Predictive Analytics and Data Mining (PADM) has been a slow but steadily growing practice within the broader field of Business Intelligence (BI). The “machine learning” technologies that drive PADM were developed many decades ago. The last two decades presented adequate desktop computing power and software automation to make PADM a practical and highly valuable BI function in every medium and large business.

One benefit of a two year beta program was not only a quality product but sample databases and code that were refined and accurate. Yes, we had to wait a long time for Yukon in 2005, but it was worth it!

OK, we all know about the AdventureWorks Bicycle Company but I quickly forgot the Pubs and Northwind databases as lightweight memories. Instead of 23 rows in a table we had some tables with over 100,000 rows. Wow! Books Online also had countless code examples that actually worked. And they conveyed the concepts very well. Someone had the time to do a few QA cycles in those days…

A new feature in Analysis Services 2008 is the Attribute Relationships tab in the Dimension Designer. This tool is part of the Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) which is really Visual Studio in disguise. In SSAS 2005, we could define attribute relationships one by one using the attribute list but there was no overall graphic […]

PowerPivot is a great new technology for Self-Service BI. In previous blog entries I have outlined some of the technology using SQL Server 2008 R2 and Excel 2010. The concept of accessing data from various sources and bringing them together in a PowerPivot model is very powerful. The fact that it can all be done […]

In a previous blog entry, I talked about developing a PowerPivot model. The model defines the data and the relationships to be used in a PowerPivot application. As the PowerPivot model is defined, the data is actually imported into the Excel spreadsheet using a compression technology called VertiPaq. The first thing you notice is that […]