Data Management & Warehousing

Tag: BI on Rails

  • Data Warehouse Appliances – Fad or Future?

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    macleanwalker
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    This article was originally written for Conspectus Magazine in December 2006 and has been updated in November 2009 by the original author Despite all the hype from vendors the basics of data warehousing have remained fundamentally unchanged – extract data from multiple source systems, reformat the information into an easy to query structure, load it into a…

  • Creating Graphics for BI Reports in Ruby on Rails

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    macleanwalker
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    So your manager wants reports with sexy graphs – what are your options and what are the pros and cons I have found eight usable packages with different considerations OpenFlashChart This is a series of libraries including one for Ruby that allow the generation of great looking charts that are very dynamic (see the demo…

  • Analysis by ETL …

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    macleanwalker
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    Performing source-system analysis by writing ETL is just about the most expensive way you can do it; but many organisations do exactly that. Why? Because they “can’t afford” to do their analysis the cheaper way. No, this does not make sense. This is how it works… In most data warehousing projects, business analysts are separated…

  • The project wiki – a cost reduction tool

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    macleanwalker
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    Some readers will be familiar with TED: Ideas Worth Spreading a series of talks on just about everything worthwhile in Technology, Education and Design. I recently revisited Yochai Benklers talk on the new open-source economics from 2005 where he explains how collaborative projects like Wikipedia and Linux represent the next stage of human organisation. The principle discussed is one…

  • Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive!

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    macleanwalker
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    The deception in our case is the accuracy of the data and the return on investment of the data warehouse solution. Too often projects make compromises in the implementation of a business intelligence solution that create massive cost and user dis-satisfaction downstream that lead to the failure of BI projects: For example: * In the…

  • BI Convention over Configuration

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    macleanwalker
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    The convention over configuration discussion when designing a data warehouse often leads to fanatical discussions by technical people over the ‘best’ approach to do things. Convention can be used to define the standard way to design a data model (see Process Neutral Data Modelling) or to implement an ETL transformation (for example a reducing sets approach)…

  • We’ve got a new puppy – we’ve called him ETL!

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    macleanwalker
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    Monday … Our house is full of optimism today – we’ve been out and spent an absolute fortune on a pedigree pup. We were really impressed by the salesman at the shop. He offered something to each family member. Mum (our family manager and my wife) was sold on the the cost efficiency. We won’t…

  • Version Control on Rails

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    macleanwalker
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    In my consultancy assignments, I usually work in large organisations that have outsourced IT departments and very formal processes for everything. One aspect of this is version control. In such an organisation every document contains a long table near the beginning with a row for every change, who made the change and when it was…

  • Agile Development of a BI application

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    macleanwalker
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    Wandering around the web I found a presentation by Soren Burkhart of Hawaii Business Consulting, LLC given at the Rails Conference in Portland, Oregon (May 2007) that describes a classic agile approach to developing a Business Intelligence application for the Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”) of the US Department of the Treasury. It demonstrates the collecting of…

  • Can Business Intelligence Be Agile ?

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    macleanwalker
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    The agile manifesto and it’s underlying principles set out four key values for developing software solutions: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan If an organisation is willing to accept these values for software development then how much more important should adoption of them be for…