It's been pointed out that I probably need to give a better explanation of what my tool does and why I think you guys will like it so..

As a freelance BI consultant. I constantly find myself repeating the same tasks over and over; creating staging / warehouse tables, building update procedures, adding measure groups and dimensions to cubes. Its normally the same thing just different data and naming conventions.

My tool, which for now is called RaBIT (Rapid Business Intelligence Tool), aims to alleviate that grunt work by building the whole lot for you. The tool uses a specification file as its input which is not a great deal different than what you would expect from a decent technical spec document so the initial overheads are low. The tool reads the spec file in, determines what objects need to be built, confirms what the solution will look like, then goes away and builds it. You can effectively go from a specification to a full BI solution in seconds.

The resulting solution includes; staging tables, warehouse tables, dimensions, measure groups, a cube and the ETL procedures needed to populate the lot. It supports degenerate and SCD type 1 & 2 dimensions. It can build you basic date and time dimensions. It creates all the appropriate primary keys, surrogate keys and foreign keys. It can even be used to extend existing solutions, tacking on measure groups and dimensions to existing cubes or making use of existing dimensions in new measure groups and cubes. There are comprehensive settings that can be adjusted so the resulting solution fits with whatever whimsical naming conventions are needed.

The bottom line is that it can save you days of that tedious development work we all do on a regular basis.

The tool currently only works with versions of SQL Server 2008 R2 or later but I hope to add support back to 2005 at some point.

Volunteers for the beta test will receive free lifetime licenses to the application and all future updates. All I ask ask in return is feedback.

There is a free trial of the tool available to download from my website www.barakudabi.com/rapid-business-intelligence/

I'm still waiting for my software publisher certificate so you will probably get an install warning, if you aren't comfortable installing without this you could always spin up a VM and try it out on there.

Edit: Certificate is now added so we're official 🙂

If anyone is interested in a beta license please send me a PM and I'll arrange an activation code.

Many thanks

Dan