In my opinion “soft” skills such as the ability to listen are hardly ever mentioned as a success factor for data warehousing and BI projects. Part of the problem with BI is the broken telephone effect and to a lesser extent, the technical skills of the developers. Too much time is spent implementing the wrong…Continue readingListening to hear your clients
Category: Business Intelligence
UPDATE-6 July 2020: I have updated this post to be the landing page for all my posts on Open Source SQL Editors. There are many aspects of SQL editors that I will post in separate and probably smaller posts. Introduction Working in Business Intelligence (BI), I write and execute SQL statements every day. Actually it…Continue readingOpen Source SQL Editors
Nothing irritates me more than redoing BI reports because of an unclear specification. This is a total waste of time that I try avoid at all costs. Decision tables are a simple tool to facilitate effective communication of report logic between business users and BI developers. How many times have you sat through a meeting…Continue readingVisualising Client Reporting Specifications
The first step when designing a fact table using Ralph Kimball’s dimensional modelling method is to decide on the grain of the table. Another way of describing the grain is the level of detail to store in your fact table. The accepted rule is that you should always store the data at the most detailed…Continue readingETL: Classify do not Filter out data
Sometimes making the simplest enhancement can be difficult to implement at a technical level. Simple is relative off course but from a BI perspective somethings I would consider simple to include: Adding a single column to a report Changing a calculation in a report or cube The reason everyday tasks in a BI environment become…Continue readingTechnical Dept: SQL CASE statement in Business Intelligence (BI)