Getting BI data to users
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IT managers say presentation and security are crucial when getting business intelligence information to the appropriate people over the network.
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ParAccel, a new company based in San Diego, this week released a database for midsize companies that combines a number of BI-oriented features at a low price point.The company is targeting the middle of the midmarket, not smaller businesses, according to vice president of marketing Kim Stanick. &quot;You have to have a certain amount of data before our product becomes compelling for you,&quot; she said.The software does not provide radical new technology, but ParAccel is touting its database&#39;s columnar orientation and MPP (massively parallel processing) capabilities. The company argues that columnar databases are more effective for&#160;BI applications because users can query just the desired columns of a given row, saving bandwidth.&quot;That itself is a nice product set, especially with the price point,&quot; Stanick said.ParAccel is offering the database as a software package or incorporated into a hardware appliance. It can also be deployed as a &quot;drop in&quot; accelerator for existing SQL Server and Oracle databases. The company said the database is compatible with all major brands of hardware.A number of licensing options are available. All-in-memory systems cost $1,000 per gigabyte, beginning at 100GB. Disk-based systems cost $40,000 per node plus $10,000 per terabyte, starting at five nodes. Subscriptions cost $5,000 a month and up.ParAccel counts some notable names among its management team. One of Oracle&#39;s co-founders, Bruce Scott, is vice president of engineering.The startup originally positioned its product as an accelerator for SQL Server, but in response to market interest widened its focus to include data warehousing and Oracle&#39;s platform. This week&#39;s announcement doubled as the official company launch for ParAccel, which joins an increasingly crowded market for data warehousing.ParAccel also announced benchmarking figures for its database running on Sun Fire X4100 and Blade 6000 servers. According to the company, the combination set TPC-H (ad-hoc, decision support) records for performance in the 1TB category. Sun and ParAccel are also partnering on a data warehousing product.
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Microsoft invites business users to preview its integrated performance management applications.
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The purpose of repurposing Of course, there are a variety of different types of integration and there are a range of different things that you can do with data integration. I am not here to suggest that there is another way of tackling data integration in general. However, there are specific aspects of data integration (and in this context I am talking specifically about the data movement aspects of integration) where there may be an alternative that is worth considering.â¦
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BIE (Business Integration Engine) is an Open Source data integration system for exchanging data with internal or external sources. Built in Java, this platform-independent integration system includes a web-based management and configuration GUI, a drag-and-drop Map Builder and a wide variety of built in protocols, message formatters and listeners. It competes in the same EAI space as applications like MicrosoftÂ® BizTalkÂ®, WebmethodsÂ®, and TibcoÂ®. BIE 6.0.3 adds bug fixes for Map Builder macros and stability.   BIE can be downloaded at http://www.brunswickwdi.com/bie
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JasperSoft&#39;s next upgrade of its open-source business intelligence suite, due out Nov. 1, will improve the ability for users to create their own customized reports.JasperSoft&#160;has found that the end-users of a BI system often need a developer&#39;s help to create more complex reports, said Paul Doscher, JasperSoft&#39;s CEO. That takes time away from the developer that could be used to work on other IT projects.&quot;The last thing the developer wants to do is develop reports,&quot; Doscher said.With the new release, Business Intelligence Suite 2.1, JasperSoft has expanded the ability for someone in the accounting department to customize their own BI Web portal to generate new kinds of information, Doscher said. Previously, end-users could build simple reports, but &quot;we want to make this more sophisticated,&quot; Doscher said.For example, an accounts payable clerk can drag and drop elements within the BI Web portal to produce a report showing which customer has the most receivables. Previously, that job would have required the clerk to dictate to the developer what kind of report is needed, and the developer would build it, Doscher said.JasperSoft has also expanded the range of calculations the software can perform, he said.JasperSoft&#39;s open-source BI tools are integrated by developers for use with other applications and even hosted CRM (customer relationship management) services such as Salesforce.com and SugarCRM. Customers set up their customized charts and graphs that give information about their business through a Web portal or another application.Businesses such as telecommunications companies use JasperSoft to analyze trends in their billing data. The University of Nebraska, another JasperSoft customer, uses the suite to analyze information on students stored in large databases.JasperSoft&#39;s products are free to download, and the company makes money by selling support packages. Doscher said JasperSoft has about 7,000 paying customers, of which 70 percent are companies with revenue of $1 billion and below.JasperSoft focuses on the small to medium-size businesses, where Doscher said there is the most growth now for BI products.&#160;
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Get juicy company information, four times a year.
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A safe bet? Comment I met with Gerry Cohen last week, the founder CEO of BI vendor Information Builders (IB). After 30 years in the business he still has an infectious enthusiasm for software. As has Jim Goodnight, the founder CEO of SAS, and Michael Saylor, the founder CEO of MicroStrategy, who founded his company in 1989. Between them, this triumvirate of founder CEOs account for $2.3bn of worldwide annual BI industry sales: about one-third of the whole BI market.â¦
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The leading vendors in the data warehousing market are running scared of new entrants to the market that are offering data warehouse appliances (i.e. pre-integrated hardware, software, storage combinations) that can offer greatly superior performance at a significantly lower price.  In this white paper we will dispel the 'fog of war' that currently pervades the data warehousing landscape, dismissing those question marks that are irrelevant and gratuitous, but highlighting any genuine issues that need to be addressed.
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Sam  posts an interesting proposal.  This is better than the HTTP delta suggestion but still has a few issues.  The client needs to know the ETags before it can start performing differential fetches.  With date ranges you still preserve the initial archive query.  For example when you first subscribe to a feed you could fetch 30 days worth of posts.  If you like the feed you can even fetch *older* posts which could be really cool.  Also even if you still use faster checksum algorithm like CRC32 or Adler32 you still have an O(N) performance hit for your document.  If you have a btree on your post dates you will gave O(log(N)) for search for a much smaller string (64bit in most situations).  F ...
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New from Codewalkers.com today: Take a look whether or not to migrate your Access data to MySQL and then how the migration can be done with the help of Navicat, a MySQL database administration GUI, in our newest tutorial.
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It&#39;s hard to argue against data portability. After all, who could oppose giving people control over the data they load, publish, and store on Web sites?This is particularly timely now that average users have started feeling the &quot;network fatigue&quot; that comes from maintaining multiple social-networking profiles, e-mail accounts, blogs, address book applications, social-news-sites memberships, and the like.And yet, while it is an important and unquestionably worthy endeavor, data portability faces thorny challenges in such areas as technology, privacy, security, business, and regulation and legislation.An informed and articulate discussion of these challenges can be found on the online forum of the DataPortability Workgroup, an organization founded recently to highlight the work that multiple data portability groups have been doing and to create a technical blueprint for vendors to adopt.While the workgroup has about 50 formal members, anyone can join the discussion forum, which now has more than 700 participants and is the workgroup&#39;s main meeting place.Activity on the forum has been engaging in recent weeks as people discuss technical and nontechnical issues, offer up suggestions, ask questions, argue and, mostly, cheer each other on in their collective quest for a satisfactory data portability solution.More than 400 discussion threads have been started, as participants ponder what are the parameters for user data, what data portability truly means, who owns data already created for a specific site, and whether making data portable is illegal in Europe.Other threads focus on how to bring together various data portability efforts already under way, like the Friend of a Friend project (FOAF), OpenID , Attention Profiling Mark-up Language (APML), the Liberty Alliance, and various open data microformats.Despite the magnitude of the endeavor, participants interviewed feel optimistic that the workgroup will yield concrete results that will bring about industry-wide implementations of data portability solutions.&quot;Where there is a will, there&#39;s a way. And so far it seems like everyone has thrown their will behind the project. Now they need to find a way,&quot; said Chris Saad, cofounder of the DataPortability Workgroup.The DataPortability Workgroup positions itself at a higher conceptual level than the groups working to develop specific technical standards for data portability.&quot;Our goal is to highlight, not compete [with], the work of other groups and to encourage the adoption of their work with vendors and users,&quot; Saad said.The workgroup&#39;s main accomplishment so far, Saad said, is that it brought people to the table and started to outline the documents it plans to deliver, chief among which will be the DataPortability Technical Blueprint, envisioned as a key reference document for a complete implementation architecture for the data portability stack of standards.John Breslin is a workgroup supporter who sees it as having a lot of synergy with the Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities Project (SIOC), which he founded in 2004 to provide methods for interconnecting discussion services such as blogs, forums, and mailing lists to each other.&quot;SIOC is a data format essentially to describe communities. It has many different possible applications, of which data portability is one,&quot; Breslin, a lecturer and researcher at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute of the National University of Ireland in Galway, said in a phone interview.Victor Coustenoble shares a similar belief. He co-founded the OSocial.net project with Edwin Taylor to let people see their social-networking data in an open, portable way and let them securely build a friends list across site boundaries without the need for new registrations.&quot;About our participation, we are very interested to implement and use data portability ideas and specifications. It helps us to write applications easily for data management with standards and with a community support, which is very important for us,&quot; Coustenoble said.For Devin Holloway, the workgroup could yield historic results. He plans to move from Silicon Valley to Asia to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities where social networks, mobile phones and Internet technologies intersect.&quot;[Data portability] will pave the way for a future rich in services and applications that harness our aggregate data to help improve our lives in virtually every aspect. The [workgroup] is onto something that is going to change the world, and I&#39;m excited to be a part of the process,&quot; he said.Unfortunately, the enthusiasm, commitment, and passion displayed by participants, many of whom are acting as individual volunteers, hasn&#39;t so far been replicated by the major Internet players.While the decisions by Google and Facebook to become members put the workgroup in a news spotlight, their representatives don&#39;t seem to have yet participated in the forum discussions. Google and Facebook also declined to have their workgroup representatives be interviewed for this article. Each separately sent a brief, prepared statement saying that they want to participate in the group because they&#39;re committed to data portability.This isn&#39;t new. The CEOs of both companies at different times have said that their companies believe in data portability, and yet, neither them nor any other major Internet company can be said to have taken a leadership role in this effort.&quot;I haven&#39;t seen anything convincing from the big Internet companies that illustrates that they want to embrace this wholeheartedly,&quot; Breslin said. &quot;These sites haven&#39;t really been rushing to make their data portable yet.&quot;&quot;We are yet to see if they are fully committed. So far they have only committed to the conversation,&quot; said Saad, who is also CEO of Faraday Media in Australia and cofounder of the APML Workgroup. &quot;That being said, however, it&#39;s encouraging to see them take the first few steps in the right direction,&quot;This isn&#39;t a minor point. The DataPortability Workgroup and the other technical organizations could come up with fantastic solutions, but if the major Internet players -- and in particular the major social-networking sites -- don&#39;t adopt them, data portability will not become a reality for end-users. MySpace, Friendster, LinkedIn, and Bebo did not reply to requests for comment for this story.Maybe these Internet companies aren&#39;t truly convinced that data portability will be good for their businesses. In what some viewed as an example of words being inconsistent with actions, Facebook recently booted from its social network the well-known technology blogger Robert Scoble.Scoble&#39;s crime? He exported his contacts data in his Facebook account over to Plaxo&#39;s address book management service, Pulse. No can do, Facebook said, explaining that Plaxo&#39;s tool violated Facebook&#39;s terms of service and posed a security risk because it &quot;scraped&quot; the data from the social network. Scoble&#39;s account was later reinstated, but under the condition he doesn&#39;t do this again.If you operate a social-networking site -- or any site where people create an account or profile, list contacts and post content -- a way to discourage them from switching to a competitor is to make it hard or impossible for them to easily export and reuse that data elsewhere.Yet proponents of data portability like Saad say that things are starting to change, and that Facebook, MySpace, Google, and others need to wise up if they don&#39;t want to fall into disfavor with their users.What has changed is that these &quot;social&quot; sites have reached mainstream status, and a critical mass of users have realized the inconvenience of having to reenter and update a lot of the same information and content in multiple &quot;social&quot; sites and applications.&quot;As more and more applications start to feel the impact of social features, users will begin to demand a data portability solution. Either that or network fatigue will reduce adoption and eventually kill the fun,&quot; Saad said.For example, a concrete result of data portability could be a console-like management application where a person could manage his address book contacts, photos, videos, social news entries, social bookmarks and blog posts. With that application, the user would be able to share data between multiple social applications, sites and services.Unlike other vendors, Plaxo is heavily involved in data portability discussions and efforts precisely because its Pulse service has been designed to help people manage their dispersed contacts data across address books, sites, and e-mail accounts.&quot;By making data portable, you&#39;re enabling all these tools to work together. The user can be the hub and the different services can be spokes. That&#39;s what we&#39;re pushing for: Users in control of the data and interoperability among the services,&quot; said Joseph Smarr, Plaxo&#39;s chief platform architect.Ultimately, the problem represents an opportunity for Internet companies. &quot;In the end, whoever moves first to be truly open will have the advantage,&quot; Saad said.J. Trent Adams, founder and chief innovator at Matchmine, another vendor pushing for data portability, concurs. A stealthy startup could develop a clever application or service built on data portability standards and force other vendors to respond. &quot;All of a sudden, it&#39;s the right idea, and the big boys will have to react,&quot; Adams said.In other words, Internet companies who insist on locking up their users&#39; data to protect their businesses might soon find themselves instead stuck in the mud.
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New graphical report designer plug-in gives Eclipse developers direct access to world's most widely-used open source BI reporting product  SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 20, 2006 Ã¢â¬â JasperSoft Corporation, the market leader in open source business intelligence, today launched iReport Plug-in for Eclipse, a graphical report designer that lets developers using Eclipse quickly add sophisticated reports to their applications. JasperSoft's new Eclipse plug-in, as well as the iReport designer application and the JasperReports reporting libraries are all freely available for download and use under open source licenses. This is the first integration of Eclipse with JasperSoft's open source BI products, which have been downloaded more than 1.7 million times.  Eclipse users can now create, edit, and run reports from the same familiar development environment they use everyday, speeding up their workflow and reducing project development times. Java developers can instantly access the iReport graphical report editor to give their applications rich reporting capability based on the popular and powerful JasperReports library that can create Web and pixel-perfect ready to print reports in PDF, HTML, XLS, CSV, TXT and XML. In addition to easy report creation, the new iReport Plug-in for Eclipse also gives developers access to the entire JasperIntelligence suite of open source BI applications to manage interactive reports from a server, schedule reports, and analyze data.  Ã¢â¬ÅWe want to thank JasperSoft and their peers in the open source community who worked on the new iReport Plug-in for Eclipse that gives developers the ability to add advanced reporting capability to their applications,Ã¢â¬Â said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. Ã¢â¬ÅCreating a bridge between the Eclipse and JasperSoft open source communities further strengthens both communities and brings more value to users of open source applications.Ã¢â¬Â  Ã¢â¬ÅJasperSoft developed the iReport Plug-in for Eclipse in response to demand from Java developers to get direct access to the world's most popular open source reporting library with the most popular open source IDE platform,Ã¢â¬Â said Giulio Toffoli, lead committer for the iReport project and iReport engineering lead at JasperSoft. Ã¢â¬ÅNow Java developers can choose the best reporting tools for their projects, without concern about IDE compatibility.Ã¢â¬Â    The new product is shipping with all copies of iReport and is immediately available for download and installation from http://www.jasperforge.org as part of the iReport package. iReport and the new Eclipse plug-in are distributed under the GPL open source license.  ###
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See how smarter documents are working for others at
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TechWeb - Business intelligence software sales are growing at a double-digit pace, according to a new IDC report, and rising demand lifted sales for nearly every vendor. Microsoft and SAS led the way among the top-five vendors while one up-and-coming company racked up a near triple-digit sales gain. Despite all the &quot;BI for everyone&quot; marketing hype, IDC says the technology is still out of reach for mainstream business users.
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MicrosoftÂ has taken another step to make it easier for customers and partners to customize its BI software suite.
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This scenario is all too familiar to office workers who collaborate electronically on projects: E-mails get passed around with differing versions of documents-in-progress attached. Instant messages whizz by. Web sites are cited, then lost. It's often a jumbled mess, with no central online location for shared data. There must be a better way.