Cognos Business Intelligence Technical Articles
I have started posting some technical articles on my company website. My focus is on Cognos 8 Business Intelligence, as I am currently interested in that type of work. Any feedback would be appreciated, either through the contact page or by leaving a comment. If you work with Cognos Business Intelligence, let me know if there is anything that you would like to see as I am open to suggestions for future topics.
Secure Business Intelligence Development
In order to build a secure business intelligence system, business intelligence developers need to be more security conscious as they go about creating data models, cubes, and reports. eWeek has an article titled 5 Steps to Secure Development, which outlines how to make security an integral part of the enterprise software development process. These lessons are equally applicable to Business Intelligence projects.
- Definition - Start thinking about security from the beginning of the project and build it into the project plan. Most BI vendors will have a security framework for preventing unintended access to data, but how well does it match up with existing business processes? Will the BI system will leverage the existing security infrastructure? Is there any custom coding required?
- Education - According to the article, there is lack of security training across the IT industry. Be sure that the team knows how to roll out secure applications, and how to establish appropriate responses to security breaches. Shutting everything down is effective, but such drastic actions will quickly undermine the confidence of end users.
- Equipment - An emphasis on security can risk slowing down a project, but having the right software tools can mitigate this risk. Look for analyzers and automated testing tools that have security testing features.
- Test, test, test - Testing must be expanded beyond functionality, performance and data validation. Security testing means studying potential failures to see they can be exploited. How a component or the systems fails is as important as preventing it from failing in the first place.
- Monitoring - As part of the roll-out, alerts and processes must be put in place to monitor for failures and suspicious activity. For example, being alerted to huge spikes in activity and abnormal amounts of data being downloaded by a single user or in a single location.
Most business intelligence vendors take security seriously, with published guidelines for implementing security and details about how their software handles various threats. Here are two examples from Cognos and Microsoft. However, despite these convincing assurances, the responsibility for a secure system ultimately lies with the project team.
Searching for the next big thing in Business Intelligence
Like most people in the IT industry, I am always looking for the next big thing in my niche. As my company does BI consulting with IBM Cognos 8, a trend I am keenly following is the evolution of the next BI platform. Clearly, SOA, SaaS and cloud computing will have an impact, and the details are slowly becoming evident. Shawn Rogers, blogging on the b-eye-network, recently wrote about three recent developments at Google that provide some insight into the future of business intelligence:
- Panorama Software announces a BI solution that integrates with Google Docs.
- SalesForce, the poster child for hosted enterprise software, announces the integration of SalesForce with Google Apps.
- Google’s Big Table, the database component of the Google App Engine, is available for storing data “in the cloud”, opening the door for application developers to leverage Google’s massive infrastructure.
While it is debatable if Google can (or even wants to) become a player in the Enterprise BI market, they are setting trends in software development and providing clues as to what future of BI software suites will look like.
Mainstream Business Intelligence
With last year’s vendor consolidation and the appearance of several smaller BI upstarts, one could conclude that Business Intelligence is now a mainstream enterprise technology. However, James Taylor of Smart Enough Systems makes a point to the contrary: advanced BI functionality, such as visualization, in-memory analytics and search, make BI more palatable, but do not make the technology mainstream. To make BI mainstream is to get information into the hands of those who need it, and then take it a step further with business rules, predictive analytics and decision services.
“…it must focus analytic insight on the making of decisions in software not just in people’s heads.”
It must first begin with a shift into thinking about operational BI. There must first be a level of comfort with delivering BI reports and dashboards that are timely, accurate and useful. Then, with careful analysis of the business processes, improve upon those reports to automate any decision making as much as possible. It requires a strict alignment of BI reporting with business goals and metrics.
Upgrading to WordPress 2.5
I am going to upgrade this blog to WordPress 2.5. today. I have been using it in my dev environment (on my laptop) and I am impressed with the new admin UI. I am hoping to reap some other benefits as well. I will also be relaunching my company’s website this week, which will use WordPress 2.5 as a CMS. I came across some good ideas here and here about customizing WordPress with CMS functionality in mind.
What to do when you have no budget
What do you do when you need software, but you do not have the budget yet, nor the time to deal with the procurement office? Have a look at Open Source Living. Contrary to open source repositories, like Source Forge or Google code, this is a directory open source software, organized into some broad categories. It is no where near comprehensive: some categories only have a couple of listings. You will not find code libraries or obscure applications, but rather open source counterparts to many commercial applications. The projects seem to be chosen for listing based on popularity, and the licenses vary. If the software is going to become widely used in your organization, be sure to apply some criteria when making a selection.
Of course, it might not be a limited budget that draws you here, but a desire to leverage some of the benefits of open source software.
Improving the usability of Pentaho BI
A common concern with open source projects, and BI open source in particular, is the usability of the software. For both end users and administrators, this can be a key factor in adoption.
For Pentaho Business Intelligence, the Mantle project is underway to put an AJAX front end onto Pentaho. The project leverages Google Web Toolkit . A brief review with some screenshots can be found here. While still very early stage, it demonstrates the WEB 2.0 direction that the Pentaho team is thinking about. It also points the way for Pentaho OEM partners who want to put a prettier face on open source business intelligence.
Copying files into the Windows Vista Program Files folder
One of the many annoying things when working with Windows Vista is the way the operating system protects certain directories, as part of the many security enhancements now built into Vista. For the average user, this is probably a good thing, but for any IT professional or developer who needs to test and tweak files all over the place, it can be a huge inconvenience. I use the following steps as the quickest way around this:
- Open up a privileged command line prompt. Type “cmd” into the Start Search box (the “run” box in previous versions of Windows), and hit Ctrl+Shift + Enter (as opposed to just the Enter key). A User Account Control dialog window will pop up. Click the continue button or use the Alt-C keyboard shortcut. Thanks to the How-To geek for this tip.
- Take ownership of the directory into which you wish to copy files with this command: takeown /f “directory name”
- Grant yourself full control of the same directory with this command: cacls “directory name” /G user account:F
- Use the robocopy command (now included with Vista) to copy the files or folders, or launch Windows explorer from this privileged command prompt with this command: explorer
If you need to do this often with the same files, the commands can be put into a batch file that can be run as administrator. The commands takeown and cacls are also useful for deleting or overwriting system or other protected files. A complete list of Windows Vista and Server 2008 commands can be found here.
Building an ETL tool: how hard can it be?
After my post on buying or building an ETL tool, I searched around a bit for some counterpoints. guercheLE, via Twitter, pointed me to Oren Eini . On his blog he has documented his experience building an ETL tool, which was released as Rhino ETL. The series of posts is great reading for both understanding how ETL works and for insight into the evolution of an open source project.
Should you buy or build your ETL?
A recent article on Intelligent Enterprise breaks down the buy versus build arguments for ETL software. The article caught my attention because I am generally of the opinion that unless you are suffering from a severe case of NIHS, it would be difficult to argue a case for building BI tools from scratch, given the maturity of the software and the range of tools available.
Features that give an advantage to an off-the-shelf ETL
- A graphical interface to represent the ETL process, SQL code, and any other related objects
- A built in metadata structure
- Production ready functionality - log files, alerts, and other features that ease administration and maintenance.
- Data lineage and dependency - tools to find the source data, or conversely, to find the downstream dependencies (reports, etc.)
- Data cleansing and de-duplication
- Good performance, without too much tweaking of either the ETL engine or the database
Disadvantages of shrink wrapped ETL
- Liscening and maintenance costs - with the rise of open source ETL software, most notably, the Kettle project, this might be mitgated
- Uncertainty - either unrealistically high expectations, or a underestimation of the power of the tool
- Limited compliance - use is restricted to the vendor’s supported hardware, operating systems and databases
- Proprietary scripting language - additional ramp-up time would be required, depending on how compliant the vendor is with established standards
Either way, nothing can replace the planning necessary for an ETL projecet, nor the need for the usual production standards: maintainable code, a change control system, audit reports, and the ability to restart or back out of a load.