learn How to communicate OLAP Cube Design Decisions to Clients

Every business intelligence project involves significant data cleansing efforts. It is like building a data quality firewall to stop bad data before it enters data warehouse. Why is data cleansing essential? By number of reasons, which I’ll explain in the next posts, the quality of corporate data is 10 times less than most of respondents [...]

You can accelerate SQL Server Analysis Services cube processing by adjusting two setting, without changing data architecture or other costly approaches. 1. Use Shared Memory protocol to optimize source data retrieval >1.5 times I came across this remarkable feature while reading SQL Server 2008 R2 Analysis Services Operations Guide. It’s applicable when your data warehouse [...]