Connect – a Simba Technologies Blog

IBM's acquisition of SPSS

IBM's announcement this week of its intention to acquire SPSS was very interesting.  After all the consolidation a couple of years ago in the BI space with Hyperion, Business Objects, and Cognos all being acquired, this could mark a new round of consolidation.  Good timing too since stock prices are down due to the recession.  eWeek had an interesting article this week on the SPSS acquisition which is worth a quick read: http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Enterprise-Applications/IBMs-Proposed-Acquisition-of-SPSS-Puts-Oracle-SAP-SAS-on-Notice-446993/?kc=EWKNLDAT07302009STR2.  The article indicates that this acquisition really strengthens IBM and puts Oracle, SAP, and SAS on notice.

SAP's Hasso Plattner talks about column databases

I have always thought that SAP's Hasso Plattner is a good public speaker.  This year at SAP Sapphire, Hasso spoke about column databases.  I was watching his talk again this past weekend and would recommend that if you have some time, you watch this too.  Very interesting.  You can read more here: http://www.sap.com/community/sapphire2009_data_storage_hasso_plattner.epx or watch the video here: http://www.sap.com/community/showdetail.epx?itemID=17716.

New BI Features in Excel 2010

The Technical Preview for Office 2010 is now out and there are a lot of new BI related features in Excel.  On his blog, Chris Webb has a post describing these at: http://cwebbbi.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!7B84B0F2C239489A!4645.entry.  Worth looking at.  At Simba, we are looking at how Excel 2010 will work with SAP BW and Oracle OLAP.  When possible, I will blog more about this.

MDX Query Language, XMLA, ODBO and IBM

I was recently poking around to see what IBM is doing in the MDX query language space.  I tend to discuss the MDX query language space rather than OLE DB for OLAP (ODBO) or XML for Analysis (XMLA) because MDX is really the core of multi-dimensional connectivity as I see it.

IBM announced its DB2 and InfoSphere Warehouse software, code-named Cobra http://www.idug.org/component/content/article/12-news/11924-db2-97.html which has extended IBM's support for MDX.  I have not yet had a chance to try out this software.  If you are interested, there is more information on IBM's MDX query language support in Cubing Services at http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/db2luw/v9r7/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.dwe.cubemdx.doc/mdx_concepts.html.  IBM Cubing Services also supports ODBO and the information for this is at http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/db2luw/v9r7/topic/com.ibm.dwe.cubeserv.doc/topics/c_cub_odbo.html.

It is also worth looking at the following slide deck http://download.boulder.ibm.com/ibmdl/pub/software/data/sw-library/education/bichats/20090130.pdf.  If you look at the slide on Page 9, it seems that IBM will have Cognos, AlphaBlox and third party apps connect to Cubing Services via the MDX query language.  This is a significant point to note for those of us in the MDX world because this means IBM is treating MDX as a first class interface - IBM's own apps will also use MDX to connect to Cubing Servcies.  I take this as another strong vote for MDX as the de-facto multi-dimensional query language standard.

I am also a strong believer in Excel as BI client.  Users seem to love Excel and Microsoft is investing significantly in Office/Excel BI.  When looking at the IBM slide deck, it is interesting to note that they specifically call out Excel as a client for Cubing Services - both on page 9 and page 19.

ODBC 3.80 is here!

Finally, ODBC 3.80 is here!  According to Pak-Ming Cheung from Microsoft, “We’re excited to announce that version 3.8 of the Microsoft ODBC DM (Driver Manager) will be released in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2”.  You can read more in his blog post at: http://blogs.msdn.com/data/archive/2009/07/06/odbc-dm-3-80-in-windows-7-and-windows-server-2008-r2.aspx.

 

Basically, there are 4 main new features in ODBC 3.80:

1.       Streamed Output Parameters

2.       ODBC C-Type Extensibility

3.       Asynchronous Connection Operation

4.       Better Management in ODBC Connection Pooling

 

As a leader in the data connectivity space in general and ODBC in particular, Simba is definitely committed to supporting ODBC 3.80.  If you would like more information, please don’t hesitate to contact us to discuss further.

On-Demand Business Intelligence

Brad Peters wrote an interesting article entitled "On-Demand Business Intelligence Takes Off" at http://www.information-management.com/specialreports/2009_150/business_intelligence_bi-10015655-1.html.  Interesting article and worth a quick read as he explains why an on-demand BI solution makes sense.  Brad states that "It has been said that only 20 to 30 percent of the total cost of a traditional on-premise software platform is license cost – the remainder is the cost of implementing, managing and operating the software (people, hardware and other resources)."  In my experience, I have found that there is a huge customization cost in the BI world and users often just want to pull their data to Excel and work from there.  In fact, in his keynote at SAP Sapphire this year, Hasso Plattner commented that many users pull their data from SAP BW into Access and from there into Excel.  This is an important point to note as Hasso says this is not appropriate.  Even for on-demand BI, it will be important to make sure we have good connectivity to Excel as this is the application that most business users are comfortable in.