Roger's BI Blog

Microsoft must have been thinking that the live of a Windows administrator gets so boring that they need a distraction and they have integrated the XBox Live extensions standard in Windows Server 2016.  No kidding: take a look. I did not select it as a feature and it is there. As you can see the XBox Live service is started automatically even in mode manual (see error log).  To my opinion these 3 XBox Live services should never be available on a server. Unless the server is part of the XBox Live platform of cause but honestly I don't think that Microsoft will allow that.  Every IT manager with a serious Windows production environment would fire any administrator playing XBox Live on the production servers. So though it might be tempting don't do it Windows administrator. It is a trap! :-)

Storage Spaces is a component available in Windows 2012. Microsoft has used this technique in their Microsoft Analytics Platform System or previously named SQL Server 2012 Parallel Data Warehouse.  But as I will show they got stuck in the 'old way of thinking' which will only work (slightly?) better if we live in a perfect world, were all data is requested at the same time. In a lot of cases this is not so.... The hardware behind Microsoft Analytics Platform System When looking closer at the hardware the Hewlett and Packard (HP) solution based on the DL360 Gen8, which has 2 PCIe slots, is equipped with one H221 SAS controller with two 4x6 Gb/s ports and one Melanox Infini Band 56 Gb/s controller. In the HP solution the JBOD is divided in two: every node manages 32 disks.  Dell addresses the solution with the PowerEdge R620 which has maximum 3 PCIe slots but 2 JBODs so in order to address all 102 disks in the JBOD's they need to do the same as HP namely one SAS...

This post is based on the tests I did to see if storage spaces in Windows 2012R2 can serve as a platform for our Fast Track environments. When Microsoft developed the Fast Track Data Warehouse architecture, which was at first very limited in hardware choice and for version SQL Server 2012 became a reference guide, Storage Spaces as a functionality in Windows did not exist.That has changed with the release of Windows 2012 and later on with version 2012R2 and soon 2016. Why is Storage Spaces as a storage technology so interesting for SQL Server?  Anyone who is a pro in SQL Server knows that parallelism - adding more disks - can greatly improve performance. Adding an hard disk for the tempdb and another one for the LOG files will do the job if the hard disks perform sufficiently (that might be another issue!). To my opinion (and also to others) SQL Server does not do a great job in using the available hardware. Before and after the installation it is mandatory to tune a SQL Se...

Working with Management Data Warehouse, a reporting tool for Data Warehouses introduced in SQL Server 2008 and never changed since, makes a lot of limitations visible and also the lack of in-depth documentation by Microsoft. They tried to make the documentation better accessible in SQL Server 2012 but the product itself did not change.  What are the main limitations? MDW uses snapshots, which is actually a 'easy' way to handle all the issues involved in collecting ongoing activity. It is like taking 10 pictures per second of a dancing girl: you see the changes in every movement but if you want to know what is the total distance the girl covered then it can get rather complex. So you have for 1 minute of pictures and I bet you will break your teeth on that one. If you want to see the distance the girl danced in a week, month or year go for it! This gets us into the basic question of BI. Why are we collecting data? What do we want to do with it? Apparently taking 10 pictu...

I have been using pure Android now since the Nexus 4. I am on a Nexus 5 now and before I was using Samsung Galaxy S3 and S both on various versions of CyanogenMod, the latest was 11.1. So I  have quiet some experience with the platform and it evolution. To make things very clear: pure Android on the Nexus 5 does not have a longer battery life than 3 hours!  Using your phone as a route planner with mobile data on and the GPS on makes it live barely 1 hour! These are from my real every day experiences.  That is when you watch a video or listen to music (!). The latter I find quiet amazing because processing a video and show it on screen is for sure not the same thing than having the device screen of and listening to music only. Strangely it does. And I used Google Play. Maybe that is the reason. If you put of WiFi and mobile data my Nexus 4 on Android 4 last for 7 days and the Nexus 5 several days only. The reason why their performance on battery life when activ...

After reading the article of Didier Gaultier on The 10 key points of predictive marketing I like to reply based on the experience I have working in the field of Business Intellegence and Marketing in special. First point is Marketing departments are always looking for the black box, some call it Quick Analytical CRM others call it Smarter Solutions, but working with marketing departments and enhancing data I can confirm this search is futile. There is no one system that can do all.  That's also the reason why CRM solutions never provide a correct solution for reporting, simply because no organization is the same and no IT department is the same. Even the biggest ERP solution - SAP - needs Business Objects or another tool to enhance reporting. So if your organization is not using SAP, but another ERP, your organization need to do something to do their intelligent reporting.  The biggest problem most Marketing departments of large organizations face is actually getting data...