2012 Review

It passed 3 months from the previous post and I need to say sorry to all you that follow my blog. For all the visitors, friends and more than 500 followers I want to explain that the previous year were the most important of my life and for that reason I failed writing here more often. I started the most important project of my life with the birth of my daugter Diana, wrote an entire book with my friend Reza and moved from Lisboa to Oporto to embrace a new challenge in a new company (BI4ALL) and stay near my family

The most important project of my life and the first smile:

The most amazing city of the world: Porto

The book

... and he company I currently work and the event I organized in Porto

I promise that I'll write more often! 
I have several projects in mind to share with you all.
Pedro

BI Book - Packt Publishing reaches 1000 IT titles

Dear friends, 
The last two months was a big challenge for me. Working at one of the best BI companies of the world (BI4ALL) is not an easy task! But everything is running fine and it’s really amazing working with wonderful colleagues as I have at BI4ALL. But the reason for this email is to spread a marketing message from the Packt Publishing who gave me all the conditions and support to write an amazing SSIS book with my friend Reza Rad. 

Birmingham-based IT publisher Packt Publishing is about to publish its 1000th title. Packt books are renowned among developers for being uniquely practical and focused. Packt books cover highly specific tools and technologies which IT professionals might not expect to see a high quality book on. Packt would like you to join them in celebrating this milestone with a surprise gift – to get involved you just need to have already registered, or sign up for a free Packt account before 30th September 2012. Packt published their first book in April 2004. One of the most prolific and fastest growing tech book publishers in the world, they now have books on everything from web development to web graphics, e-learning to e-commerce, IT architecture to games, and app development. Packt supports many of the Open Source projects covered by its books through a project royalty donation, which has contributed over £300,000 to Open Source projects up to now. As part of the celebration Packt is allocating $30,000 to share between projects and authors in a genuinely unique way, soon to be disclosed on their website. 

Dave Maclean, founder of Packt Publishing explains, “At Packt we set out 8 years ago to bring practical, up to date and easy to use technical books to the specialist tools and technologies that had been largely overlooked by IT publishers. Today, I am really proud that with our authors and partners we have been able to make useful books available on over 1000 topics and make our contribution to the development community.” 

For more information about Packt, the kind of books they publish, and to sign-up for a free account before the 30th of September, 2012, please visit their website: www.PacktPub.com 

BI Conference - SQL Bits VII

Today I want to inform you about an amazing conference that will take place from September 30th to Saturday October 2nd in York (UK). It will be the 7th edition and for sure is an event that you could not miss. I don’t know yet if I’ll attend, but I’ll try! I attended two times in the past… check here and here to read my experiences at SQL Bits II Birmingham and SQL Bits III London

"Just as a reminder, SQLBits 7 will take place over three days from Thursday September 30th to Saturday October 2nd in York. Day one will be a training day, featuring in-depth full day seminars by leading SQL Server professionals such as Chris Testa-O’Neill and Chris Webb; day two will be a deep-dive conference day with advanced sessions delivered by the best speakers from the SQL Server community; and day three will be the traditional SQLBits community conference day, with a wide range of sessions covered all aspects of SQL Server at all levels of ability. There will be a charge to attend days one and two, but day three, Saturday October 2nd, will as usual be completely free to attend allowing everyone to attend and experience a great day of training even if they have no training budget"

If you think to register let me know.

Pedro

BI Interview – Donald Farmer BI Perspective

Today I want to share an amazing interview done by my friend Ella Maschiach’s with the “father” of Microsoft Business Intelligence… Mr. Donald Farmer. He’s responsible for the new amazing Microsoft products like Power Pivot and Sharepoint 2010. You can’t miss this interview. Ella… why do you not follow a career also as a journalist?

ehehhehehehehe

Part I


Part II

Check the entire post in Ella’s blog here

I hope you enjoy it.

BI Blog - Three Years Blogging - Thank You!

Starts to be a routine add a post to commemorate the anniversary of this blog. :-) It’s a project created 3 years ago with great passion and dedication, and therefore remains alive for this long time. This is the place where I described some of my many stories, tips, news and even some personal moments/events.

For those who thought three years ago that the blog was more like a joke, today maybe are surprised. It has over 100 posts on various subjects related to Business Intelligence… But I do not cross my arms and I'm already preparing something to further improve this blog, not only in design but also related to the content. The promised remote BI sessions mentioned in a previous post, will really start soon…

Naturally these three years of life are due also to the thousands of visitors who passed through this blog, from the simple readers, to those who placed questions or requested some opinions/feedback. I know that many of those visitors have yet unanswered questions due to my immense workload during the last year… nevertheless I’ll try to answer soon.

A special thank to a person that is the huge driver of BI in Portugal and is undoubtedly my main reference… the teacher Maria José Trigueiros. She’s not physically with us anymore, but for sure, she’s seeing what we are doing here.

Some numbers...

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Want to share an experience? A tip? Some news?
I could give you permission to create your own blog in BIResort community or you could write a post here as a guest in section BI Guest Corner

This place will continue to be a meeting point for all those persons that have the same passion as me for Business Intelligence. Some more technical post’s continue to be published on BIResort community that I’m co-founder.

THANK YOU ALL

Pedro

BI Conference - Business Analytics Summit

Next November 2009 (12-13) will take place a promising conference about business analytics. Unfortunately, and mainly because I’m in Europe, I won’t be there, although I must share the event with you. The organization, the speakers the content promises and if you are in USA or be there in these dates you cannot miss it…

The Business Analytics Summit focuses on the key issues involved in the implementation of Business Analytics such as data integration, KPIs, reporting and more. There are an increasing amount of companies investing in Business Analytics for improved decision making, organizational performance and a competitive edge. In a time of economic downturn the key to growth (or survival) is making the right decisions. Adequate decisions will be found wanting in 2009.

Ben Satchwell, Conference Director at Business Analytics News, says “The current economy has made businesses realize that business analytics is no longer a project they can continue to look at from afar. We are very excited about working with Information Builders Inc on the Business Analytics Summit as our goal is to have leading players from each set of stakeholders in the industry involved – and Information Builders very much fit the mold of the high end companies that will have a presence at the conference.”

Take a look at the official websites:

http://social.businessanalyticsnews.com/

http://www.businessanalyticsnews.com/usa/

The total amount for the summit is $1595, but Ben Satchwell (Conference Director) offer $400 discount for all the visitors of this blog, so…

Contact me to get a $400 discount code

BI Tools - Microsoft beating the BI market

Today I finally received an e-mail from Microsoft announcing the release of the CTP version (Community Technology Preview) for SQL 2008 R2 ... and I'm really excited to take the first look and for sure tomorrow I’ll download it ... I'm still focused on my master thesis, any way I will try to "play" a little this release and give a little feedback to you.

I truly believe that today Microsoft made a big step to beat all the competitors. Microsoft doesn’t have several decades of proved work, but has few years that are being improving and investing a lot in the Business Intelligence “world”

But why as an independent BI consultant I believe in Microsoft?

1. Because Is open to the communities/and world in spite of almost other players that they follow a strategy to hide all information and knowledge from their products

2. Because Is a buyer in the market… Examples are the acquisitions of Datallegro, ProClarity, Mobicomp (mobile), Zoomix (data quality), Teradata… and for example partnerships with Dundas, Panorama…

3. Because in a near future BI will be for all users (to the masses) and not only for a few group of decision makers. Today BI is spread in all organization for operational, tactical and strategy areas. Nothing better than improve the capabilities of an existent product in the market that everybody knows what it is, and what it does… simple EXCEL.

4. Because almost the players (SAP, SAS, Microstrategy…) in the BI market provide very expensive tools that are not possible nowadays… Some years ago they could set these expensive costs, because in that time these tools could provide competitive advantage… today even open source solutions are available in BI…

Last decades this BI players was trying to convince the end users and decision makers that they need new applications/interfaces to analyze, monitor and plan their business, but they were wrong, and mainly because Microsoft enter few years ago in this market. The end users and decision makers doesn’t want to know what is behind excel… only wants to see their KPIs no monitor, analyze, plan and control their business in their preferred tool… EXCEL.

In the coming weeks Microsft will also launch CTPs in the Project Gemini (Excel and Sharepoint) and in the Project Madison (massively scalable data warehousing).

BI News - Data Mining for Terrorists Is Urged

I found an interesting article that I want to share with you about Data Mining.

The article was Published at "The New York Times" on October 7, 2008 by Eric Lichtblau

WASHINGTON — "A federal panel of policy makers and scientific experts urged a government-wide evaluation Tuesday of programs that sift through databases looking for clues on terrorism, to determine whether the programs are effective and legal. The federal government has made aggressive use of so-called data-mining tools since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as counterterrorism officials in many intelligence agencies have sought to analyze records on travel habits, calling patterns, e-mail use, financial transactions and other data to pinpoint possible terrorist activity.

The National Security Agency’s program for wiretapping terror suspects without warrants, the screening of suspicious airline passengers and the Pentagon’s ill-fated Total Information Awareness program, shut down by Congress in 2003 because of privacy concerns, have all relied on aspects of data mining.

But in a 352-page government study released on Tuesday, a committee of the National Research Council warned that successfully using these tools to deter terrorism “will be extremely difficult to achieve” because of legal, technological and logistical problems. It said a haphazard approach to using such tools threatened both Americans’ privacy rights and the country’s legitimate national security needs.

Mining through data patterns has been shown to work in commercial settings to predict what kind of toothpaste people may buy and what kind of movie they are likely to rent, or to detect casino card-counters or those engaged in credit card fraud.

But there is little evidence to confirm that the techniques work to actually find terrorists, despite the growing use in the last seven years, committee members said. Part of the problem, they said, is that the sample of known terrorists and actual attacks is so small that it is difficult to establish patterns of suspicious behavior.

The push to accumulate enormous amounts of information has also produced the risk of “a huge number of false leads” that could implicate people with no actual connections to terrorism, the committee said.

“More data does not mean better data,” said William J. Perry, the former defense secretary who was co-chairman of the panel, with Charles M. Vest, president of the National Academy of Engineering. "

Read entire article here