Many people reach out to me asking for advice in helping them evaluate various BI platforms for their companies. In my mind I am obviously the wrong guy to ask as I am not shy to admit my fairly heavy bias towards Microsoft. However, over the course of the last twenty years, I have been exposed … Continue reading How to think strategic about Business Intelligence
Category: Reviews
SAP Hana vs Microsoft SQL Server, the war is on…
and the Germans are making the first move... I have written two posts about Hana vs. xVelocity (Part I and Part II) making the basic point that there is nothing truly visionary or revolutionary in SAP Hana from the technology perspective and that a customer can get all the benefits (or rather alleged benefits as … Continue reading SAP Hana vs Microsoft SQL Server, the war is on…
A quick note on Surface RT battery life
Just wanted to write a quick note about my first day of using Surface at work.. I used it extensively throughout the whole day, lots of internet browsing, a few Lync meetings, heavy emails. As of right now, the battery is at 58% without me charging it for the entire day. In fact I had … Continue reading A quick note on Surface RT battery life
Surface RT review, part II
I was a little surprised to see how much traffic was generated by my original post. I decided that, it would be a good idea to follow up with a review focused on the device itself. My first experience with Windows 8 came from Samsung Series 9 tablet. I generally liked the tablet although it was … Continue reading Surface RT review, part II
Microsoft Surface RT review, sort of in a context of Microsoft BI
First, I have to explain why I am writing this review when so many websites have already covered the product – the only thing that I will cover that others haven't is what features of Microsoft BI stack run on Surface and what don't. Let's get through the bad stuff first. I don't know if … Continue reading Microsoft Surface RT review, sort of in a context of Microsoft BI
PowerView in Excel 2013 – Business Intelligence – Second Impression
Well, the more time passes, the more I like it... Somehow I have figured out, subconsciously, how not to make it crash quite as often and also how to work around things that don't work very well. So, in no particular order, here are few more observations... Map - like it a lot. There is … Continue reading PowerView in Excel 2013 – Business Intelligence – Second Impression
SAP HANA versus Microsoft Business Intelligence and xVelocity
This will be in a long rant format as I am still trying to organize my thoughts around this subject. Before I start comparing and contrasting the two vendors, I just wanted to make a quick statement to get something off my chest: Generally speaking, HANA is a good business decision for SAP as it … Continue reading SAP HANA versus Microsoft Business Intelligence and xVelocity
PowerView wish list
My PowerView wish list inludes the following: HTML5 Support (!) Multidimensial model support Hierarchies Drilldowns (at least in some way) Ability to insert images Ability to customize background PerformancePoint and/or SharePoint integration Improved touch response
xVelocity and Columnstore Indexes review
Today I decided to take xVelocity and columnstore indexes for a spin and see whether this technology lives up to all the hype. I tested it on a 2Gb fact table with about 21M rows. First I wrote a query that joined the fact table with a Customer dimension and returned the total revenue grouped … Continue reading xVelocity and Columnstore Indexes review
Choosing between PerformancePoint, PowerView, Excel Services and Reporting Services for your data visualizations
Even though PowerView is the only Microsoft Data Visualization tool that is new on that list, it appears that there is some confusion as to how these four options compare with each other. The topic is pretty big, so it will probably take me a few tries to get it done right, but here is the first … Continue reading Choosing between PerformancePoint, PowerView, Excel Services and Reporting Services for your data visualizations
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