Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - Dec 21, 2011, 12:03 pm
Microsoft Excel is one of the most widely used tools for a variety of business purposes, due to its simplicity, calculation abilities and efficiency as a client tool for accounting purposes. Excel is the tool of choice for not only business users, but for a wide variety of users, right from field......
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - Dec 18, 2011, 5:01 pm
Tabular models are one of the new enhancements coming in SQL Server 2012 especially with tabular mode analysis services. Querying data from these models is available in two modes: DirectQuery mode and In-memory mode. Those who are well versed with Multidimensional mode analysis services can grasp......
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - Dec 6, 2011, 3:12 pm
This blog has been silent for quite some time. I am recovering from an accident, a few turbulence in personal life including laptop crash. I am also busy these days in my new book authoring assignment. I would like to keep the details of the book under the covers, till the time gets mature to...
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - Oct 19, 2011, 3:40 pm
Any quantitative data analysis would mean that there are a huge number of data points to analyze using visualizations and derive meaningful readings from this sea of data. A major part of the reporting world is composed of analysis of operational data, compared to analytical data. Reporting and... &...
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - Oct 17, 2011, 4:55 pm
Data is the only currency that is generated every second in IT business and its the only currency that every business was to gather and utilize in the best possible way. BIG data and Unstructured data are creating tsunami sized data related challenges for storage, processing, as well as analysis.......
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - Oct 11, 2011, 3:28 pm
Federations is one of the most effective aspect of any architecture design, which basically provides de-centralization of operations, effectively providing parallelism, scalability, de-coupling and multi-tenancy. Cloud has become a dominant platform for any kind of architectures, and federations on....
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - Oct 6, 2011, 2:33 pm
Edward Tufte and Stephen Few are two of the most famous names in the field of Information Visualization Design. But in my views Apple has done wonderful work in this field, and Sir Steve Jobs contribution in the field has been immense and which cannot be explained in words. Sir Steve Jobs needs no.....
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - Oct 3, 2011, 2:57 pm
Business Intelligence Semantic Model (BISM) is the new philosophy in MS BI analytics parlance, that is taking shape in SQL Server Denali. Tabular projects and MOLAP with choice of MDX or DAX can be termed as a brief definition of BISM, in tangible terms. SQL Server Denali CTP3 ships with all the... ...
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - Sep 25, 2011, 3:42 pm
Time is money and this philosophy turns into a requirements when it comes to reporting. RSS changed the way people access information, as one no longer needs to continuously poll the source of information to check for updates. Reporting environments may start with a modest set of reports, but o...
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - Sep 13, 2011, 4:24 pm
I apologize to my blog readers that I have been very passive in blogging these days, but I am just recovering from some personal issues and getting on track. I promise to be back on normal pace of my blogging within a weeks time. Advancements in SSRS Denali, as heard and seen in TechEd seems to...
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - Sep 7, 2011, 9:28 am
Business intelligence reporting tools should be capable of analyzing massive amounts of quantitative data via categorization into distributed frequencies and groups. The intelligence expected here is facilitating analysis of data density distribution across various logically-related or unrelated... ...
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - Aug 29, 2011, 1:17 pm
I have been very busy these days with personal matters, and have not been able to extract time for blogging. I apologize to my readers for the same. Microsoft Azure cloud environment is a rapidly growing cloud platform. With the release of Hadoop connectors for SQL Server, support for Hadoop... ...
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - Aug 21, 2011, 4:04 am
Unstructured data is the newest and most vibrant source of data, that organizations want to mine for rich business intelligence. SQL Server and Sharepoint and the front runners from the Microsoft platform in the field of BI. SQL Server being a RDBMS, is not the right choice to contain unstructured.....
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - Aug 14, 2011, 3:22 pm
Microsoft seems to be floating support for unstructured data in bits and pieces, which increases its sustainability towards the upcoming challenges posed by BIG and unstructured data. RDBMS is going obsolete gradually, and BI professionals are almost abandoning plain vanilla RDBMS, which I have... &...
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - Aug 9, 2011, 5:38 am
Not-only SQL (No SQL) is ruling the world of unstructured data for data storage, warehousing and analytics, with Hadoop being the most successful and widely used technology. There are two choices you can make when something is gaining immense acceptance: either you can abandon and keep competing... ...
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - Aug 7, 2011, 2:13 pm
Have you ever heard of what are columnar databases? You might be wondering this is something new - The answer is No and Yes. Columnstore is not a new technology that has evolved suddenly and is making waves in the database community. It has been in the industry for quite some time. Generally... ...
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - Aug 4, 2011, 2:09 am
Data representation has many forms. The intended method and purpose of analysis as well as the nature of the data will determine which form of data representation is most appropriate. With the growing need for better analytics, reports today are increasingly expected to be interactive enough to... &...
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - Aug 2, 2011, 5:15 pm
Generally cloud and ETL have a typically known application of facilitating ETL, which mostly harnesses the elasticity of computing resources. ETL on cloud is ideal for applications where data is already stored on the cloud. Regular line of business applications would process data from OLTP sources.....
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - Jul 31, 2011, 2:49 pm
These days my interests have been converging a lot on subjects related to extracting BI from unstructured data. Editing a few properties, learning a few functions, developing few queries for faster data access, authoring colorful reports and more tasks like these make many professionals feel so... &...
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - Jul 25, 2011, 10:00 am
A major community of data warehousing professionals grow up from the old school of Kimball and Inmon methods of data warehousing. Lots of professionals do boast on virtualization, complex MDX querying, performance tuning OLAP engines and managing data warehouse environments of the size of a few... &...
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - Jul 18, 2011, 3:04 pm
Data Quality Services has come up with some interesting concepts. 1) Two main pillars of DQS concepts are - Knowledge Base and Domains. 2) In laymen terms I would consider KB as tables and domains as fields of those tables. Domains have datatypes, constraints, and other attributes just l...
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - Jul 15, 2011, 11:57 am
Few questions are very important to get answered before anyone dives into the sea of business intelligence. You would find many professionals who cannot make out the difference between reporting data and business intelligence. I recently met one senior professional having approx 14 years of... ...
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - Jul 13, 2011, 2:18 pm
SQL Server Denali CTP3 and SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 have been publicly released, and is available for download. You can read about the official announcement from here and the quick link to download Denali CTP3 is here. Star of the release seem to be SQL Server Data Quality Services and Business.....
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - Jul 11, 2011, 4:11 pm
Any architecture design diagram is composed of several layers vertically and horizontally. Horizontal layers are discrete logical areas and their association in the diagram describes the way they are connected to each other. Vertical layers run across the entire solution and all these logical...
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - Jul 10, 2011, 1:42 pm
Architecture Design of any solution in general is done by a solution architect or a group of architects like App Architect, Data Architect, Infra Architect etc and this group is guided by a solution architect. Design is one part of the SDLC but other part is reviewing the design. Design review is......
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - Jul 6, 2011, 4:28 pm
Data warehouse planning is practiced more as an art than as a science. Art is something that one learns with a gifted skill to pursue the craft and deliver the end product. While science is something that anyone with the correct logical algorithm can apply to create the end product. Consultants... &...
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - Jul 3, 2011, 1:57 pm
SSRS Reportviewer webpart in Sharepoint and SSRS Reportviewer control in .NET are two major application interfaces to SSRS from the microsoft application world. UI limitations and lack of programability of reportviewer control continues to remains a challenge for the application world, as this... &#...
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - Jun 29, 2011, 2:56 am
The true power of any report authoring platform lies in its ability to let users analyze data effortlessly and visually, involving the least amount of manual calculation. To support such a level of visual analysis, the main ingredient of the reporting platform is visualizations and infographics. In....
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - Jun 26, 2011, 4:20 pm
The notion of developing something that is very visually appealing is so much ingrained into the minds of business stakeholders and professionals, that whatever technology that provides fancy, animating, and colorful visuals, they develop an image that its the technology of choice to develop... ...
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - Jun 20, 2011, 1:06 pm
One quality that has always helped me in my career till date is that when I come across something technical that I do not know / understand, instantly a huge amount of curiosity gets created in my mind. This has been a virtue / trait since the time I was in my academics. Due to this curiosity, our.....
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - Jun 15, 2011, 1:48 pm
In a MS BI platform based solution, Sharepoint it mostly used as the deployment platform for web-applications, reports and other artifacts of the solution and it's a very standard practice. But this remains as simple as it sounds only till you have one server per technology / hosting platform, for.....
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - Jun 12, 2011, 2:35 pm
Any ETL designer would think of integration with source systems, with ideas like, ETL would connect using X driver, X database, stage to X server, load to X destination etc. But an architect cannot take anything as provided and would have to validate even the basic questions. Some of this basic... &...
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - Jun 6, 2011, 4:02 pm
Representing a dataset having hundreds of data points on a single report is not an easy job. If report is displayed in tabular or matrix format, generally the approach followed is pagination or filters. But consider that if neither of it is an option, when the requirement is to comparatively... ...
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - Jun 3, 2011, 12:45 pm
Data Quality and Master Data Management are a common and very huge exercises in terms of implementation within any organization. Any enterprise would have a collection of applications for its various business and internal operations. Every application cannot be expected to be designed or readi...
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - Jun 1, 2011, 11:26 am
SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) is the built-in reporting backbone in the Microsoft BI stack. Customers who have based their reporting solutions using MS BI would have invested in terms of hardware and licensing to build up their report servers. Generally, report servers are categorized as... &...
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - May 30, 2011, 3:24 pm
Microsoft Tech-Ed is like a feast of knowledge and tons of information is raining all over the place. It becomes a big confusion to figure out what to learn and what to skip, as there are mountains of topics in front of you. As an Architect you cannot simply stick to one tool / technology, but you.....
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - May 29, 2011, 3:06 pm
SQL Server Denali is going to comes up with a new service, known as Data Quality Services (SSDQS). Knowing the architecture, targeted use, integration options, cost of ownership, developer friendliness etc are the fitment tests that a product needs to pass before architects give a green flag from......
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - May 25, 2011, 11:33 am
Data discovery is a branch of BI that is applied over strategic data i.e. long-term historic data. Visualization plays a very vital role in BI data representation to facilitate effortless data analysis. Silverlight based BI components and motion frameworks is the new trend gradually propagating in.....
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - May 24, 2011, 11:14 am
Video: What’s New in PerformancePoint Video: Introducing PerformancePoint Dashboard Video: Creating a basic dashboard by using PerformancePoint Dashboard Video: Touring PerformancePoint Dashboard Designer Video: Adding a report to a dashboard by using...
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - May 23, 2011, 3:38 pm
Microsoft download center has a new download available that would be of interest to many SSIS professionals. Its a new transform named Balanced Data Distributor transform, which takes a single input and distributes the incoming rows to one or more outputs uniformly via multithreading. Below... ...
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - May 18, 2011, 4:40 pm
Mobile business intelligence is a growing need day by day, and with the advent of devices like Apple IPads and Samsung Galaxy Tabs, the requirement would continue to grow more and more. Long back when I was in my academics, we used to develop websites that would emit WML (Wireless Markup Language).....
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - May 15, 2011, 2:47 pm
When you think of dashboard development in Microsoft BI world, the only name that would pop-up is Performancepoint. A general perception is that professionals who are skilled at using performancepoint are dashboard development experts, but this is a very big misconception. To develop an appealing......
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - May 13, 2011, 1:15 pm
In Microsoft world when you think of scheduler, SQL Agent is one of the most famous name that would come up on the list. Scheduling can be seen as a very nominal and regular requirement in almost every project, and most professionals would think of addressing it by installing a scheduler on your... ...
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - May 10, 2011, 1:30 pm
SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) - This technology is considered one of the most challenging and most valued skills in the microsoft parlance. The reason for being challenging is the very nature of OLAP is multi dimensional. Professionals working on the database or administration side are used......
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - May 9, 2011, 3:08 pm
Business Intelligence has a lot of adjectives associated with it, and one that is generally not found in limelight is visual business intelligence. Those who are not aware of this term would even feel that it's just a hoax and no such category of BI exists, but many do not know that lack of... ...
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - May 6, 2011, 3:18 am
Mobile business intelligence is a very loosely-defined term, but without a doubt it’s a much-desired feature for almost any kind of reporting audience. With the advent of more and more smart devices, access to the web is not limited to desktops and laptops anymore. You would find devices like... &...
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - May 3, 2011, 1:42 pm
In today's budget economy, everyone wants free tools and softwares, and whosoever provides the same FREE, manages to invite a tsunami full of attention from the target audience. But I see it from a different perspective, and one point is what you want for free and why you want for free ? I rece...
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - Apr 27, 2011, 2:43 pm
Architect is a very appealing word to all the aspiring technical minds, but most people do not realize that architect is an adjective-free role. Have you ever heard terms like SSIS Architect, SSAS Architect, SSRS Architect, PPS Architect etc.. ? If yes, then I would say that Architect word has been....
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - Apr 24, 2011, 2:27 pm
Most companies would not entertain use of third-party tools and utilities, for the obvious reasons of cost, developer expertise and corporate policies. But it is not that tools should not be used at all, it's just that there should be correct reasons when you should consider the options of using... ...
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Siddharth Mehta posted an article on Siddharth Mehta's Blog - Apr 17, 2011, 3:01 pm
In my views, "Failing to Plan means Planning to Fail". Most project managers and technical leads undervalue the importance of deployment in the solution development life cycle. Deployment planning is often considered even out of solution development perspective, and the complexity of this process......
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