Anyone who uses SQL in their environment is at risk for what we at SWC like to call “digital cholesterol.” How do you know you have it? You might notice sluggish system performance, connection timeouts, query deadlocks or worse, complete failure or other near-disasters.

The problem for many mid-market companies is how to justify the expense of a full-time SQL DBA. Many businesses either outsource this function, hand it off to an overworked in-house IT team with little time or SQL expertise, or just put it on the back burner for someone to “get back to” when there is more time or worse, something bad happens.

If your SQL data is critical to your business, it’s imperative to properly assess and maintain your SQL environment. If your digital cholesterol means your database can’t grow with your business, that’s a big problem and it’s probably time for a checkup.

SQL servers should be assessed and maintained to determine whether the servers have been configured to established best practices. At SWC, we investigate everything from configuration, usage and performance metrics; from data we collect, we make recommendations that enhance the systems’ performance and management.

If you notice any of the symptoms of digital cholesterol, it’s definitely time for a checkup to get your system’s health back on track.

When I’m not architecting business intelligence solutions or working in the garden with my inquisitive 3 year old, I find time to watch “Deadliest Catch”.  I always have 3 or 4 episodes queued up on the DVR on any given day. I rather enjoy doing my homework while the briny episodes unfold on the LCD.  It could be worse.  Especially if my wife has episodes of Oprah to catch up on!  Yikes. 

One thing I’ve noticed since becoming a DC fan is that all the captains make most of their decisions from the gut.  These decisions include deciding where to fish, how long to fish an area, when to increase the bait in the pots, when to ask the crew to pull long shifts, and when to stop the current plan and start over with a new plan.   How are these decisions/plans arrived at?  The show gives some insight into the decision making process but for the most part we are led to believe that all the decisions are made at the whimsy’s of the curmudgeon captains and their vast years of fishing experience.  This gave me pause the other night.  Could this gut feel decision making approach be a metaphor for some decision makers in the mid-market?

I find there is a parallel between this gut approach on the show and many of our prospects in the business intelligence mid-market.  There are countless small businesses that have become successful by having leaders who can make good decisions based on wisdom and a little bit of luck.  There are also countess examples of small and even large organizations that failed because rash decisions were made.  Our job entails meeting these decision makers, and convincing them that fact-based decisions derived from information can be a good thing!     Every organization has access to data.  Turning that raw data into actionable information is what gets me exited and keeps me coming back each day for new and interesting challenges.  I rather enjoy the warm comfortable feeling of making decisions based on information.  When I buy something at the store I know my money is good because I checked my checking account balance from my blackberry earlier.  I don’t make purchases based on my recollection of the balance from a week ago.  Not good and usually not correct! 

I wonder what the captains on DC would think if I parked myself and my laptop in their wheel house for week or two?  I can see the dashboards and reports I would create. Perhaps I could convince Sig Hansen to let me pear into his decision process and formulate some analysis assets to help him get the crab!  Maybe a trend report that shows average pounds of crap per pot.  Or a deck hand scorecard that shows: avg hours without  sleep, count of employee injuries per string, Avg pounds per pot, Median sort duration per string, Running pounds of crap caught, forecasted profit share, and remaining units of bait.  I could go on and on…   

I don’t know if we’ll ever see SQL Server Analysis Services running on the computers of the Alaskan crab fleet, but I feel convinced that cube based information would make them all better captains.  Of course, taking away risk and unknowns from the decision making process might not make for good TV.  I’m certain it would put more cash in the pockets of the captains and crews. 

Anyone hungry for Maggiano’s and Business Intelligence? 

I will present business intelligence in a luncheon format at Maggiano’s in Oak Brook IL on May 21 from 12-1:30PM.  The topic will be:  “SWC LUNCH & LEARN – Building Better Dashboards with Microsoft 2010”  If you haven’t signed up already, I highly suggest you do so.  We’re very excited about our 2010 BI vision and look forward to demonstrating this vision at the luncheon. We hope you can join us!

Today I reached a new milestone in my analysis of Excel 2010 PowerPivot (Beta). I’m ready to share my experiences with the product and get our customers excited about Microsoft BI! Before I go into the details on PowerPivot, I think it’s useful to look back on the past year. It was nearly a year ago that Microsoft made dramatic changes in the technology roadmap for BI. Those changes included rolling PerformancePoint M&A into the SharePoint SKU and killing PPS Planning. Over the last 12 or so months I’ve experienced a lot of different emotions from our customers out in the field. Some were disappointed and borderline angry, while others were glad to see that a new strategy was on the horizon. That horizon is nearly here and looks to be coming in the June timeframe. Don’t hold me to this date though, I’m just assuming the late May rumors for RTM are true. So here is a short list of major products getting close to launch that will change BI in positive ways:

• SQL Server 2008 R2 – Includes BI enhancements to support PowerPivot, better SharePoint SSRS integration, and an improved version of SSRS report builder as well as a host of other new features and upgrades that build on the success of SQL Server 2008
• SharePoint 2010 – As far as BI features, the notable ones are PowerPivot service, BI Gallery for PowerPivots, Better integration with SSRS, and a new BI search feature for finding analytic content published to SharePoint.
• Office 2010 – Office 2010 and specifically Excel 2010 have been significantly improved as far as BI features go. I’ve invested a lot of time into Excel 2010 research and the big wins I see so far for BI include the following:
  • PowerPivot – This add-on integrates with Excel 2010 (Formerly Project Gemini) and provides the ability to create local in-memory analytic solutions that are very similar to Analysis Services cubes. This morning I experimented with a data set from http://www.data.gov It was some Medicare data in a CSV file format with about 10 million records. Normally, I’d have to load that data into a table on SQL server to analyze it. With PowerPivot, the 10 million rows imported just fine and only took a few minutes to load.
  • Pivot Table Slicers – I can’t say enough good things about the slicers. They give the user a visually appealing way to filter a pivot and they aren’t bound to a single pivot or chart. In fact I created some samples where a single slicer was controlling the outcomes of three pivot tables and three charts.
  • Custom Calculated Measures – This feature is using DAX (Data Analysis Expressions). Basically, it’s an extension to the Excel formulas. I find these expressions extremely simple to create and there is a handy interface for checking syntax and offering a template for all of the parameters the expression needs. This is many times simpler than writing MDX (Multi Dimensional Expressions).
  • Sharing Content to SharePoint 2010 – Seems like a minor feature but it’s importance supersedes the rest. SharePoint provides the security, workflow, navigation, and data governance for all the PowerPivots people will want to publish. Without SharePoint, I think I’d be writing some criticisms on how PowerPivot is just another way to create unmanageable data islands all over the enterprise. SharePoint brings order to the BI universe and is the perfect mechanism for delivering the content. It also addresses the concerns of how to share the rich content with users who don’t use PowerPivot but want read access to the analysis. And finally, SharePoint provides the mechanism for data updates/refreshes. The PowerPivots are great but if they are stale they’re completely worthless the day after creation. Having a well thought out tool for data refreshes that is controlled in one place is extremely useful and important to insuring the success of the analysis asset.

Here’s a link to my next webinar on February 9th 2010. If you haven’t guessed it already, I’ll be talking about and demonstrating: PowerPivot, Microsoft BI, and SWC’s “Extreme BI” approach.