Hotel Atlantis The Palm, Dubai Holidays

After almost two months, I finally have time to describe my holidays in Dubai and in one of the better hotels in the world, Atlantis the palm ... I was staying in this hotel before the official opening, and I must tell you that is really a dream while a little illusion. Check the video of the grand opening at the official website:

Dubai is one of the seven United Arab Emirates and is investing heavily in tourism since it is expected that the main source of wealth, oil, runs out in about 5 years ... Everything that is done in Dubai is done to be always the best in the world ... the world's tallest building, the largest artificial island in the world, the best hotel in the world, the best instance of SKI of the world ... everything! They are building the world map in the islands where the connection to earth will be made only by boat, airplane or helicopter. And it is no coincidence ... because in this way is to boost the aviation industry and boating industry ... because as you can see below, the cars industry in Dubai is well positioned...

Visit the website of company that is responsible for all this amazing constructions, which the owner is the shake, to better understand the greatness of what is being created. Where Vision Inspires Humanity http://www.nakheel.com/en

I will not comment further because the images speak for themselves.

The Atlantis by night

The Atlantis friends

The Atlantis from room

The Atlantis Room

The Atlantis Beach

The Atlantis Oceanarium

The Atlantis swiming pool

The Dubai Burj Al Arab

The other world in Dubai - The construction workers

The Ski Dubai
http://www.skidxb.com/

The Desert, the Safari and the Dinner


The Dubai Old Castle

The Dubai Cars

The Abu Dhabi

The Abu Dhabi Muslim Church

The Hotel also has Dolphin Bay, Aquaventure, Lost Chambers…
Today Tom Cruise reserved the entire Hotel for him and his friends to the new year party… uuaahh…

Happy new year!!!

SQL2008 - Free Hosted Trial Offer

Dell, MaximumASP and the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) have partnered together to offer a free SQL Server 2008 account on a securely hosted environment. This offer allows anyone to try SQL Server 2008 today without downloading and installing the software.

Thanks to Ella, I knew this news and immediately made my registration.

This feedback, participantion and the free hosted environment, it'll be important for me because I will focus my BI dissertation using Microsoft tools, mainly SQL 2008.

For further details visit Ella’s blog.

Regards!

Merry Christmas

It is time to relax with the family and take care of those who truly love us and be forever on our side!

Merry christmas to you all.

SSIS - Script Component as Source From SQL

I’m not writing about technical issues for a long time ... but I’ll start to diversify more the content of this blog. Today I’m writing about script component in SSIS that people ask frequently in Microsoft forums and in http://www.experts-exchange.com/.

To access the SQL Server or other sources, there are some standard components provided with the SSIS that I always suggest for almost the cases, but for some complex issues that require some customization, this post could be useful. If you understand the script component logic, and know some .net programming, you can get data from any source.

1. Open Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS), and create a new package.

2. Add a dataflow to your controlflow (There is a script task in the controlflow, but I’ll write about Script Component inside dataflow)

3. Create the table Contry for this example

4.Create and configure ADO.NET connection with the name “cmSQL_ADONET”

5. Configure the script component setting the script connection to the connection created in the previous step, and add the columns you need to the SSIS pipeline

6. Open the design script to add the customized code and try to understand the logic of the component. You have five main procedures: AcquireConnections, CreateNewOutputRows and ReleaseConnections, preExecute and postExecute. In this example, I only use the first three procedures but you are free to use the procedures you want.

7. You can see the results from the pipeline grid view.

This example is not dificult, but its the first step to give you more complex packages that I'll try to show you in a future post. If you want the code of this package, let me know and I send you by email instantly.

Regars,

Pedro

BI Financial Markets with Data Mining

I have been a little absent due to the preparation of my Master's thesis in Decision Support Systems (DSS or BI), and it’s with a great pleasure that I share with you the theme that I will investigate during next year. This research project will be focused in the behaviour of financial markets through the use of Data Mining techniques. It’ll combine the technology through the creation of ETL processes, a Data Mart and Data Mining techniques, with the financial markets knowledge.

And the reasons that led me to choose this theme, are without doubt, the fascination for the mysterious world of financial markets, the fascination by data mining techniques (that are for me the true intelligence of a BI solution) and the need to create a DSS that enable the understand the impact of movements in financial markets in the budget of each one of us
Many of us invest money in the stock market through mutual funds, pension savings plans, through the brokerage firms and others ... but do we know what they are doing with our money? Could we trust on institutions that are investing our money? I think it's time to be ourselves the owners of our money and define what we want to do with it.

We have to know the right moment to subscribe, transfer or redeem financial products offered by various financial institutions, or even whether we should invest ourselves (in a long term and in a diversified way, we have high probability of good profits) in financial markets or put the money from under our beds.

And despite the banking sector is the most regulated in the world, still occurs several big frauds that could put in risk the survival of a company or even put in risk our savings... after several scandals in Portugal, France (Société General), and United States of America, today a new one…

Bernard Madoff, the former Nasdaq chairman and founder and president of a New York firm that invested funds for wealthy individuals, hedge funds and other institutions, was charged with operating what he told employees was a long-running $50 billion Ponzi scheme in what may be one of the largest frauds in history. Bernard Madoff was arrested today at 8:30 a.m… and some of his clients are BBVA, o HSBC, o Royal Bank of Scotland, Credit Agricole and Banesto.

How can a former chairman at the world's largest stock market with 20,000 listed companies have entered into schemes of fraud? Are these same markets efficient? There is much speculation and a lot of confidential information (inside trading) that is used to always generate profits for the same persons in the markets...

Aren’t you tired of being a spectator? I will use my arms (Data Mining) to understand better the financial markets and react to it with logic and not following the panic or the movements of the masses…

I never invested directly in stocks because I respect the stock market, however I was investing for few years in mutual funds that I earned about 20%... but I had the happy idea of leaving the market when I heard on the radio some advertising to subscribe mutual funds... which led me to think that people were entering into the market by “marketing” rather than the real value of companies... this one lesson that I learned by myself…

BI Reporting - Dundas for Microsoft Products

Dear Friends,

Today I will try to explain which Dundas components is included with the “new version” of SQL 2008 Katmai. I used new version in commas because Microsoft is preparing another new version for 2010 with the name Killimanjaro.

Dundas makes our job easier with a complete line of data visualization tools for Microsoft technologies. These award-winning products includes charts, gauges, maps and calendars for Microsoft .NET, SQL Reporting Services and SharePoint

I always avoided 3rd party components, not only because is needed extra payment but also because in the companies I worked they doesn’t accept 3rd party installations. But Dundas has a big potencial in data visualization with hundreds of components, and for that reason Microsoft include it in the new 2008 products. But I was a little disappointed because only a few components are included with these Microsoft 2008 products… Only the gauges… that is very useful for balanced scorecards and other type of reports that has KPI’s… but if you want to add some dundas charts, maps or calendars, you must pay! Bbbbrrr…

For SQL Reporting Services 2008, I made a simple’s screenshots to make you more familiar with Dundas AddIn. (left image the free features and the right image the payed features)

If you need to do some specific and complex charts or gauges and have some budget, Dundas is a very good solution. Go to www.dundas.com and download a trial version that comes with a lot of examples.

I will try to write some words about other excellent 3rd party components that I heard for the first time in the ‘SQLBits’ conference last September in London, the XLCubed that acquires BonaVista Systems, the developer of MicroCharts.

Regards!

Pedro