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Good ideas are hard to stop from happening. After dorking around with Pivot Viewer, I was thinking of things I could “pivot”, and the iTunes App Store was one of them. No real API though, there are some out there that have created APIs, or you could scrape the web, etc but nothing solid. Looks [...]

Most people have probably done this at least once in their lives.. You go to a restaurant and order a meal. The waitress is nice, comes over, gets your drinks, takes your order, checks up on you, refills, what not, brings out the meal, and woah, something is wrong, it is cold, bad, just something. [...]

I have been reading about Microsoft’s PivotViewer lately, and decided to try to get it going for myself. What is PivotViewer? Think of it as visual data slicing through a web page. What you do is take some data, and then tie records to images, and then publish out your “collection” and you can consume [...]

Now that SQL Server 2008 R2 is out, and Excel 2010 is out. You can get PowerPivot (http://powerpivot.com/) and create your own in memory cubes! …. Or something like that. I still haven’t figure out where PowerPivot fits in a business scenario. Why? Well first you have what are now being called the “old school” [...]

About 3.5 years ago I was introduced to Agile at the Agile 2006 Conference. After that, and implementing it in a software dev environment, I found that it just works. Sprints, Scrums, Stories, Backlog, Velocity, all the pieces fit and work. Now that I am managing a Business Intelligence group, which when I started wasn’t [...]

Digging into the blog post from earlier this summer I wanted to see what was new and exciting in Excel 2010. Recently I have been working on an cube and we want to be able to budget right from the cube. There are also many other cubes/scenarios where the ability to writeback to the cube [...]

Most people, when using OLAP cubes, are hitting the live version that is located on SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS). They hit it with Excel, or some other reporting tool, etc. I have blogged previously about offline cubes and how you could possibly use them. Now, the blog I did before, I talked about creating [...]

Today I received an email asking to some extent best practices on development with SQL Server Integration Studio (SSIS) and Business Intelligence Developer Studio (BIDS) in a team environment. Here is part of the email: Me and another DBA belong to the same team, we have a SQL server with SSIS running. We use the [...]

We are again looking to fill out our Business Intelligence team at Trek Bicycle Corporation. What I am looking for with this position is someone who is both technical and has the business analyst skills needed to work with end users, gather requirements, etc. You can read more about the position here: http://www.trekbikes.com/us/en/company/careers/post/98/sr.+technical+business+analyst Feel free [...]

A couple of months ago, a colleague lent me Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data by Stephen Few. What a great book. I read it in one afternoon. It goes through a bunch of different software systems you can buy or implement in regards to Business Intelligence and Dashboards, KPI, Reporting, etc. [...]