A Couple Of Good BI Articles

I came across a couple of interesting articles over the weekend that some of you might be interested in.

If you got the chance to listen to Chris Webb and Nigel Pendse's podcast last week, on the effect that SQL Server 2005 will have on the BI market, you'll probably be interested in an article Nigel has just published on the OLAP Report website. "Synchronicity" looks at the major new releases by Business Objects, Cognos, Microsoft and Hyperion and notes that the common theme between all of them is the blurring of the distinction between relational and OLAP reporting - something of course that Oracle attempted with Discoverer 10.1.2. Nigel notes that each of the vendors takes a different approach to this; Business Objects have now made their Universes (the equivalent to Discoverer End User Layers) OLAP-aware, whilst Cognos, who've traditionally been seen as stronger in their OLAP capabilities, have been extending the functionality of ReportNet, their reporting (as opposed to OLAP) solution. Microsoft however (and I touched open this in an earlier article for DBAZine, after a conversation with Nigel and some of the guys from Oracle) are bringing the two together by extending the capabilities of Analysis Services, and MDX, so that it can map on to most relational structures, "sucking" the data into a MOLAP cube in the background and providing access to the data via MDX; Microsoft's thinking here is that whilst SQL is good for OLTP-style reporting, any warehousing queries, be they relational or OLAP, are better served by MDX as it is better suited to working with aggregates; Oracle's approach on the other hand is as you know to extend SQL to cover OLAP as well as OLTP reporting, Good stuff and well worth reading.

I also came across (via Chris Webb's site) a new blog by Andy Hayler, one of the founders of Kalido. There's quite a few good postings on Andy's blog, one about how in his view "BI for the masses" is more vendor hype (or hope) than actual reality, another is on the effect that Oracle's recent buying spree has had (or not had) on it's share price, and the final one is on the shakeout in the ETL tool vendor market. Very well written, and while of course Andy has got an angle like the rest of us, they're an interesting read and I'll be checking back on the site in future.