Category archive for ‘Business Intelligence Architecture’ 
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Adding self serve data transformation to reduce shadow systems
Do you have lots of unoffical spreadsheets in your organization being used for data analysis? Is the data warehouse use low to non-existent, yet somehow lots of data is appearing in power point presentations and excel spreadsheets all over the company? I believe a key to understanding how information moves around your organization is to [...]
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Build vs Buy the Allure of Out of the box business intelligence
The big software vendors claim they can sell you an "out of the box" data warehouse including reporting that installs onto your Oracle, Microsoft or SAP ERP package. Are these things really that easy? Is it actually cheaper to build it yourself? How do you determine if a given product is a good fit for [...]
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Business Intelligence adoption low and falling
It seems that the level of adoption of business intelligence tools as a percentage of users is much lower than typically thought. The data warehouse institute (TDWI) published a commentary on the latest business intelligence survey. This survey, published by the business application research center, reports that although your BI vendor might be telling you [...]
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Pragmatic Business Intelligence
I'm a regular reader of datadoodle, and there have been a couple of great posts recently talking about what I think of as "Pragmatic BI". The first one talks to the question of what the perfect BI tool is- answer? One that people actually use. The second uses a story to illustrate that many uses [...]
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MS Access query example and comparision to Datamartist
Microsoft Access allows users to create complex queries and analyze large data sets. However, it can be complicated to use compared to Excel. In this post, I'll talk about ms access queries and the equivalent way to perform the same data transformation in the Datamartist tool- visually and simply. Microsoft Access has a clear role [...]
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Self Serve Business Intelligence
Self serve business intelligence dreams of letting everyone whip up any report or analysis they want. The reality is that its often not the report that's the problem- it the underlying data and model. So the idea of self serve business intelligence is a wonderful idea- the problem is that its not all about pretty [...]
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Spreadmarts and Data Shadow Systems- The Debate
When business users are not getting what they want out of the enterprise business intelligence system they very rarely just give up. Successful business people didn't get where they are by giving up when someone doesn't deliver something, they take things into their own hands and get it done. Knowing this, it's not surprising that [...]
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A Cost comparision between Data Marts and a Data Warehouse
I've noticed a fair bit of search traffic focusing on cost questions, particularly which is cheaper; a series of data marts or a single enterprise data warehouse. I think it's a bit like the question of lease vs buy. Starting off building a single departmental data mart will represent a much smaller cash flow out. [...]
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Personal Data Marts: cost effective, powerful Analysis
Huge, expensive data warehouse projects often either deliver a huge compromise in terms of functionality, or are impossibly complex and expensive. A bunch of them fail outright. Why do so many people turn to Excel for their analysis needs? Because with excel they are in control. With Excel it IS personal. Massive, expensive data warehouses [...]
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Easy to use ETL
As We've been creating Datamartist, we've been trying to avoid using acronyms to describe what it is, but when I'm talking to people who have a background in data warehousing, I only have to say "its an easy to use desktop ETL tool", and suddenly they know what I am talking about. An Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) tool is [...]
