Spatial, you said spatial ?

Hi all,

Spatially enabled datawarehouses, geospatial datatypes, geospatial BI ... etc ... a lot of buzz around this topic over the past year. Maybe the next BI grail !

Geospatial data helps users to visualise how usual business data (customer, products, time ...) are impacted by geography.
For instance, a lot of telcos are building spatially enabled analysis and reporting. Just imagine some advanced analytics like : how is my customer using his cellphone, when is he using his cellphone and WHERE is he using it ? Now imagine the answer displayed on a map instead of a classical dashboards and spreadsheets. Amazing, no ?

Have a look on this web site : Spatialytics
You will find some very interesting explanations about geospatial datawarehousing and also a spatially enabled version of Kettle : GeoKettle. Also a release of Mondrian, called GeoMondrian .... spatially enabled. According to Spatialytics, GeoMondrian is the first open source SOLAP player.

I started to test GeoKettle. Quite interesting. Of course you need to have some spatial data near you to play with but this should not be an issue for you according to Franklin (1992 - An introduction to Geographic Information Systems : linking maps to databases) : "About 80% of all data stored in corporate databases has a spatial component".

Have a look to your data and become spatially enabled !

Another reading ...

Hi all,

Another interesting reading (at least for me) about BI and Open Source.
This one is coming from Claudia Imhoff. Usually I'm not a great fan of her and her visions but I think she wrote quite a good white paper here.

BI and Open Source

Happy reading.

Massive but agile : very good article from Forrester

Hi all,

I just finished reading this study from Forrester.
Massive but Agile, the next generation Enterprise Datawarehouse.
Very good reading on how to make a big elephant move like a ballet dancer ;)

Forrester Massive but Agile

Enjoy and ... discuss if you want.

Cleaning strings

Hi all,

A javascript, usefull for a string manipulation toolbox.
Puts the first character in uppercase, the others in lowercase. Example : Vincent instead of vincent.
This code is specific to Kettle (Input.getString) but can be used in Talend with little change.

//First letter in uppercase, others in lowercase

var c = Input.getString().substr(0,1);
if (parseInt(Input.getString().length)==1)
{
var cc = upper(c);
}
else
{
var cc = upper(c) + lower(Input.getString().slice(1));
}

My new NAS

Hi all,

I'm currently working on personnal developments around BI and I needed a little NAS to store everything.

Finally, last week, I chose the Digitus one. A really nice piece of hardware. I think Digitus is a German company.
Let's have a look closer :

• Dual SATA disks,
• Raid 1 (mirror),
• Embedded HTTP and FTP server,
• Multiple filesystems (ext, ntfs, fat ...),
• File sharing,
• Ethernet,
• Torrent features (continue to download from torrents when your PC is off),
• Dual USB2 plugs and special features to copy from usb to internal disks.

I also bought two SATA disks with 1 To. These two disks are now in Raid 1 (mirror) in order to secure all my data.

Speed is good, both with reading and writing. I just tried to open and use a vmware virtual machine from this NAS and everything worked well. The NAS is provided with an external PSU and is not very noisy (ok to stand on a corner of my desk).

Here are some pics.

Quick list of ETL tools

Hi all,

A lot of work these days ... I'm back.
Soon to come : a complete overview of my current BI work on the Amazon Cloud (EC2).

For now, a quick list of - more or less - free ETL tools.

• PDI (Kettle) from Pentaho : http://www.pentaho.com
• Talend Open Studio : http://www.talend.com
• KETL : http://sourceforge.net/projects/ketl/
• Apatar : http://www.apatar.com
• Pequel : http://sourceforge.net/projects/pequel/
• Jasper ETL (= Talend Open Studio) : http://www.jaspersoft.com/jasperetl
• Clover ETL : http://www.cloveretl.com/
• Octopus : http://octopus.enhydra.org/
• Benetl : http://www.benetl.net/

Free/open source DB Modelling tools

Hi all,

A quick overview of free and/or open source DB modelling tools.
I use them quite often, depending on the work I have to do and features I need.

• ARGO UML : http://www.argouml.org/
• AZZURI : http://www.azzurri.jp/en/software/clay/index.jsp
• DB DESIGNER 4 : http://www.fabforce.net/dbdesigner4/
• DIA : http://www.gnome.org/gnome-office/dia.shtml
• DRUID : http://druid.sourceforge.net/
• TCM : http://wwwhome.cs.utwente.nl/~tcm/

Feel free to send a comment if you use another tool.