telephone:InetSoft Product Information: Data Modeling Concepts
This is a table of contents of useful information about data modeling concepts. InetSoft offers Web-based BI software that includes intelligent data modeling tools for building logical data models and data mashups.
Need to Aggregate Information from Multiple Sources - We will come and take a look at that. But even here, it's important to recognize that there are some BI applications that are truly analytic or data mining in nature. For instance you might be trying to find patterns of purchase behavior among customers to get a strategic understanding of customers. In these case you really need to mine lots of lots of transactional data or click-stream data in a warehouse. This contrasts to reporting dashboards or operational business intelligence, which is not analytically heavy, but it still needs to aggregate information from multiple sources. You will see that that distinction is somewhat important because today people are using replication based strategies to serve a lot of business intelligence work, but in reality much of this kind of work can actually be done through virtualization saving cost and time plus giving you the ability to deliver faster changes to the product. So having said that, it’s not an either/or question. You can store the same kind of data if you replace this with MDM, and we will see that shortly...
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OLAP Overlay Multidimensional Analysis - OLAP overlay is an optional component of the data model that provides flexible ways to dynamically group, aggregate, and display summary information. This is often called “slice-and-dice.” Unlike star schema relational databases and multi-dimensional databases, ER schema databases do not have a physical schema that readily supports OLAP functions. The Data Modeler provides a light weight, logical mapping tool called OLAP overlay to allow direct slice-and-dice on ER schema data. For end users, this component of the data model is accessed through the OLAP analysis interface. Conceptually, OLAP overlay can be considered as a star schema. Data items are organized into dimensions and measures. Measures are numeric values that are additive in nature. For example, ‘order sale amount’ fits this definition because adding all ‘order sale amounts’ will give the ‘sales total’. Bank account ‘daily balance’, on the other hand, is not additive because adding two days of a balance does not provide meaningful information. Therefore, account balance is considered semi-additive, because it can still be averaged for useful purposes...
OLAP Server Setup - This article provides various notes on OLAP server configuration. Microsoft SQL Server 2000, Microsoft SQL Server 2005, Oracle9i, and DB2 OLAP Server. 1 Microsoft Analysis Services should be installed. 2 Install Microsoft XMLA for Analysis, version 1.1 or later. 3 The file ‘datasource.xml’ in the ‘<XMLA installation directory>/ config’ directory is configured to use localhost by default. If the OLAP server is on another machine, the file must be reconfigured. Multiple data sources can be included in this file. 4 The file ‘msxisapi.dll’ in the ‘<XMLA installation directory>/isapi’ directory must be made available in a web server. Set up a virtual directory (e.g., xmla) on the web server which points to the ‘isapi’ directory. When the URL (e.g., http://localhost/xmla/msxisapi.dll) is entered in a browser, it should return a SOAP message. If it fails, make sure the end user has been granted permission to execute scripts...
onLoad Handler - The onLoad handler is similar to the onInit handler, and is also executed at the beginning of report generation. It differs from onInit in two important ways: onLoad script is executed every time a report is processed. onLoad script is executed after report parameter prompting. The typical usages of the onLoad handler are the following: • Declaring report-level variables. For example, to keep a subtotal on each page, declare the 'subtotal' variable in the onLoad script and then update it using onPageBreak Handler script. • Initializing the report based on user input parameters. For example, onLoad script can set chart styles, report headers, element visibility, etc. The onLoad handler has access to the 'parameter' array that contains all report parameter values. For example, to hide a chart if a parameter is false: if(!parameter['showChart']) { Chart1.visible = false; } • Dynamically running queries. An element's 'query' property can only be set in the onLoad handler, not in element-level script. See Binding Queries for details. • Modifying binding characteristics (column visibility, grouping and summarization, etc.) using the element's bindingInfo attributes. • Modifying multiple elements from a central location...
Practicality of Big Data - Social data is another great source of Big Data. Take behavioral data - this is what people might be doing online or in different environments where we are monitoring their behavior. Then there is social graph information, which is the kind of “who they know” scenario and we see this when people look at our Facebook profiles or our LinkedIn profile I know Eric and how he feels and Eric knows me and that’s part of my social graph. We analyze these social graphs and bring the data into Enterprise for analysis of our customers and for customer retention and customer service issues. Perhaps one of the biggest and most important social data sources is sentiment data. This is what people think about us or think about our products or restaurants or our food chains or what have you. And this information can be quite abundant as well. Take Twitter for instance: this micro-blogging site presently has over a 150 million users that are active on the system. They send 90 million tweets per day which is something like 800 of them per-second. And overall the ecosystem at Twitter produces 8 terabytes of information every single day based on all the interactivity from the community that utilizes the system...
Presentation Aspects of Mobile Devices - So let’s look at the presentation aspects of mobile devices too. Then we can look at some of the capabilities that leading organizations are more likely to have than others. And a lot of these capabilities help those top performers to get access to the data they need when they need it. A key feature is automated alerts triggered by key performance indicators. So this is basically a rule-driven system that enables an alert to be pushed to an employee’s device whenever some business event occurs...
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