A journey through database heaven & hell (and other stuff)
When you are trying to connect to MDS from Excel, if you get the following error
“The Master Data Manager Web Application is Older than the Add-in Version”
while using MDS excel addin, then one possible reason is that the connection for the MDS excel addin does not like the full address i.e.
You just need to enter http://servername/ or http://servername/mds and it works fine!
The error message is not clear for this issue!!
Houston Neal of Software Advice has written a nice article to introduce BI to newcomers to the subject.
If the words “extract transform load” sound like a foreign language, you’re in the right place. Making sense of the business intelligence (BI) software market can be challenging for even the most technical of software buyers. It’s complex stuff.
You can read the full article here
Though it was worth sharing a quote from the big man…
“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
Having been working with QlikView for some time now, I thought it was worth writing a few posts about some of the slightly more interesting things we have been doing with it.
One of the requirements of a recent project was to develop a way of allowing users to:
The final result was a web application (screenshot below), running in IIS, that allowed user to do just that. It uses the QV Publisher API and was written in ASP.Net 4 using Visual Studio 2010.
What the web application does is to search the root QV documents folder and display those that already have a reload task associated with them. Documents with no tasks will not be displayed in the “documents” grid. It also recognises the User’s Active Directory credentials and searches the relevant LDAP to look for memberships of Security Groups containing the word “QlikView”.
Within our app, there was a requirement to allow the user to enter externally supplied parameters to the reload task, but this is purely optional – the application will work without them being supplied, due to flags we place in our QV script.
Effectively, what the code does in the background is to create a clone of the existing reload task that is attached to the document, replacing any existing supplied values with those supplied from the web form, run the reload task, and then delete the “clone”. It would be better if the code created a task from scratch, but we haven’t quite managed to to that yet with the QV Publisher API.
If people are interested in this application, we may well be able to package it up, make it a little more generic and release the source code.
I intend to post more detail about the application over the coming weeks.
Having spent the early part of the week at Qonnections in Miami, one of a number of very cool things I saw was this
It seems that everyone was talking mobile BI, and this is one of the better incarnations i have yet seen.
This is a pretty good resource for those people wanting to get started with the latest versions of the Microsoft BI stack.
Download details: SQL Server 2008 R2 Update for Developers Training Kit (January 2011 Update)
I'm a Business Intelligence Architect/Developer. I spend my working life working with BI tools such as QlikView, SQL Server, Analysis Services, Sharepoint and other well known BI tools. Thought I'd share some stuff with others who may or may not be interested...
