BI Tools - Cumulative Update #8 for SQL 2008 R2

Dear Friends,
Just to inform you that a new cumulative update was released today! If you use SQL 2008 R2 version don´t forget to update it with these new fixes.

Take a look a the full details here:
CU#8 KB Article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2534352

Previous Cumulative Update KB Articles:
CU#7 KB Article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2507770
CU#6 KB Article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2489376
CU#5 KB Article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2438347
CU#4 KB Article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2345451
CU#3 KB Article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2261464
CU#2 KB Article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2072493
CU#1 KB Article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/981355

Follow all Microsoft SQL Server Release Services here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlreleaseservices

BI Blog - Four Years Blogging - Thank You!

Four years blogging! For me it’s simple amazing!
I started this challenge 4 years ago (May 2007) when few people known what a blog is! I always kept in mind that this place is just for write about BI and never to make money with banners with commercial purposes. My goal was always to spread BI world and never disappoint you with other intentions like earning money with this.

Almost 100.000 page views for a blog without adult content or illegal download links, it’s for me absolutely positive. I know that there are several points to review and improve, but it’s all about stop for a while and decide to focus on it.

Naturally without the support of special persons, I couldn’t arrive here. I highlight the following important persons, who directly or indirectly make this blog still alive:
- The ISCTE students from MSIAD and MEI master degrees classes
- The UPT students from post-graduate BI classes (1º and 2º Editions)
- The Ensiguarda students from MBA classes
- My dear teacher Maria José Trigueiros
- All the persons that believed in me and always encouraged me to continue on this challenge
- All blog visitors!!

Some numbers...

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This place will continue to be a meeting point for all those persons that have the same passion as me for Business Intelligence.

THANK YOU ALL
I promise you that I’ll never stop

BI Book – Free Data Quality and MDM SQL e-book

Well… here am I again with another free e-book… and this time a Data Quality (DQ) and master data management (MDM) book using SQL 2008 R2! The book was written by my MVP colleagues Dejan Sarka and Davide Mauri. It’s for sure an amazing book that you should not miss! I’ll start reading soon!

"This book deals with master data. It explains how we can recognize our master data. It stresses the importance of a good data model for data integrity. It shows how we can find areas of bad or suspicious data. It shows how we can proactively enforce better data quality and make an authoritative master data source through a specialized Master Data Management application. It also shows how we can tackle the problems with duplicate master data and the problems with identity mapping from different databases in order to create a unique representation of the master data.

For all the tasks mentioned in this book, we use the tools that are available in the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 suite. In order to achieve our goal—good quality of our data—nearly any part of the suite turns to be useful. This is not a beginner’s book. We, the authors, suppose that you, the readers, have quite good knowledge of SQL Server Database Engine, .NET, and other tools from the SQL Server suite.

Achieving good quality of your master data is not an easy task. We hope this book will help you with this task and serve you as a guide for practical work and as a reference manual whenever you have problems with master data"

Download link!

I hope you enjoy it!

BI Book - Free Business Intelligence e-book

Today I bring you a link for an interesting free e-book from Logica. This e-book doesn’t require any registration and I think you should take a look!

"Knowing that we address Business Intelligence (BI) experts with our mailing, there's no need to convinve you of the importance of monitoring and measurement of the performance of your organisation in times of uncertainty and economic downturn.

With our book "The BI Framework - How to turn information into a competitive asset" we introduce how BI can help to reach your business objectives. Knowing that most organisations already have BI solutions in place we focus on cost effective management of BI and provide you with a clear roadmap on how to lower the total cost of ownership of your current landscape"

Table of contents:
1. Introduction
2. Business Value of BI
3. Business Intelligence definition
4. Managing BI
5. BI Lifecycle
6. BI Solution Engineering
7. Best Practices
8. Ferrari Case Study

Download link
I hope you enjoy it!

BI Seminar – MSIAD – BI new trends

It’s almost beginning the master degree entirely dedicated to Business Intelligence (BI) idealized by my main reference on BI: Dra Maria José Trigueiros that physically left us on year ago. This Master is held every two years and the season 2011-2013 will begin next October 2011. To formal present to the public this master, the ISCTE-IUL University in the person of Dr. Filipe Santos, decided to follow one of the Dra Maria Jose Trigueiros dream: A Business Intelligence seminar dedicated to the fourth edition of BI master! Wherever Dra Maria Jose Trigueiros is, I believe she is proud of this university and all the people that will make this dream come true.

If you are interested in BI and also were a Maria Jose Trigueiros student, I truly suggest you to be in ISCTE-IUL next Friday. BI demonstrations from DevScope (main Microsoft BI Portuguese partner), F5TCI (Qlickview) and SAS will be some of the amazing content that will be provided to you! Don’t miss this event!!!
Official website here

BI Book - Reactive Business Intelligence

This book was for me one of the more original and interesting data mining books! It explains the several data mining tasks and techniques in a very intuitive and innovative way. It explain almost key points in the data mining field from the simple to complex topics. Even those persons that hate statistics and formulas will read and like this wonderful book. It has written in a “clean” language, with a lot of pictures that provides a better understanding about author’s message.

The book was written by the two persons of the picture above (R. Battiti and M. Brunato), and I truly suggest you to buy it. In the official book website, R. Battiti and M. Brunato added their description about it: “Reactive Business Intelligence is about integrating data mining, modeling and interactive visualization, into an end-to-end discovery and continuous innovation process powered by human and automated learning. This unifying goal requires collecting and integrating topics which are usually dissected into books dedicated to different areas” and also in the YouTube it’s possible to see a more personal description:

The concept of Reactive Business Intelligence introduced on the book is focused in four main areas: Data Mining, Models, Visualization and Feedback/Learning by software and people.

Throughout the book can be seen huge amount of intuitive pictures that support a fast learning, mainly in some topics often difficult to understand. Some examples can be seen in the official website, but I selected right now some of them for you:

Some points that I think could be improved/changed:

- Reduce the references to the visualization tool used (Grapheur) or add a new one more intuitive.

- More alignment between amazing book content to “real world” business cases

You can buy the book at official website!

I hope you enjoy it!

BI Event - SQL Saturday Portugal

The SQL Saturday, owned by the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS), is organizing for the first time outside USA, an SQL event here in Portugal! The SQL Saturday goal, is to provide the tools and knowledge to groups and event leaders that need to organize and host, a free day of training for SQL Server professionals. This SQL event will be realized all day, and will take place next 15-April at the Microsoft Portugal auditorium. It’s for sure a very interesting event, mainly for those professionals in the SQL DBA and DEV fields.

The session’s schedules are the following:
09:00 AM Niko Neugebauer
SQL Server Denali CTP1 and more
10:15 AM Nuno Godinho
SQL Azure Overview - How to Develop and Manage it
11:30 AM Ramesh Meyyappan
SAP/SQL Server - Software Integration at its best!
01:30 PM Artur Santos
Optimizing SQL Server for Sharepoint 2010
02:45 PM Scott Stauffer++
SSIS: Overcoming Common Challenges
04:00 PM Pedro Rosa
Introduction to SQL Azure Reporting?
05:15 PM Ramesh Meyyappan
SQL Server Performance Monitoring and Tuning

Click here to Register

BI Award – SQL BI MVP Award 2011

Yesterday, I received the email from Microsoft with MVP Award related for all my contribution in the last year. It’s an honor to be again in the restricted group of those persons that spend huge time in what they believe and has passionate.

I have some projects related with this award that I’ll write here very soon. But for now, I want to thank primarily to my princess Joana that is always by my side and to my family. Some special thanks to all direct and indirect support from:

- All blog visitors
- All the post-graduation students on BI from Universidade Portucalense (Porto)
- All the master graduation students on BI from ISCTE (MSIAD + MEI) (Lisboa)
- Dra. Maria José Trigueiros for all the magic words (She’s still alive in my life)
- All those persons that believed in me, even more than myself

Thank you all! Regards.

BI Conference - Microsoft Portugal 2011 (day after)

Yesterday I attended the Microsoft BI Conference that took place here in Portugal. It was the first time that Microsoft organize a big and vertical conference focus specifically only in Business Intelligence. The advantage of this kind of focused event is that the attendees know exactly where they go and also is more easy to get support from Microsoft BI partners that could implement some interesting initiatives like show what they has being done in BI, but also to get the contacts of potential future customers and also employees. 700 attendees are a signal that Microsoft BI Tools and “BI world” have been gaining more confidence and support from the community. A special reference for my BI students from ISCTE (Lisbon) and also from UPT (Porto 300 kms distance) that were attending the event! This is just one more step on their interest on BI World… I hope they enjoyed it!

But because this is the first big BI event with 3 parallel tracks, naturally that has some contents that not fit at all in some group of attendees. Almost the sessions was too soft for Microsoft BI professionals, but was amazing for those people that were seeing Microsoft BI capabilities for the first time. Naturally this kind of event has a commercial purpose that allowed being a free event. So… a free event with a very good speakers and also with an amazing organization from Microsoft staff… what we can expect more?! I believe these kind of vertical/focused events are here to stay. And I hope to finally see an academic track where the BI students around Portugal could show their projects based on Microsoft amazing BI tools. And also we want to see more Portuguese speakers like Bruno Cortes that was planned to present at the beginning, but for some reason his session was canceled. There are huge potential in BI here in Portugal that Microsoft in my perspective should invest. What about the several conference partners? Just one Portuguese partner presents a session? This makes any sense? For me naturally not!

It was amazing to speak personally with Albert Ferrari that is one of my references since some many years. If you want to follow one of the discussions I had with him in SQL BI methodology click here. I confess that I don’t believe too much in Microsoft Power Pivot Excel Add-in (One of the main key areas of Albert Ferrari and also Marco Russo), but after speak for a while with Albert, he convinced me with some new features that I didn’t know. I am an advocate of a single repository of data, and create more “islands” of information scares me! I know that Power Pivot has huge performance, I know that could be amazing for a prototype, but I also know, Microsoft is interested in these islands (Office is a key area) and in a more realistic scenarios cannot be created by end-users, because they need to know a new query language (DAX)… If Integrated with Sharepoint I truly believe that could resolve some issues, even because the amazing Sharepoint design/layout could easily create a new end users habits that in spite of going to file system looking for their excel files, maybe start looking in Sharepoint that centralize them… Congratulations for all your sessions! Nice so see you here!


The Facilities and organization
Relating to the facilities and all organization, I just need to thank to João Bilhim e Miguel Vicente for all the amazing work they done on this event. They always give 200% to make these initiatives come true. On my side as a BI passionate I want to thank all the efforts done.


The Tagetik Session
In spite of their very good speaker’s performance, I was expecting a bit more about Tagetik tools. It was more a Sharepoint integration than a Tagetik session… for those that saw Sharepoint for the first time I imagine that it was amazing… but for those not, I think they was little disappointed because they have not seen the huge promise of Tagetik capabilities. Maybe in a next opportunity… but thanks for the speakers that made a very good session!


One day in a decision maker life session
The session was promising a lot… and despite almost attendees not having learned anything new, it was a funny and cool session… Basically, Sergio Ferreira (Microsoft) was telling us a history about BI (in Sergio BI perspective) and about how he deal with 400 new email messages every day and about the 1.200 meetings he has per month! He showed a power pivot excel file that reads data from outlook… It was a different session more focused on convinces business users, that they can do more with less effort. I think he made it well!


The Maciej Pilecki Sessions
Usually the speaker that comes from Project Botticelli Company is Rafal… See here my posts about this amazing speaker. Unfortunately he didn't come this time and Maciej Pilecki replaced him. Maciej is also a huge speaker, but the topics was very simple and generic and already included in previous Rafal events on Portugal. But for those who never had the opportunity to see Rafal sessions and are beginning a BI career, I don’t have any doubt they were convinced about Microsoft BI tools capabilities. Congratulations to Maciej!


The Alejandro Leguizamo session
Alejandro is Spanish and my MVP colleague. It was the first time I saw a session presented by him, and truly loved! He made a very good job in his session about “Designing scalable and complex Analysis Service Cubes”… it was for more advanced and tech users, and fits more in those people that already work with SSAS. Unfortunately I didn’t speak in person with Alejandro, because I left his session before the end, and I never found him again around the conference location. Congratulations Alejandro! Nice to see you here in Portugal!


More conferences like this one is desirable for sure!

BI Videos - SQL Server Denali Videos‏

Today I paste some very interesting SQL Server videos links for you... not only for BI professionals, but also SQL DBA's and DEV's. I hope you enjoy them!

The videos and links could be found below:

Upgrade Your Database (Denali)
Data Programmability Tools (Denali)
SQL Server appliance (Denali & R2)
Parallel Data Warehouse (R2)
SQL Server virtualization (Denali & R2)
SQL Server security (Denali)
SQL Server AlwaysOn (Denali)
SQL Server backup compression (R2)
SQL Server Integration Services (Denali)
SQL Server Non-Relational (Denali)
SQL Server CLR (Denali)
SQL Server Data Compression (R2)
SQL Server Manageability (Denali & R2)