I’m building up for my running challenges of 2011 and breaking in my new treadmill so I am slowly building up my miles.
On incentive is the Marcothon group on FaceBook, the basic premis is to run for either 3 miles or 25 minutes in every day in December.
I have also been mucking around with Xcelsius for a parkrun project, more on that later.
To keep an eye on my progress I have built a dashboard to track my running over the current year and so I can visually compare my training year on year.
photo credit: eshm
I was having a flick through my employment contract and I found the following clause:
13.2
You agree that during the course of this contract and after the termination of the contract for whatever reason without limit in point in time you will keep in confidence and shall not disclose to any person unless authorised to do so with the prior written consent of the Company the following:-
13.2.1 Any consultancy know-how, methods, tools, techniques or intellectual capital.
I realised that some of my blog entries or tweets could fall foul of this clause so I asked for written permission to continue blogging generic “work related” content such as Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, Data Modelling and Business Objects.
Rather than granting this and leveraging the fairly good google rankings that my posts seem to get I was asked to remove all work related posts.
Business Objects Best Practice (higher ranking than BusinessObjects.com)
Business Objects New Features (Page One)
Dimensional Modelling (Ralph Kimball ?)
As such I have password protected all of my work related posts.
If you are struggling to find content there are a variety of searches that could turn up interesting content.
Alternatively you can go to my company site, contact details can be found here or here.
The purpose of this document is to provide a description of what I consider to be best practice when designing a business intelligence report. I will also try to describe the reasoning behind the suggestion.
photo credit: ArtemFinland
The purpose of this document is to provide a description of what I consider to be best practice when designing a Business Objects Universe. We will also describe the reasoning behind the suggestion.
Just a quick summary of my on-line presence this year.
I have invested a lot of content to Twitter this year.
This is primarily due to the convenience of the platform racking up almost 1200 updates in the year here.
I can’t find a way to get stats for the year so here are my top five photos:
By far the most popular post on the site was the photos page here.
Second most popular page is the “About Me” page here.
As for the blog entries themselves they rank at:
1 – Business Objects XI 3.0 New Features – Conditional Prompts
2 – Crystal Xcelsius – Filtered Rows From A Filter Component
3 – Modelling Change In Your Dimensions
4 – Business Objects XI 3.0 New Features – Change Data Tracking
5 – Dimensional Modelling – Facts
As you can see here the site only really started getting traffic last January so that gives me 17300 page views.
Obviously the biggest news of the year was the passing of my daughter Emma.
Celebrating the Life of Emma Berry Goodman
And the year ends on another low point with the passing of another member of my extended family.
George Miller – Footballer | 1939 – 2008
This is really obvious with hindsight but it took me ages before “the penny dropped”.
Most of the time I find myself using the “Filtered Rows” option on my selectors.
The main selector that I want to use is the “Filter”, but strangely this does not have the option of filtered rows.
What I have resorted to doing in the past is to use multiple selectors:
A date drop down list box filters the rows from “Raw Data” sheet to the “Monthly” sheet.
A product drop down list box filters the rows from the “Monthly” sheet to the “MonthlyProducts” sheet.
A customer drop down list box filters the rows from the “MonthlyProducts” sheet to the “MonthlyProductsCustomers” sheet which now lists all of the sales made for that combination.
The filter component could do that, but this component assumes that there will only be a single row in the output. As soon as you have multiple rows in your result set then you can’t use the filter component.
Ahhh, but you can with a little lateral thinking; that’s what Xcelsius is all about.
One of the major features being “re-introduced” to the XI product family is Publishing.
This gives you the ability to write a single report, that runs a single query but sends a different “version” of the report to each user.
This is only scraping the surface of the full Publisher functionality, lets have a look at houw you can create your first user targeted publications.
When in doubt, don’t fiddle.
I “forgot” the admin password for my Business Objects XI 3.0 (Demo) environment.
Some searching turned up a “hack” that would resolve this, which involves deleting data from the repository database. One quick delete later and my installation is broken.
Of course if this was in the “real world”
No worries, I just did an uninstall and re-install – a couple of hours work, but it is work I didn’t have to redo.
Lesson Learned – Treat even your demo system like production!
I know that I covered this in my video post, but I hated the quality of the video, so here is a similar post with pictures (click on hem to see larger versions).
You no longer need to splash out on fancy dashboarding software (although Xcelsius is good !) to quickly highlight when your data is changing. A new feature in Business Objects Web Intelligence (WebI) 3.0 allows you to add this feature to any document.
I’m going to start a small series of posts showing you what’s new in Business Objects XI 3.0
I’m starting off small; with Conditional Prompts.