Cloud computing

Business Intelligence/Analytics

Mobile Application Development Trends (including Android & Iphone)

Software as Service Models.

Apart from these, I am personally interested in learning/developing Silverlight interface and MVC dependent web applications.

Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technologies

Instead of talking about the step by step solution for the above scenario, I just write about the challenges I faced. (Applicable only to SQL Server 2005)

1) Setting up the cube OLAP Server as a linked server in relational database posed lots of problems.
Cannot obtain the required interface (“IID_IDBSchemaRowset”) from OLE DB provider “MSOLAP” for linked server.
Recommended solution:
   1. Start –> Run –> Dcomcnfg
   2. Component services –> My computer –> DCOM config –> MSDAINITIALIZE
   3. Right click on MSDAINITIALIZE –> properties –>security
   4. Add the SQL Start-up account ( you may have to go to services in administrative tools under control panel to check log on account) under   “launch and activation permission”, “Access permission” and “Configuration permission”.
   5. Give full rights.

2) When designing a SSIS package to extract the data from the cube, the DataFlowTask with OLE  DB -Analysis Services Provider, always failed. Further investigation (spent lots of time) revealed the following fix from Microsoft:
Change the Provider to Native OLE DB\Microsoft OLE DB Provider for Analysis Services 9.0, - Click the Connection Properties tab:
You need to tell the Connection Manager to return the query in tabular format, so in the Extended Properties text box enter Format=Tabular

 3) Then, the SSAS datatype and the SSIS datatype didnot match – failed to convert from unicode to non-unicode. The following article addresses the problem.
http://www.mssqltips.com/tip.asp?tip=1393

4) Finally the MDX query had to finetuned to retrived only the relevant result (Caption, Name, All Members) – Good Understanding of MDX will be very beneficial when trying to use ssas data inside a SSIS package.

Four ways to generate a report off of SSAS:
http://denglishbi.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!CD3E77E793DF6178!332.entry

• It can be used to port packages from one server to another.
• It includes the packages organized in folder structures.

Is Microsoft coming up with its own utility to deploy multiple packages? Anything available on Microsoft SQL Server 2008?

Performance Management delivers scorecards.

The following check list should help:
1) Do you have any periodical reporting system?
2) How do you make a decision?
3) Where do you get your numbers?
4) Is there one integrated view of all the reports from the departments?
5) Have you provided the decision makers all the data and the tools necessary?
6) Were you able to pin point exactly the cause for any particular event noteworthy like a big order, huge loss.?
7) Is there a consistent system representing the facts, delivering one version of the truth?

What is Business Intelligence? How is this different from Datawarehouse?
As there is no clear definition available, the so called pundits define Business Intelligence as the technology platform which provides for business decision making thus delivering actionable insights.

BI is one another term for Datawarehouse, both the terms are relatively the same. But just to differentiate between the two,  Datawarehouse is just the accumulation of data from the various datasources minus the analytics reporting.

Based on the survey results from CIO Magazine,  Business Intelligence is considered to be in top 3 priorities.
” CIOs  identified the top visionary projects that they are working on now or foresee implementing in the future, ranging from process improvement to taking advantage of technologies that can provide immediate and long-term financial impact, such as: business intelligence and analytics, virtualization and green IT, service oriented architectures (SOA), service management, and cloud computing.”