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Archive for the ‘BI’ Category

xLite Beta Updated – adds Python as an Excel Scripting Language

Posted in BI, ETL, Python, excel, xLite on February 7, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

I’ve updated the xLite Beta with bug fixes and added a new page introducing xLite’s Excel/VBA and Python extensions to SQLite.
See http://www.gobansaor.com/xlite
The u() function allows any VBA UDF (user defined functions) to be called from SQLite.
The x() function allows an inbuilt function or indeed most any formula (but not a UDF, use u() instead) to be [...]

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Palo BI Suite Community Edition

Posted in BI, GoogleApps, Groovy, Palo, olap, tagged , , on June 12, 2009 | 5 Comments »

Jedox have finally published a roadmap for the Palo BI Suite Community Edition, having caused considerable confusion by pre-announcing its availability last April. See here for the details.  The headline dates are, a beta version due 1st of July with a Release Candidate due 1st September.
Although the announcement in April was essentially vapour-ware (no Worksheet [...]

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LiteBI, Heavy ETL

Posted in BI, ETL, Talend, cloud, data, kettle, olap, tagged on April 24, 2009 | 2 Comments »

Although my major BI interest is in micro-BI (or is that  workgroup-BI?)  i.e. data, perhaps cleansed and packaged elsewhere, available locally on a datasmith’s PC,with most likely an in-memory OLAP as the analysis tool; the possibilities of the “cloud” as a BI platform have not escaped me.
From a micro-BI perspective, the ability to act as a [...]

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Project Gemini – XXL, Excel on Steroids

Posted in BI, ETL, SQLite, excel, tagged , , , on April 1, 2009 | 9 Comments »

In my last post about why I use SQLite in combination with Excel for datasmithing tasks, I listed the more traditional backends (Excel itself, MS Access, RDBMs & MOLAP cubes) that one would expect to “compete” with such an idea.   But I suspect that if that same post appeared  two years or so into [...]

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SQLite as the MP3 of data

Posted in BI, ETL, Palo, SQLite, VBA, excel, olap, tagged on March 14, 2009 | 18 Comments »

… and Excel as its “mixing desk”.
When I tell people that I use SQLite in combination with Excel (via xLite) as my datasmithing platform, many ask why SQLite? (Many others ask why Excel?  but “sin scéal eile”, that’s another discussion – Excel as the iPod of Downloaded Data.) Those that question my use of SQLite [...]

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Spending time on Excel-SQLite, C, VBA Callbacks & Twitter

Posted in BI, ETL, Palo, SQLite, VBA, Web2.0, excel, xLite, tagged , on November 20, 2008 | 3 Comments »

Haven’t posted here in a while as my spare time has been soaked up programing, well actually refactoring would be more exact.  My xLite “SQLite empowered Excel” codebase has grown over the years and required a serious makeover to get rid of stuff I no longer use and to generally make it more robust.  I [...]

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I’ll give up Excel Pivot Tables when you take ‘em from my cold, dead hands

Posted in BI, Palo, excel, olap, tagged , , , , on October 10, 2008 | 19 Comments »

Jedox, the company behind the open source MOLAP server Palo, has just announced an MDX driver. This means that it’s now possible to access Palo cubes using Excel Pivot Tables or indeed any tool that supports ODBO.  This is excellent news, as MOLAP to most Excel users IS a Pivot Table, and somewhat like the NRA, [...]

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Twitter – the penny drops!

Posted in BI, Web2.0, data, tagged , , , , , on September 12, 2008 | 4 Comments »

I’m a fan of most things Web2.0, not just for personal use but as business tools.  Over the last four years or so I’ve enthusiastically embraced Wikis, IM (Google Talk), RSS Readers et al. I could see the benefit and attraction of social network sites such as Facebook even if I’ve not partaken as such. [...]

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Cloudy skies, cloudy apps…

Posted in BI, ETL, Ireland, Palo, Web2.0, cloud, data, excel, news, olap, tagged , , , on August 28, 2008 | 4 Comments »

Just back from a break in Clifden, Connemara, summer is nearly over, the kids return to school today, back to work.
Counties Galway and Mayo were like the rest of the country last week, a tad wet, but unlike the developed east of the island, flooding was not a problem; a problematic drainage area is called [...]

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Talend + SQLite + Groovy the new Oracle …

Posted in BI, EC2, ETL, Groovy, Palo, SQLite, Talend, data, excel, olap, tagged , on August 2, 2008 | 5 Comments »

… well, at least for me.  Let me explain.
For most of my datasmithing career, I’ve had access to corporate Oracle databases and now with the availability of  Oracle10g  Express I can even run my own Oracle instances at home or on EC2.  The combination of a powerful SQL engine, expressive scripting language (PL/SQL) ,OS independence, [...]

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OLAP Cube as a Mind Map

Posted in BI, Palo, excel, olap, tagged , , on July 30, 2008 | 3 Comments »

If you’ve worked with OLAP technologies for any length of time you’ll undoubtedly have been in the situation where you’ve had to explain the concept of an OLAP Cube to a “newbie”.  If the person in question has come across Excel pivot-tables, then you can probably short-circuit the conversation some what, explaining that a pivot [...]

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Palo OLAP and sparse dimensions.

Posted in BI, ETL, Palo, excel, tagged , , , , , , , on May 26, 2008 | 9 Comments »

Last week I tried out both the latest Palo 2.5 release and its sister product, ETL-Server.  Although I’ve not done any proper benchmarks, 2.5 does appear to be faster than the previous release and the Excel add-in also behaves better when co-habiting with other add-ins and macros (the previous release’s use of, and response to, [...]

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Palo ETL Server – Not for me …

Posted in BI, ETL, Palo, SQLite, excel, tagged , on May 1, 2008 | 2 Comments »

Jedox have just released V1.0 of their Palo-centric ETL Server. I had been looking forward to this, not so much for its ETL ability (which is somewhat limited when compared to the likes of Pentaho PDI or Talend) but for the drill-through capability it would add to Palo. Alas, there’s a catch, you [...]

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Python the new VBA ?

Posted in BI, ETL, Palo, Python, Ruby, SQLite, VBA, Web2.0, data, excel, news, tagged , , , , on April 11, 2008 | 11 Comments »

These last two weeks, Python has been on my mind. First off, last week I decided to make time to fully investigate Picalo, an open-source Python-based data analysis tool, and then, this week, Google announced their long awaited cloud-computing offering, Google Apps Engine, with the language at its core.
Python was the first of [...]

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Postgres Plus Cloud Edition is boring …

Posted in AmazonAWS, BI, EC2, ETL, S3, SQLite, SimpleDB, olap, tagged , , , on March 27, 2008 | 2 Comments »

… and that’s good. That’s how I like my databases, boring, reliable, consistent, easy to use.
SimpleDB on the other hand is not boring, it’s an exciting new shiny thing that opens up a myriad of new possibilities; but first, I and the rest of the developer community, need to tool up and cast aside [...]

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Dublin Bus and PALO ETL – the connection!

Posted in AmazonAWS, BI, ETL, Palo, S3, SQLite, SimpleDB, Talend, VBA, excel, kettle, olap, tagged , , , , on January 26, 2008 | 5 Comments »

Dublin buses, as is the norm with most road-based public transport systems in our increasingly car-choked cities, tend to operate on the basis of “no sign of a bus for ages, then two or three arrive at the same time”. Palo MOLAP ETL options appear to be following the same pattern; we’ve been waiting for [...]

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New ETL platform for PALO OLAP

Posted in BI, ETL, Palo, Talend, kettle, olap, tagged , , , on November 28, 2007 | Leave a Comment »

Jedox have announced that they intend to ship a Palo centric ETL open source server product early next year. This is excellent news and is on top of the new rules engine that was added to Palo this summer. Open source MOLAP has suddenly taken off the training wheels and is getting ready [...]

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Amazon EC2: S, L and XL – now we’re sucking diesel..

Posted in BI, EC2, ETL, RSSBus, Web2.0, tagged , , on October 16, 2007 | Leave a Comment »

As of today, Amazon EC2 now supports two new Instance Types..
… a “Large” and an “Extra Large” instance type to complement the original instance type and provide more flexibility for EC2 users. The new instance types provide more memory, CPU, and instance storage, and are based on 64bit technology. EC2 users can now [...]

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BI governance – push or pull, carrot or stick?

Posted in BI on September 17, 2007 | Leave a Comment »

Timo Elliott discusses the perennial problem surrounding BI, the great centralised-data-warehouse versus departmental-data-marts debate; who owns what and who decides what to build, corporate IT or individual business units? He suggests a good compromise, a pull model, with individual business units owning, commissioning and paying for BI projects but with a centralised BI competency [...]

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CouchDB – document centric ODS

Posted in BI, ETL, S3, SQLite, data, tagged , , on September 14, 2007 | 4 Comments »

While the potential of column-oriented DBMSs within BI projects is obvious given the popularity of MOLAP ( a form of column-oriented data store) the potential for the other new kid on the block, the document-oriented database, is less so. One such DBMS,CouchDb, is the latest wunderkid to bubble to the surface, helped by the [...]

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