12 posts from: Open Source Analytics
KETL ETL Tool - Training Document
(Indexed 2006-07-29):
Its been a while since I posted, and I thought lets begin with something on open source ETL. I posted this first on my OpenSourceAnalytics.com blog and am posting the same stuff here as well.KETL is an open source ETL tool by Kinetic Networks that is gaining mindshare of late. It is currently downloadable as part of Bizgres BI project, but can be
Agile Data Warehouse Development..., or how to ensure sanity in your BI implementation
(Indexed 2006-06-06):
Building a successful Data Warehouse as part of a BI roll out is going to test both your tolerance for ambiguity and the resilience of your development methodology. Traditional water-fall model tends to fail as BI requirements change frequently. So if the traditional big-bang waterfall is not likely to work, what does?Agile development is an approach that "cycles" through the development phases, from gathering requirements to delivering functionality into a working release. Two w
RFC, Writer's Block, and the Airlines Data Model
(Indexed 2006-05-25):
... in no particular orderWriter's Block: Seven months, and scores of posts since I started blogging, I seem to be catching a particularly infuriating and disabling disease these days. Its called the Writer's Block. "Writer's block is the state where a writer loses confidence in his/her creativity to the point where further writing is difficult." (Source: Wikipedia)The stats tell me that this is a particularly popular blog, and every day more people subscribe for email alerts. An
Delivering on the BI Promise: A Road Map for Financial Services
(Indexed 2006-05-15):
Last week I was attending a Financial Services CTO Summit where a paper of mine has been published. The paper, titled "Delivering on the BI Promise: A Financial Services Road Map", is a guide for Financial Services IT organizations for rolling out comprehensive analytics in a phased manner.The paper lays down a road map for doing analytics in multiple phases - prioritized based on ease of imple
Build Your Own Data Warehouse - II: The Sales Data Mart
(Indexed 2006-04-28):
Oh well! This post has been somewhat delayed because I couldn't figure out a way to put in images on ITtoolbox blogs, and I needed to use some images in order to explain how the sales star schema would look. Some of you would know that I have another blog about Open Source Analytics. So what I have done is that I have put
Calculating ROI for Business Intelligence Projects
(Indexed 2006-04-16):
We all know (or have heard about) how frightfully expensive and risky BI projects can be. It is an unfortunate reality that most BI projects fail. You don't get to hear about it simply because acknowledging such an expensive failure can often be disastrous for individuals that sponsored the project. (See post How not to buy an OLAP product for things to keep in mind).It is extremely important to k
Build Your Own Data Warehouse - I: Background and Homework
(Indexed 2006-04-06):
Let's say you are a technologist at FoodMart, a (fictitious) retailer that sells various grocery products in a chain of stores across North America. The FoodMart IT Department currently churns out multiple standard reports every day by firing SQL queries on the application databases, and also serves ad-hoc report and analysis requests from users. However, this approach is becoming unmaintainable due to the sheer number of distinct reports and SQLs out there, and also slows down your applicat
MySQL as a Data Warehousing Platform
(Indexed 2006-03-30):
In the next post, we'll start doing some hands on. But before that we need to select a Data Warehouse Platform. Don't worry, I am not going to nudge you towards some commercial "Data Warehouse Solution" here! As promised, it will be open source and free.Since a Data Warehouse is essentially a database, we could use any standard database for the purpose. But since we aren't making just a toy to impress people with, let's stop for a moment and look at what we need. So lets go over that...
Good Pitch, Bad Pitch
(Indexed 2006-03-27):
A very interesting blog that I make a point to read regularly (well, almost) is the Juice Analytics Blog. The Juice Analytics guys have interesting, often contrarian (we agree to disagree on certain things), and well informed take on various topics related to analytics that I find quite useful and educating. Well, this post is not about open source analytics (we'll come back to it very soon). This post is about pitches/presentations
Dimensional Modeling... or, Why your App is NOT your Data Warehouse
(Indexed 2006-03-21):
As I was saying in the last post, your Application database is not your Data Warehouse for the simple reason that your application database was never designed to answer end-user queries. Your app is a jumble of tables interlinked to define the entities in your business and their relationships (usually depicted in an Entity-Relationship Diagram). You just have to look at an Entity-Relationship Diagram to know that its not an easy job trying to get some queries and answers out of it. (Don't miss t
Database vs. Data Warehouse
(Indexed 2006-03-16):
In this blog we will start with the basics on the data side and then move on to reporting, modeling, and data-mining. A good Data Warehouse is the first step towards a sustainable analytics initiative, and unfortunately this is where most projects end up going wrong. Some of these posts are lifted from another blog of mine, and they serve to set the perspective and the base that further work would be built upon.So how is a data warehouse different from you regular database? After all,
Open Source BI, Data-mining and Analytics
(Indexed 2006-03-12):
If you are doing business intelligence/analytics/data-mining today and are satisfied with your results, this blog may not be for you. If you aren't doing it, you should be. And if you have always wanted to do it but could not, you have come to the right place. This blog is for people who are tired of all the misleading hype propagated by commercial BI vendors and the exorbitant prices being charged for software products of suspect quality. This blog is for people and o