OLAP and the ACID test

In the OLTP (online transaction processing systems – usually operational systems) world we measure the quality of a database by its ability to pass the ACID test.  That is Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation and Durability – ACID.  For more details see: http://en.w

Business Intelligence Trends – Dr Stephen Brobst

At the Think Big Data Warehouse conference, one of the other Keynotes that kicked us off was the address by Dr. Stephen Brobst, CTO of Teradata.  Having to follow Claudia Imhoff is quite the challenge, but there presentation styles were so different and the topics/approach divers

Making Life Simple in Business Intelligence

One of the things that became very obvious listening to Claudia Imhoff (Co-founder and President of Intelligent Solutions, Inc.), Stephen Brobst (CTO, Teradata) and Bill O’Connor (Distinguished Engineer, Business Intelligence CTO, IBM) was the use of reference architectures to h

Keys to Success in Business Intelligence

So are these pieces on Business Intelligence of interest from the Think Big Data Warehouse conference.  I am going o continue on my thoughts from Claudia Imhoff.  In this post I am going to talk about some of the identified keys to success.  Claudia listed the following

Benefits of Business Intelligence

As with many ventures that cost capital, we need to find the return to the organization.  Often Business Intelligence (BI) has softer value, but in Claudia Imhoff‘s presentation at Think Big she shared some great building blocks of which her experience found value. Some of

Purpose of Business Intelligence

Once again I continue my theme of Business Intelligence (BI) by discussing some of the purposes of BI.  Generally you can lump these into two areas (thanks to Claudia Imhoff again in continuation of our previous post. 1.  Monitor the Financial and Operational Health of the O

How do you Recognize the Need for Business Intelligence

In our last post on BI I briefly discussed what it means.  Today I would like to continue my observations from Claudia Imhoff’s keynote. Claudia postulated that there are many ways to idntify when BI is needed other than always as without intelligence on what we are doing,

Business Intelligence – What is it?

To some it is an oxmoron, like in Engineering we joke about a Civil Engineer (there is no such thing as a civil Engineer – ie refined – we are all uncouth).  I remember meeting with someone on the business side of an organization and as we were talking about a specifi