Friday, March 28, 2014

Gartner 2014 Report - BI and Analytics Platforms...

The Gartner report for 2014 related to the Business Intelligence and analytics platform is out, as expected the number of vendors competing in the BI and Analytics space continues to grow. There are niche vendors continuing to enter the market space, at the same there are some vendors who have made it to the leaders quadrant. The vendors were evaluated across 17 categories which were divided into 3 main areas:

  • Information Delivery
  • Analysis
  • Integration
 The vendors who made it to the leaders quadrant are:
Tableau,Qilk,Microsoft,SAP,SAS,IBM,Oracle,Tibco Software,MicroStrategy and Information Builders. Since i use Microsoft suite of products the most, areas of  concerns that has been listed are, Interactive visualizations, metadata management and Mobile BI support. As per the report Microsoft is trying to handle the Mobile BI space by using Power BI. Currently Microsoft BI products seemed to be most used in the Enterprise and Small business world the most. One of the challenges that Microsoft faces I feel is cross product integration, we have the traditional Microsoft BI stack on one hand, the Office/Power BI suite on the other, to add to the mix we also have Sharepoint driven BI capabilities. How do these different versions of BI products from Microsoft Co-Exist? At the same time Microsoft is depending on cloud based BI offerings to reduce complexity for smaller companies.
There were other vendors who have good mention with respect to the leader's quadrant: They are:
Tableau
TIBCO Software
Qilk
The concerns for the above three vendors were mainly in the areas of Customer Support and sales. For Qilk as per the report there were mixed opinions about whether product is enterprise ready or not.
In the report there was mention of two cloud based BI vendors:

Birst
Birst's BI platform is primarily a cloud-based offering. It includes a broad range of components, such as data integration, federation and modeling, a data warehouse with a semantic layer, reporting, dashboards, mobile BI and a recently announced interactive visualization tool.

GoodData
GoodData is a cloud BI and analytics specialist. It provides a range of front-end BI capabilities and packaged analytic applications that complement its comprehensive cloud and on-premises source data integration and cloud-based data warehouse platform.

Tuesday, March 25, 2014

SQL Scripts...

As a Developer, I have always loved writing scripts to automate tasks in SQL Server. They come in really Handy especially for DBA's and Developers alike. When I used to work as a DBA for a product development firm i had to create scripts as part of installation and provide utility scripts for clients. With the constant evolvement of SQL Server there are lot of areas where scripts can come in handy. Here is a blog by DBA On the Go, where in the some of the useful and quality scripts have been compiled:
http://www.dbaonthego.com/2014/03/my-favorite-free-scripts.html. I am a big fan of Ola hallengren's scripts, please check out the blog link above.

Monday, March 17, 2014

Cloud Services...

I was on a emergency trip to take care of my father, during the flight met some individuals who are offering different types of cloud based services for different types of companies. They were were upbeat about the adoption of cloud based technologies. With Microsoft Satya Nadella stating the emphasis on cloud based and mobile offerings, this is a space to watch out for. I am enclosing a link on a demo of Azure by MVP TroyHunt:
http://www.troyhunt.com/2014/03/the-worlds-greatest-azure-demo.html. He very nicely lists out the 14 different steps required to set up Azure and has provided a video as well.