I am not addicted to text messaging. I was talked into using FaceBook and found out that two of my high school teachers are more active on the site than I am.
I love getting cards or real mail. I don't own a game system except for one that was passed down to me and is currently sitting unplugged, unused.
We have one T.V. with no cable, just PBS over the antenna.
It's not that I am slow to adapt, or painstakingly deliberate – I just don't feel the need to be inundated day in and day out with information, much of it which has little to nothing to do with the decisions I need to make.
Why bring this up? I'm not going to bore you with a personal diatribe about modern technology, but rather make a point about information systems and how we need to be careful in our decisions.
One of the points I get clients to hammer out detail on when putting into place any level of reporting/analytics is how they will respond to the data once they get – what are the methods and governances you will have around the metrics once you start seeing them? One of my favorite stories is of a call center manager who was set to fire half of his staff due to returns or exchanges of computer products, until we pointed out to him he needed to look at the year over year context to understand that this was a normal consumer cycle and that they were actually doing better than the year before.
This is a cogent point all the more given our current economic state – we are not required to have an immediate reaction to every action that occurs. We (the market and our government) did not have a planned method for response to these events – if you do not have a plan or understanding of why the needle tips, and what to do when it does, then you put yourself in danger with any immediate response to that moving gauge.
I get a small chuckle out of everyone misquoting Milton Friedman when it comes to the Great Depression and trying to fit his statement into current context.
He did place a lot of blame on the Fed for contracting the money supply during a time when banks needed liquidity, but if you understand more of Friedman and his advocacy for a free market, then you cannot place his thinking next to the decisions guiding the "bailout".
Friedman was a very deliberate person and a brilliant economist (gross understatement). With all the information we now have at hand, much more data and coming in much more timely, there is the opportunity to pick a more measured path for the economy.
So what does this have to do with being old fashioned? Maybe it's just my weird thought pattern for the day, but I believe that we haven't learned as a society what to do with, and how to react to the amount of information we are given every minute of the day. Stocks fluctuate intraday for no apparent reason other than they have a high "news" index on Google or Yahoo!; an industry becomes hot overnight because it gets featured in some trade publication for some minor purpose, and then the story copied over and over -- or, one of my favorites about United Airlines and a mistake in publishing a story that plunged the stock over 75% in one day.
I guess that I am old fashioned in that I like to get all the facts before making a decision – it's not to say that I don't make up my mind quickly on a great many things, but often I can rely on either experience or an accumulation of points before that juncture that allow me to pick (hopefully) the best option before me.
I think something I'll use to underline this point: is there any day trader (technical investor) out there that can compete with Warren Buffet (value investor)?
It is important that we, as I/T professionals, push our clients to consider the facts, plan for excellence, plan for the long term, and to do this, we need to help them understand the repercussions of the information they will be receiving from the systems we put in place.
Thoughts, examples? Please feel free to comment or e-mail me.
Tags: ramblings,
business intelligence
Categories: Business Intelligence
One of the great things about attending any conference is strengthening your resource list. I just attended a session on SSIS best practices hosted by Denny Lee of the Microsoft Customer Advisory Team; Denny and his colleagues are keeping their experiences, practices and notes publicly available on SQLCAT.com.
For anyone interested in the content of the session I just attended, they have posted the bulk of the content in this top 10 list on Integration Services best practices.
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Ben Stein's keynote address wrapped up just a few minutes ago and I am sitting and waiting for my specific session to start, so I wanted to follow up and echo one of the messages Microsoft is really trying to get across to everyone; I think it is best wrapped in Stephen Elop of Microsoft's statement yesterday: "democratization of information".
There are a lot of my service industry peers in the non-Microsoft side who love to point to faults or inabilities in the Microsoft stack, particularly in the database and business intelligence arena. I am thinking of this point as I posted yesterday on Microsoft's claim to an ETL world record, and a simple search on reactions came up with this article posted in Toolbox.com by a Deloitte manager.
McBurney is pretty scathing in his response to Len's post; having had experience with Informatica and clients who have implemented Informatica, I want to add my observation and hopefully underscore one of the reasons I am a consultant dealing exclusively with Microsoft products and technologies and why I will remain so: there is a strong desire to make the tools easy to use, but allow for a maturity path even within the same tool that makes possible mastery.
It is democratization of information supported by the ability for anyone to walk in and learn to use the tools (some of you are probably screaming in pain a bit here – let's set aside the issue of spread marts that get created by this concept and focus on the issue of getting clients, peers and those coming behind us that need to learn these concepts, master them, and keep the engine running after we have architected the solution!).
I have to share a story from one of my clients (to remain unnamed); Informatica was, and still is, the ETL tool of choice for their company. The team I supported had gone through a week of training, had three books and a manual that they could proudly display on their desk and a depleted training budget all to prove the effort. Yet when it came to development, time and time again, they dropped Informatica and would bribe their I/T co-workers into getting SQL 2005 installations here and there, access, logins and then run SSIS packages.
Why? They could use the tool with little to no training, complete their packages and transformations faster and easier. Disparate team members were able to follow and understand the developed packages more readily. Overall, the team was more productive and happier with development in SSIS.
A lot of Informatic proponents will point to the advanced meta-data features, data lineage components, and so on that Power Center will bring to bear in any solution, proposed or actual – and as a Microsoft partner, I am well aware of the features and abilities that SSIS may fall short on when compared on paper.
But it doesn't keep me from recommending it nor using it. For a first, and most recently, second generation ETL framework, SSIS is absolutely amazing and it will continue to grow and eventually include out of the box the features and functions that some of the more mature ETL frameworks have now.
I want to emphasize out of the box though – it is important to point out that SSIS is an immensely extendable framework, something that is underscored by the number of components that you can find on CodePlex, through independent software vendors, or, like us, through internal developed IP.
We will see a lot from Microsoft in the near future focused on making it easier for the end user to consume your hard work on warehousing and business intelligence projects, but what is more exciting to me is that we will definitely see a lot from individuals, internal Microsoft teams (unofficial releases) and the partner community in best practice, custom extensions and plug ins for SSIS. It is a very active and vibrant community to be a part of, something that I do not see with the same level of passion and innovation on the other side of the fence.
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This was a cool session to walk into:
Len Wyatt actually posted about this on the SQL Server performance blog back in February 2008, but it is still worth mentioning as a quick poll of the attendees (myself included), had not even heard this news.
As you would expect, the hardware configuration was incredibly optimized for to achieve this load, more so than you would expect to find at a client – even ones with warehousing in the forefront of their concerns, however there were a few take-aways about SSIS 2008:
- New data connectors for Oracle, Teradata and SAP BW (last one coming soon) improve what SSIS can use as its information source
- The improvements in caching in the lookup transformation, which they heavily utilized in this scenario.
That's really all I've got left in me for the day – it's been pretty busy and a ton of fun. I will be posting in more detail after the conference as information and conversations have time to sit and be comprehended.
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Sitting in on one of the partner sessions, Microsoft has put together a new web site specifically aimed at SQL Server enthusiasts, http://www.sqlserverexperience.com, or http://www.microsoft.com/sql/experience/.
If you are a partner and have a login, you can also go to http://partner.microsoft.com/bi. Look for many new resources and a contest to be posted here in November.
Tags: bi conference,
business intelligence,
conference
Categories: Business Intelligence
Day two kicked off with a lot of energy and I'm running to my next session, but I'll give everyone a quick preview of two of the big annoucnements by Microsoft at this morning's session.
As a lot of you have read, Microsoft has made a lot of acquisitions the past few years, and this is due to their vision for the data platform and where it will be able to take and support their customer base and those of us that implement for their customer base.
The first, and one of the exciting new projects, is an implementation of SQL Server, now and future versions, that will be aimed specifically at data warehousing and in supporting large data stores. The project, code named "Madison", will be integrating technology acquired form DatAllegro. Just to give you an idea of where this is headed: the demo run a 24 node cluster with 150TB warehouse and 1 trillion rows in the central fact table. I'll have more on this later.
The second is project "Gemini", which is aimed at supporting the end user -- trulying amazing in the capabilities that they will be supporting -- and aimed at total integration with SharePoint, Office, Analysis Services and SQL Server, but taken to an entirely new place that is not currently available -- very exciting.
I'll be sure to post more tonight, for now I am off to find out more about Blue Ocean.
Tags: conference,
business intelligence,
warehousing,
microsoft
Categories: Business Intelligence
It's hard to go to Seattle without stopping by Pike's Place public market or dropping in to get coffee from the original Starbuck's (I did both and have overpriced coffee mugs to prove it):
Shot from the Sunday meet and greet; pretty large crowd, but the bulk of the attendees should be there tomorrow for the keynote address.
Lots of good sessions this year, so I had some tough picks on which to attend, and I may still change my mind on some of them; check back for progress on this great event as I will be sure to post more as the week progresses.
Tags: bi conference,
microsoft
Categories: Business Intelligence
Yes, it is odd for me to post an entry on this blog covering thread safe ways to talk to windows user controls in C#, but I was surprised at how much trolling I had to do on Google/MSN in order to piece together a complete answer, so I figured I would share my complete and final(for now) solution.
In this particular situation, I have a windows form with a tab control, with one of the tabs hosting a text box control that displays messages. This control is not initially visible to the user, yet it is instantiated during the main form construction.
The first issue to resolve was to get the logging class and other components to make thread safe calls to this control. Microsoft has a great tutorial posted about making thread safe calls to Windows forms controls, so I won't repeat that code or explanation here.
Where I had to step beyond the MSDN article was in handling the thread safe calls to a form whose handle property may or may not be created. I am not a Windows GDI expert, I barely know what it means, but one thing I did find out during this process is that I could not guarantee when the handle for the control was created, even though its constructor was called by the containing form constructor during the application start.
To handle this, there were two steps I needed to take:
- Ensure that the control's handle was instantiated and available on the same thread as the main UI. To do this, I simply added this line to my code following the construction of the user control on the main form: IntPtr userControlHandle = textUserControl.Handle; This ensures that the control's handle is not created on the background thread when you access properties or methods on the control in other parts of your application
-
I next added these lines of code to my user control:
delegate void SolveThreadingDelegate();
public void UserControl()
{
if (this.InvokeRequired)
{
this.Invoke(new SolveThreadingDelegate (UserControl));
}
else
{
}
}
The logging pounds this control pretty well and so far I have gotten around some of the previous locking issues I experienced – it now handles well thousands of messages an hour flying at it (not all displayed on the screen at a time, but still a constant stream of information) and I have yet to have a cross thread access violation pop up.
Hopefully this helps anyone else stuck in a similar situation; if anyone has improvements, suggestions or questions, please feel free to post.
Tags: .net,
c#,
threading
Categories: .NET