This article presents a strategy for testing ETL applications that perform data movement and populate data warehouses. It is useful information for the testing community as well as designers and managers charged with planning a data warehousing implementation.  Read more...

EDM solutions are a logical and often necessary complement to operational analytics.  Read more...

Organizations with mature business intelligence environments can integrate fraud analytics within their current environment to take advantage of processes and architecture that are already in place.   Read more...

Complex event processing (CEP) software delivers on the promise of real-time insight, but is the technology too green for mainstream success? CEP was once available only to big financial institutions and government agencies that could afford custom development projects. That's no longer the case, as off-the-shelf products and implementations have proliferated.   Read more...

The interest in dynamic data warehousing (DDW) is growing significantly. A sure sign that the virtual brand has reached take-off speed is claims by bloggers that they did not get enough credit for coining the concept, viral brand or idea. For example, Dan Linstedt recently went on what he described as a "rant" about "dynamic data warehousing."  Read more...

Data warehousing is being used more and more everyday and longtime data warehouse DBA Janet Wong brings us a short look at her first project and some thoughts about warehousing in general.   Read more...

Relational Data Warehouse or Reporting work loads are characterized by low volumes of very large transactions. These applications are often identified as having predominately read workloads (e.g. Decision Support, Analysis, and Reporting) with periodic feeds or batch loads. It is important to keep these characteristics in mind as we examine the significance of database design, resource utilization and system performance. The top performance bottlenecks or gotchas to avoid for Data Warehouse or Reporting applications are outlined below.  Read more...

We published a very interesting article about data warehousing in the SQL Server Standard awhile back. However the article was abridged and the author, a very respected data warehousing professional asked that we publish the entire thing here. So we bring you Harsh Bhaiya's very popular ETL treatise.   Read more...

We get Vincent Rainardi's "Data Warehouse Loading Part 2" article taking a look at how you can perform an "upsert" in your data warehouse.   Read more...

In the second of a series of articles that targets the DBA new to an organization, this article looks at how to manage DTS packages.   Read more...

SqlBulkTool is a command line utility that is used to quickly create a mirror of a database. It reads its configuration from an XML file containing source and destination command strings and a list of all the tables to mirror and then handles the work of copying the database in an automated and highly parallelized way.  Read more...

In this article, adapted from the just-published second edition of MDX Solutions that Chris co-authored with George Spofford, Siva Harinath, Dylan Hai Huang, and Francesco Civardi, Chris shows us how to start exploring the world of cubes and MDX Scripts.  Read more...

Data, information, and knowledge. They're all different concepts and we sometimes lose sight of the fact that there are differences. This is a good look at the difference.   Read more...

The term “Enterprise Metadata Management” has been in use since the late 1980’s when many of us worked in classic “mainframe environments” using “corporate data dictionaries” to manage our COBOL programs, Job Control Language (JCL), screens, reports, copybooks, and database schema definitions. Fast-forward to 2005 ~ has anything changed? What does “enterprise metadata management” mean today ? I recently surveyed a number of leading metadata management vendors, Global 5000 companies, and industry thought-leaders seeking their input.  Read more...

In this lesson, we will introduce a function that provides us the ability to derive a set by systematically applying a set expression to each of the members of a set we define. GENERATE() is a potent function in our MDX toolset, in that it enables us to select precisely only certain members of a dimension level. It effectively operates upon two sets to create a new set, based upon the members of a second set that are also in a primary set.  Read more...

In the two years since Insight's last examination of the topic, grid computing has moved out of the laboratory and into mainstream commercial applications. No longer the exclusive tool of researchers seeking to harness enough compute power for massive computational challenges such as weather modeling or weapons test simulations, today grids are being deployed in more traditional commercial computing applications. For example, commercial computing stalwarts IBM, Intel, Hewlett-Packard (HP) and Sun recently announced they were forming the Globus Consortium to drive the technology into the mainstream for applications such as financial analysis, oil exploration and pharmaceutical testing. And within the technical community, new standards being developed called the Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF) will foster convergence of the Web service and grid computing communities, which in the years ahead is likely to have a major impact on quality and diversity of Web services.   Read more...

Robert Pearl of Pearl Knowledge Solutions, Inc., recently attended a meeting of the NY Database Professionals Council where SQL Server Analysis Services 2005 was a large part of the topic of conversation. Read his report on the push to move business intelligence into the mainstream.   Read more...

Ralph Kimball, founder of The Kimbaal Group, shares some thoughts on data with PASS.   Read more...

The first article looking at the new BI scorecard technology from Microsoft. This allows you to quickly deploy some easy reports on your OLAP system. From datawarehouse.com.  Read more...

Today Microsoft announces the web release of the Microsoft Office Business Intelligence (BI) Accelerators. Both the Business Scorecards Accelerator and the Excel Add-In for Analysis Services empowers Information Workers and executives alike to increase the speed and quality of decisions aimed at improving business performance.   Read more...

We published a very interesting article about data warehousing in the SQL Server Standard awhile back. However the article was abridged and the author, a very respected data warehousing professional asked that we publish the entire thing here. So we bring you Harsh Bhaiya's very popular ETL treatise.   Read more...

Data warehousing is being used more and more everyday and longtime data warehouse DBA Janet Wong brings us a short look at her first project and some thoughts about warehousing in general.   Read more...

This article presents a strategy for testing ETL applications that perform data movement and populate data warehouses. It is useful information for the testing community as well as designers and managers charged with planning a data warehousing implementation.  Read more...