Everybody hates documentation but this is a really neat, free tool for modeling multi-dimensional databases and is particularly suited to MSAS 2005.
ADAPT™ (Application Design for Analytical Processing Technologies) from Symmetry Corporation is a Visio stencil.
Example of a time dimension is shown below:
There's a white paper that's worth a read to get you started
It's been a busy week combining a release in my current project with getting out and about in the community!
Wednesday evening was the SQL BI user group. Suranjan Som of IM Group gave a very good presentation on Data Mining using Microsoft's toolkit. I have to be honest, I last looked at the data mining functionality in SQL2000 on my first AS project what seems like years ago now - it's definitely worth another look now.
Mark Hill of Edenbrook gave us a summary of the features in the Katmai relational engine that will affect us in the BI world. Having used CDC in Oracle I was most interested to see how MS have gone about implementing their version. On first impressions it certainly looks pretty good - performance and robustness TBC!
It was great to catch up with some people I haven't seen for a while and also meet some new faces. Thanks to Chris Webb for organising and to IMGroup for hosting.
The MS BI partner update was on Thursday and a chance for us to do some hob-knobbing with the rest of the UK BI community. As a growing company we realise the importance of these type of events and appreciate it when people give us the time of day and more! Thanks in particular to Ben Tamblyn, Andrew Fryer and David Hoffs-Mallion for their advice and time
In terms of the event itself, nothing too surprising to report - though the fact that ProClarity won't be properly integrated into PPS Server as the Analytics component until the next major release (2009) was little surprising.
The first "official" release of PPS Server 2007 is now available on MS public downloads, albeit an evaluation copy
x86
x64
I've not installed it yet so not sure whether there's anything in that didn't make it to CTP 4 but Nick Barclay has posted on the fact that the SAP BW connector for Monitoring has been cut from the release!
Still no sign of a full release on MSDN?
I'll update once I've had a look around. Oh and the sample data is back!
As Sacha posted the other day the UK launch for PerformancePoint Server is on the 16th October and it looks like we'll be getting a proper do like the US with Dr Robert Kaplan presenting. Bruno Aziza will also be making the trip over as will Peter Klein (CFO of MS Business division). No Jeff Raikes but still sure to be some super-excitement!
The details and registration are available here