Further to my blog post about SQL server appliances Microsoft and HP also offer the very exciting Business Decision Appliance. This contains a preconfigured environment with:
- Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition
- Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition with PowerPivot integration for SharePoint
- Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Edition Prerequisites for SharePoint and PowerPivot
- Appliance Administration Console
- Appliance-specific SharePoint Home Page
- Up to 80 Concurrent Users
The aim of this appliance is to provide a safe and scalable environment for business users to quickly put a PowerPivot environment in place. This is isolated from existing systems and can be implemented by a business department with very limited IT involvement. Its isolated nature is important as many organisations don’t run SharePoint 2010 throughout their enterprise. PowerPivot authors also need Excel 2010 but once reports are built and deployed they can be shared throughout the business through SharePoint using any web browser. Anyone who has already tried to set up an integrated SharePoint and PowerPivot environment will know that the installation is not simple. This appliance takes that pain away with a one click installation from first start up that can have you up and running in under an hour.
The key point is that business users love PowerPivot and its ability to quickly use their data to answer any question. They can respond dynamically, collaborate and share insights throughout the organisation. Importantly PowerPivot allows the creation of reports that look great and are very fast. All this is done from within the familiar Excel interface and requiring little training to get started. Any team of business analysts would likely have a massive boost in productivity from the installation of the BDA in their department. IT can then monitor those reports that are heavily used and decide whether they need making more robust through transition to enterprise software such as Analysis Services. PowerPivot use is at its easiest in an environment where there is a clean data warehouse but where the business aren't happy with the speed or responsiveness to change of their current front end. In an environment with more disparate and dirty data the end users need to be more SQL and data modelling skilled, but the payback can be even greater.
I see massive opportunity in this appliance for any team of data analysts to be able to deliver massive value to their business right now.
More Info on the BDA
If you work in large enterprises you often come across the attitude that Microsoft SQL Server can’t scale. People therefore turn to vendors such as Oracle and Teradata for solutions at very high cost. This attitude often comes from in-house experience of a growing SQL database which hits something between 5 and 10TB and starts slowing down and becoming difficult to work with. These databases are often run on multi-instance servers with shared SAN access and little thought to data fragmentation. Its no wonder that their environment has problems!
Microsoft Strategy
I was recently invited to a Microsoft partners event which aims to challenge these attitudes and give partners better information to discuss large scale SQL implementations. Their strategy is to use partnership with HP to give SQL server a balanced hardware configuration to run on. This will solve the major bottleneck which gives SQL Server the performance problems people perceive are with the software. They have created a range of solutions together to allow SQL server to scale effectively to meet any need. The first of these solutions was released a couple of years ago and there are more in the pipeline. There are real world case studies available from Microsoft detailing the success of this strategy for many early adopters. These solutions are targeted at the workloads they need to run and are detailed below.
Warehousing
< 5TB – HP Business Data Warehouse Appliance
20TB – 80TB – Fast Track Data Warehouse
126TB – 500TB – HP Enterprise Data Warehouse Appliance
Applications/ Consolidation/Private Cloud
100VM’s- 10,000VM’s
OLTP
On the way shortly - Will scale to the worlds largest OLTP Implementations
These solutions are all positioned such that they are going to be significantly cheaper than almost any other vendor while providing equal or better performance. The appliances also provide excellent improvements in time to market, drastically reducing required configuration time. I would also recommend the 5TB box to anyone building a data warehouse of any size. This give you the confidence that you are buying a competitively priced server which is optimised for a SQL workload and you are not going to hit any hardware bottlenecks which you might come across on a shared or custom build server. The evolution of the Microsoft appliance and fast-track structure has also produced predictable benchmarks. You can choose the performance you need by picking the right server and if you follow the best practices you can be sure that you will achieve the throughput and response time needed.
Oracle’s Exadata platform claims to be able to manage any workload at any scale. What they don’t specify in the sales briefs is the amount of configuration required to match the platform to the workload in your environment. This means you need to invest in a lot of time for your Oracle DBA’s to tune and configure the hardware correctly. It is then not a comparable product to a SQL server installed on a spare bit of hardware which has very little time invested in it.
With a balanced hardware configuration and best practice ETL Microsoft SQL Server can meet any scale requirement asked of it. So next time you come across the “SQL can’t scale” attitude don’t be afraid to let people know that they are out of date and SQL will be able to meet their requirement at a far lower cost than the competitors.
(There is another appliance out for self service BI but it deserves a post all of its own - BDA )
Distributing the slides from my talk last night, it was well received and I think everyone was able to take something away.
Credit goes to Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari for their data modelling ideas, visit www.sqlbi.com
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/25925341/Learning%27s%20from%20large%20scale%20dw%20project.pptx
Hopefully not my last talk as i enjoyed doing it. Look out for further Bath based events at:
http://avonim.wordpress.com/
All comments welcome
Calvin
Problem
SSAS translations are known to deal with warehousing language requirements well. We recently had a requirement for a multi-language report suite on top of a user browsed cube. First thought was SSAS translations, these will pick up the users local language settings and allow an elegant solution to the problem.
However a requirement was put forward for a language picker in the SSRS report suite to over-ride the users locale if they so desire. This was not so obvious.
Data source
We started with a list of languages to build a picker from, this was built by importing the table available here to a SQL Server and building it as a dataset in our report:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/0h88fahh.aspx
It is important to bring through the decimal value in column 4 and the short string in column 2 as we will see later.
Parameter Build
Use the dataset on MSDN to build a language select parameter. Use the language name in the label field and the decimal locale identifier in the value field. The setup should look something like this:
Default value setup
If you just need English as the default use the UK code 2057 as your default value, however a more elegant final solution is a little more complex.
Reporting services provides the built in variable User!Language which holds the users language in the short string ‘en-gb’ style format. So although we can access the users language it needs translating into a localeId before we can pass it to SSAS. Fortunately for us the same table we used above can be used to translate between short string and locale.
I achieved this using a further hidden parameter defaulted to the built in User!Language variable, the parameter was set up as detailed below:
Using the dataset where LanguageCode = short string in our source table
If this parameter is run first (it must be earlier in the report parameters list) it will contain the users language in the form ‘en-gb’ in the value and ‘2057’ in the label field. It is then simple to set the default of the first dropdown parameter to the value of the hidden parameter’s label using the following syntax.
=Parameters!UserLanguage.Label
I am open to suggestions of a way to get the default without a hidden parameter or a large switch statement so if you find something more elegant please let me know! It is also worth noting that if a user has a language that your source table does not have an entry for you are obviously going to lose the defaulting behaviour.
Parameter Ordering
It is essential to make sure that the parameters are ordered in your parameter list in the sequence they need to be evaluated in. In this case the hidden user language parameter needs to be first, followed by the visible language drop down parameter. Only then should other report parameters be added.
Passing Parameter value to SSAS
In order for SSAS to provide us the data in the language requested we need to pass the locale to analysis services. We can do this by over-riding the locale in the connection string. Go to your report data source and double click for properties. Then we need to edit the connection string expression as circled.
Here we need to make sure our connection to SSAS is provided with the locale from the parameter. We use the following expression to build our connections string.
="Data Source=localhost;Initial Catalog=" & CHR(34) & "Adventure Works DW 2008R2" & CHR(34) & ";Locale Identifier=" & Parameters!Language.Value
(CHR(34) is the “ character that we wanted to escape properly.)
This builds the string detailed below for the parameter selection Spanish.
=Data Source=localhost;Initial Catalog="Adventure Works DW 2008R2";Locale Identifier=3082
This should now preview and allow you to select the language and your data sets will return any translations you have present in the cube.
Notes
If you are using a shared data source reference this is not going to work for you as it is only possible to expression a data source held in the report. In this case perhaps you can use a solution along the lines of the one detailed by Mosha here: http://sqlblog.com/blogs/mosha/archive/2006/10/07/member-caption-translations-in-mdx.aspx
Another warning is to finish your report design first because you cant refresh datasets and metadata once the expression is set
Tested on 2008R2 only.
Hope this helps everyone and allows you to select your existing translations in a flexible way through SSRS. Your comments are welcome.
I joined Adatis in early August and am now going to begin blogging. My initial posts will be on SSRS and PerformancePoint, as my skills grow I’m sure the technicality and scope of my postings will increase.
Hope that I find some topics that are of use to you and look forward to your comments.