DWH News

Qlik Technologies Inc. (“QlikTech”), a provider of business intelligence software, today announced that Boehringer Ingelheim, a leading global pharmaceutical company with more than 41,000 employees, has implemented QlikTech’s innovative analysis and reporting tool QlikView, to provide its management team actionable insights into global performance trends. The QlikView-powered corporate executive dashboard allows upper management to analyze large amounts of data from multiple sources in clear and intuitive graphs. Boehringer Ingelheim plans to deploy QlikView worldwide to provide a global management information system, delivering significantly greater transparency for all important KPIs (key performance indicators) through quick and flexible data analysis.

UK police forces have begun trials of futuristic software designed to forecast the time and place of future crimes.

The Criminal Reduction Utilising Statistical History (Crush) system uses predictive analytics to process data such as crime reports, intelligence briefings and behaviour profiles to identify crime hot spots.

The system was developed by IBM, which has invested more than $11bn in developing its predictive analytics technology for helping businesses use data to develop proactive growth strategies.

The California State University (CSU), the nation’s largest and most diverse university system serving almost 433,000 students, has begun deploying Oracle solutions to efficiently produce system-wide reporting statistics and analysis. Challenged with decreasing budgets, the university was seeking to standardize its reporting practices as well as look for savings through consolidation and common business practices. By combining Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition with the university’s previously deployed Oracle’s PeopleSoft Enterprise Financial Management 9.0, CSU will be able to consolidate data onto a single repository, delivering greater visibility into business-critical information. The university successfully deployed the solution on three campuses and will transition the remaining 20 campuses over the next year. Once implementation is complete, university officials will have the resources to improve decision making and build more efficient business processes, helping the university continue to thrive

Tableau Software today announced explosive growth in the use of Tableau Public. Launched in February, the company’s product lets bloggers and publishers tell stories with data on the web. To date, people have made over 4.5 million visits to web pages enabled with Tableau Public’s interactive visualizations, or vizes. This includes news sites like USA Today, blogs like Infectious Greed and websites like Maplight.org.

As Web search, mobile advertising and social platforms become increasingly interwoven, businesses will have new opportunities to provide not just content and applications, but context-aware user experiences to end users, according to Gartner, Inc. By 2013, 40 percent of Global 2000 enterprises will have context-aware computing projects focused on the user experience under way. By 2015, context will be as influential to consumer mobile services and relationships as search is to the Web.

SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced the completion of the cash tender offer for all outstanding shares of common stock of Sybase, Inc., by Sheffield Acquisition Corp., a wholly-owned subsidiary of SAP, which expired at 9:00 p.m., New York City time on Monday, July 26, 2010. American Stock Transfer & Trust Company, LLC, the depositary for the tender offer, has indicated that, as of the expiration of the tender offer 80,929,717 shares of common stock of Sybase had been tendered into and not properly withdrawn from the tender offer (including 9,293,901 shares of common stock tendered pursuant to the guaranteed delivery procedures).

These shares represent approximately 92.1% percent of Sybase’s outstanding shares of common stock, or 91.8% percent on a fully diluted basis (as determined pursuant to the previously announced merger agreement between SAP America, Sheffield Acquisition Corp. and Sybase). All Sybase shares that were validly tendered into the offer and not properly withdrawn have been accepted for payment.

A recent International Data Corporation (IDC) study shows that the Software as a Service (SaaS) market had worldwide revenues of $13.1 billion in 2009. IDC forecasts the market to reach $40.5 billion by 2014, representing a compound annual growth rate of 25.3%. By 2012, IDC expects that less than 15% of net-new software firms coming to market will ship a packaged product (on CD). By 2014, about 34% of all new business software purchases will be consumed via SaaS, and SaaS delivery will constitute about 14.5% of worldwide software spending across all primary markets.

A cumulative audience of nearly 400,000 visiting soccer fans from all over the world came to South Africa in June to watch 32 countries compete in the 19th FIFA World Cup tournament. As they attended games and enjoyed the festivities they sent home pictures, videos and messages using email and messaging services, all over wireless data networks. As one of the largest eXchange service providers to enable inter-network roaming, Aicent, Inc. (www.aicent.com), recorded huge surges in network traffic during the competition, as much as 300 percent over the weeks just prior.

Here’s a quick one before the weekend comes along: one of the limitations in OBIEE 10g around software configuration management was that you couldn’t apply incremental patches to an RPD, applying for example a set of changes made in development to the production repository. The only thing you could do was take the whole development repository, test it and then copy it in it’s entirety into production, which wasn’t ideal.

In OBIEE 11gR1, you can create XML patch files based on the differences between two repositories, and then apply this to a third to incrementally update it (using the XUDML feature first introduced in 10g with the Content Accelerator Framework) To take an example, I have a development repository that contains a subject are with two tables:

I copy this RPD into production and make it my production version. Then, I carry on development and add a new logical table, and presentation table, to the development RPD.

What I’d like to do now, is generate a patch file that I can then apply to my production RPD, so that just these extra tables are added to it. I do this by selecting File > Compare from the BI Administration menu, and then I select the original RPD that I copied into production as the comparison RPD. The Compare Repository dialog tells me that I’ve got a bunch of new tables and columns in the modified RPD.

I then press the Create Patch… button to create the patch file. This creates an XML file that describes the new RPD objects that the patch file will create when applied.

To apply the patch, I open up the production RPD using the BI Administration tool, select File > Merge, and then select the original RPD and the patch file I want to apply. There’s also a command-line version of this utility, patchrpd, that you can use in a scripting environment to automate the process.

Once the patch merge completes, you’re left with a new copy of the production RPD, with the new columns and tables applied. Not bad.

The rest of the SCM process looks much the same in 11g as it was in 10g, though if you’re interested in scripted patching of the web catalog, Venkat’s posting the other day on the command-line interface to the 10g Catalog Manager looks an interesting option.