Just One More Reason to Love SSIS

Alternate title for this post: "Is Sarah Palin BI?" But I didn't want to go there, and I'm sure you appreciate that.

But here in the US, the presidential election season is nearly over (just a few more days to go) and many people are getting sick and tired of listening to the candidates talk. But for the last few months (or years) they have been talking a lot, and people have been transcribing what they say for the press and for prosperity.

And someone (sadly I do not know who[1]) has taken those words, particularly the words of vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, and run them through the text mining features of SQL Server Integration Services. And the UK IT news web site The Register has the scoop.

What's not to love? Politics, plus killer BI tools, plus dry British humor[2] is a surefire recipe for holiday laughs.

Happy Halloween!

[1] Although if the author of the SSIS package reads this and wants to share the DTSX with me, I would love to have it ;-)

[2] Or does that need to be "humour?"

iWindows 7 Surface Phone?

I'm not attending the PDC this year, and I must admit that I'm more than a little jealous of my friends and colleagues who are in Los Angeles at the conference this week.[1] I've been following some of the news from the pre-conference online. And one InfoWorld article had a quote that caught my eye. The article itself is about Microsoft opening up the Surface SDK, which is pretty cool in and of itself, but towards then end there was this quote from a Forrester researcher:

"What the iPhone, the Surface, and Windows 7 all have in common is that they are the vanguard of the next major wave of human/technology interaction."

Ok, I get the iPhone and Surface part here - they both have touch-driven interfaces that move beyond what we've seen before in consumer devices - but what about Windows 7? What features is Windows 7 going to include that justifies a market analyst including it in the same category as the Surface and the iPhone for human/technology interaction?

Microsoft has been playing Windows 7 pretty close to the vest, and this week's PDC is likely to be the first time that many people outside of Microsoft get to see it. I suppose that now that I am working for Microsoft[2] I could download and install it, but honestly I have too many other things to get done. So for now I'll just keep watching the press.

And now that this tidbit has piqued my interest, I will definitely be watching the PDC keynote in two hours. You should too.

[1] Although when I learned that it was Ozzie and not Ozzy delivering the keynote with Bob Muglia, I was a bit less disappointed to not be there. Ray just can't hit those high notes the same way...

[2] Three weeks today!

You fought with my father in the BI Wars?

(I totally stole the whole "BI Wars" idea from Ted Malone, but since he doesn't have a blog, I don't feel at all bad about it.)

"IBM to Acquire Cognos to Accelerate Information on Demand Business Initiative"

That's the title of the press release from IBM. (http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/22572.wss) Following Microsoft's acquisition of ProClarity (now very old news, I know), Oracle's purchase of Hyperion and SAP's offer for Business Objects, this is just one more loose end being tied up (or snatched up, as the case may be) in the BI software landscape.

So what does this mean to those of us who make our living working with the Microsoft BI toolset? Well, I certainly don't claim to know (my track record for predicting industry trends is less than stellar) but I sure hope that it means Microsoft will be putting even more emphasis on BI in the months and years to come. If other database vendors start offering comprehensive and integrated BI offerings like Microsoft already does today, then Microsoft is likely to lose core differentiators that make the SQL Server BI stack unique.

And we don't want that to happen, now do we?

MDX (almost) in the Mainstream

A few months back I posted a link to a New York Times article on data mining, marveling how such a cool technology was getting coverage in the non-technical press.

Well... MDX isn't quite ready to make the business section of the New York Times, and it probably never will be. But The Register (yes, again) has started a series of articles trying to explain to the "mainstream" software developer audience what MDX is and why it is important to them. Check out the first article here: http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2007/10/22/mdx_intro/

I think this is very interesting because with the SQL Server 2005 generation of tools, including SSIS and SSAS, developers can include BI functionality in traditional, "non-BI" applications. If you read this blog for BI information, odds are this article won't be telling you anything you don't already know, but odds are also good that you do know someone who develops software but who hasn't "seen the light" when it comes to BI. Send this article to them...

The Vulture Does Silverlight

I love to read The Register. It has a delightfully irreverent and decidedly anti-Microsoft take on the world of IT, and covers a broad swath of topics every day. I like to think of it as "keeping me honest," as their viewpoints are often quite different from my own, and I like to proactively fight my own biases when I can.

In any event, El Reg had an interesting article on Silverlight today, including portions of an interview with Scott Guthrie. Even though it's not technically deep at all, I enjoyed its skeptical take on how Silverlight stands up to competition from Adobe and Google. Check it out.

Data-Mining Goes Mainstream

You know that a given technology field is "going mainstream" when it starts to get moderately intelligent coverage from the non-technology mainstream press. So when I saw today an article titled "Reaping Results: Data-Mining Goes Mainstream" in the "Your Money" section of The New York Times, I had to give it a read.

You can find it online here (free registration is required): http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/business/yourmoney/20compute.html

It's not anything earthshaking or groundbreaking, but I think it does a decent job of presenting a complex BI technology in a manner that non-technical people can appreciate and understand. If you're in a position where you need to present data mining and BI to someone who "just doesn't get it" (especially since they always have the biggest budgets!) this might be worth sharing with them.