BI Conference - Self-Service BI with Rafal

Finally I found some time to describe the session that Rafal, following Microsoft invitation, held here in Portugal. As I already wrote in previous posts, Rafal in their specialty is the best in the world. A simple and objective way to show the concepts of Business Intelligence reconciled with several practical demonstrations are fantastic. Of course I attend these moments with great intensity, because they contribute, not only to continue learning, but also to mark and remember these moments. I will describe, in my opinion, the more relevant key points of the presentation.

The first point was approaching the concept of BI as a tool for self-service, where users are rewarded by a high level of autonomy for their daily needs for information.

The second point was the interesting and comical suggestion to be followed by consultants, when they want to sell their Data Warehousing solutions... they should not try to sell a Data Warehouse, but try to sell KPI's... this advise should be follow because the managers do not understand much of these technologies and are more attracted by KPI for making a mapping between their business and technology

The third point was the OLAP off-line functionality, which although this functionality already exists since Excel 2003, only now is beginning to gain more strength with the increasing importance that Excel is having nowadays. (These offline/Local cubes can be browsed by most OLAP client tools)

The fourth point is on the increasing quality of data mining Microsoft products. The feeling is that there is still a little more to move on this matter to “fight” against some competitors such as SAS (Enterprise Miner)... But it promises ... and in my BI thesis I'll show until where

The fifth and final point to highlight is the explanation of the strategy for Microsoft Performance Point Server product... especially on the discontinuation of the Planning module and the inclusion of the monitoring module through SharePoint product... soon will be called the Performance SharePoint Services.

I hope you have left with the feeling of having been present

Regards,
Pedro

BI Conference - SQL Bits IV and Rafal Lukawiecki

SQL Bits IV

SQL Bits IV is coming… and this time it will be in Manchester, 28 of March…Unfortunately, I will not go to Manchester because I will have to expose my master BI dissertation on the day before (27th of March), but I will attend to it on-line!

My friend Tomislav Piasevoli will be responsible for the session “Universal calculated measures in MDX queries”… I will try to purpose one session in the next event... maybe about my master BI dissertation.

Rafal Lukawiecki

Microsoft are hosting a one-day seminar presented by Rafal Lukawiecki for IT Managers and BI practitioners wanting to improve decision making and getting the valuable business insight by using Microsoft solutions at the Microsoft Offices in London and Lisbon. As I told before in this blog, Rafal is the best communicator of the world, if you are near Lisbon or London, you cannot miss it.

In Lisbon (Portugal), March 24th

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032402504&Culture=pt-PT

In London (UK), March 26th

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032403569&Culture=en-GB

Regards,

Pedro

Data Mining - Rafal Event

In April 2008 Rafal Lukawiecki came to Portugal and unfortunately I didn’t attend it. I confess, that I’ve never heard about Rafal, but today, and after seeing the four webcats, I feel that I lost a fantastic event. So... do you know what I did? I link my laptop to my LCD television and see all the Rafal webcasts!! It was really fantastic... now I understand my friend Subhash!

But who is Rafal? See this YouTube video...
http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=Vs46QZwnEcc

After my Data Mining class in my master BI degree, I’ve started to look to data mining with new eyes, and data mining is the main intelligence that a BI project could have... you could have an ETL, DW or Reporting module perfect, but the intelligence in BI is in the capability to predict the future, to analyse past and present behaviours and make the difference predicting on what it’ll happen next!

For those who really like to learn Data Mining, independently about the tools that usually use my suggestion is to start from here... from starting to see these four Rafal webcasts. Fortunately, in my master BI degree I had one of the most gurus of Data Mining here in Portugal... the teacher Dr. Duarte Trigueiros... He’s also fantastic and very comunicative as Rafal. From one hand Rafal speak more near the business logic and sometimes more intuitive and for other hand the teacher Dr. Duarte Trigueiros is more statistical. The conjuction of both approches is fantastic, and it was a privilege and a proud for me...

Introduction to Data Mining
Working with Data Mining
Using Data Mining in Your IT Systems (Part 1)
Using Data Mining in Your IT Systems (Part 2)
http://www.microsoft.com/emea/spotlight/event.aspx?id=99

After the Rafal webcasts, I dont have nothing more to write about it! But I’m currently doing a work for my master BI degree to predict the stock market behaviours... could be a good way to became rich fast!! I’ll tell about it in a next post...