Search results matching tag 'SQL'

PowerPivot & Analysis Services – The Value of Both

Patrick Husting — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 12:00:00 GMT

Linking over to a good article on PowerPivot and Analysis Services

As Microsoft PowerPivot is gaining more popularity and exposure, BI professionals ask more and more questions about PowerPivot’s role in the organization in trying to understand what value the new in-memory BI solution from Microsoft brings, along with the benefits and the limitations of it. Is PowerPivot going to replace SQL Server Analysis Services? If so, how soon? What should be done with the existing BI solution? Or maybe both can coexist and serve different needs?

More at Source

World Cup Social Media Analytics - How We Did It #worldcup #analytics @extendedresults @microsoft

Patrick Husting — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 19:31:00 GMT

A good colleague of mine over at Microsoft, Bruno Aziza, gave me a call on a Sunday night to discuss Extended Results partnering with Microsoft on the development of a World Cup Social Media Analytics web page. Bruno chose us because we have technologies to capture the social conversation going on along with the advanced visualizations we do in Microsoft SilverLight. I told Bruno, where do we sign up! Check out www.extendedresults.com/worldcup for the demo.

We started the project about 7 days ago with Microsoft using our Social Media Server solution to provide some insight into World Cup 2010. Within just a couple days using our existing Social Media Server solution, we were able to capture over 800,000+ World Cup mentions in just 7 days! Amazing…

There are many social media software solutions on the market basically all competing for your marketing dollars. We took a completely different approach to the space in that we believe all this information needs to be captured and stored within a companies enterprise database and tied to other ERP solutions (CRM, Financial, Marketing, Competitive, etc). Having the information stored within a SQL database, we can create laser sharp focused results out of the social media data, whenever we want, and tie it to business performance objectives. Powerful…

The below diagrams will give you some insight into the process of capturing World Cup social mentions and providing the insight on our web site using our and Microsoft’s technologies.

GRAB THE DATA

We started by identifying all the World Cup teams and Players that we wanted to track and entered those keywords into our Social Media Server admin tool. Our server tool then continuously pulls from the major social media web sites and a predetermined set of blogs and matches those keywords and pulls a rich subset of that conversation and posts it to our SQL database.

DATA MINE FOR INSIGHTS

Once we started capturing all the data, we started writing queries to summarize the results into summary tables. The reason we did this was because we are adding about 100,000+ new World Cup mentions a day. We actually used Microsoft Access for a bunch of ad hoc querying because it was so easy to use. You didn’t have to be a SQL developer to write complex scripts, a business user could use MS Access.
Once we got a summary tables completed, we wrote a data web service using Windows Server 2008 R2 and Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 (C#). We created a set of web service methods that our SilverLight client could call to get its data.

VISUALLY RICH DISPLAY

Now the best part. For the past couple of years, we have been using Microsoft SilverLight for many of our business intelligence projects because we can provide a deeper insights with graphical representations of the data. We used Microsoft Expressions Blend to built out our graphical objects and then passed the XAML to the C#/SilverLight developers (Matt and Steve) and watched them crank out the specific report views below. Took them all of one day to build it out including the web data service! They are the Best!

We have discovered all kinds of interesting social media facts around World Cup 2010 and will have some later blog posts on them. Just think of what you could do bringing technologies like these into your company. They can provide very valuable insights in what your customers are saying about your company and enhance business performance.

You can find out more about our Social Media Analytics solution at www.extendedresults.com

What Does Your Retail Business Intelligence Portal Look Like? #bi #sql #sharepoint #visio

Patrick Husting — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 18:42:00 GMT

We are in the process of creating a Retail Business Intelligence Experience for a customer as you can see from below. We take a very HIGH END approach to the experience and graphics when dealing with business intelligence data.

Below you will see a 3D layout of a store footprint. Then you can drill into areas on the floor to see products and sales for those products. You can also click on the layout and get a video walkthrough of the aisles. Pretty amazing experience.

We are using SharePoint 2010, Visio 2010, SilverLight 4, and SQL Server 2008 R2 in the snapshot below.

Social Media Analytics for the Enterprise using Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and SilverLight

Patrick Husting — Tue, 11 May 2010 11:47:00 GMT

We have been doing a lot of work on pulling social media data into the enterprise and using it against our traditional data warehouses to find some new insights. It can be quite interesting to pull twitter traffic on a product and tying that to retail sales and seeing the correlation between the two.

The technologies we have used are SQL Server 2008 R2, SharePoint 2010 and SilverLight. The solution we used to pull data from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and the top BLOG sites is a solution we developed so it could work in the enterprise and supported by I.T. It is a Windows Service that polls a list of active keywords on a timed basis and stores it in SQL Server.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us at www.ExtendedResults.com. This is a actual system we can deploy in your enterprise today!

Getting setup at the SQL PASS 2009 Event

Patrick Husting — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:14:08 GMT

Joe is making sure our HP Touchsmart is smart enough to handle all our tough business intelligence questions tomorrow. Stop by and sell hello and pick up some free give aways.

SQL Pass Event next week

Patrick Husting — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 20:46:34 GMT

We will have a booth at the SQL Pass Event next week. Please stop by our booth #505 which is across of SQL Magazine and IBM and introduce yourself and pick up some gratuitous swag! We will be showing all our new business intelligence solutions like PushBI Desktop and Mobile, Extended Outlook and Extended Excel.

Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference: DATAllegro

Patrick Husting — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 00:30:00 GMT

Saw a demo of DATAllegro in the Keynote. I was VERY impressed with that they demostrated and really look forward to the internal releases of the software so we can use it on some Microsoft projects. It will not be available until 1st Quarter of 2010! Long time to wait...

I was very impressed with the ability to balance out a 150 terabyte database on 24 low end servers and managed at the software level. Super cool!

More information can be found here: http://www.datallegro.com/ and http://www.datallegro.com/v3/index.asp

Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference: Kilimanjaro

Patrick Husting — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 22:00:00 GMT

The Microsoft SQL VP demostrated some exciting new features of the next version of SQL Server that will be coming in 2010!

Self Server BI tool coming in 2010 available as a plug-in for Excel

ProClarity (PAS) and SQL Server 2008

Patrick Husting — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 17:26:00 GMT

If you want to get ProClarity working with SQL Server 2008, you need the following hotfixes

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/info.aspx?na=22&p=6&SrcDisplayLang=en&SrcCategoryId=&SrcFamilyId=&u=%2fdownloads%2fdetails.aspx%3fFamilyID%3ddc9cbe69-1db1-4f5d-9b48-06b156c0f2c6%26DisplayLang%3den

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/info.aspx?na=22&p=9&SrcDisplayLang=en&SrcCategoryId=&SrcFamilyId=&u=%2fdownloads%2fdetails.aspx%3fFamilyID%3dced0bd47-7d19-40de-8e80-f924784bd7af%26DisplayLang%3den

PerformancePoint Server Monitoring CTP2 Requirement on SQL SP2

Patrick Husting — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 22:19:00 GMT

Next week you should have access to CTP2 if you are interested. Well, to prep you for some requirements when it is available, make sure you apply SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 in the next few days. It is a 282meg download and is required before you install CTP2.

Happy downloading!

Patrick