We are in a situation to decide one among MS SSAS and Pentaho. Is there any comparision list for both of them with pros and cons? Any help is very much appreciated.
Use Pentaho. I'm using MS Analysis, Integration and Reporting for two years. A lot of bugs, very weak error reporting, monsterous products. A lot of lags in design time. If you need more coplex answer ask your questions what side of thees products you interestd in.
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Power BI can connect to various data sources and run SELECT queries.
Is it possible to run also other queries (INSERT INTO, UPDATE...)?
Now I need it for a postgresql database, but could use also for others in the future.
No, you can't run directly INSERT/UPDATE queries from Power BI. This isn't the idea of the tool. If you find you need it, then probably there is a major flaw in your design, or you are not using the right tool for this job. But there are few ways to workaround this (again, I'm not saying that you SHOULD do it). Usually this is done in a combination with custom written Power App, embedded in your report in Power Apps visual. The idea is that the app will write to the database, and will refresh your report after that (if needed).
You can start here and I will recommend you to look at this in-depth session - Writing back data to PowerBI from your reports.
The answer is No if I am very straight forward. PBI is a analysis platform for data. There are probably some advance way to do that but, this is not logical or good idea to think about manipulating data from report or from any BI tools. You can search answers from different blog where the same questions asked. For more details, you can check below links-
help link 1
help link 2
We have a database that drives a lot .Net Applications, Reports and a fair bit of data manipulation that occurs on a daily basis. This database has slowly evolved over many years by many different developers and as a result it is in quite a state. The main issues are:
Naming Conventions are inconsistent
Lots of inefficient indexes
Many tables require normalizing
Table relationships are virtually non-existent across many tables
Duplicated Data
Many un-used tables, SP's Agent Jobs etc...
Pretty much a DBA nightmare!
So I am looking at what the best options are for addressing this. We will be looking to do this in the background so there is no disruption to normal operations so I have decided one of two approaches.
Develop a new database from scratch and slowly cross over functionality to the new database.
Work at identifying the exact areas of concern in the current database and fixing them in a structured pragmatic way.
I firstly wanted to check if there was a best practice approach for this kind of project (either of my two suggestions above) and it would be interesting to know what the pro's and con's are for each method.
Any other additional info on this kind of project would be greatly appreciated if anyone has experiences going through this kind of thing!
I'm fairly new to CRM 2013, and I've been reading and watching a lot of videos on the subject. I'm hoping someone on the interweb, can offer some tips or suggestions that will resonate with the way I interpret and comprehend this material.
I have a regular MS Access DB, with a few different tables that is used to store personnel records. From what I've learned so far CRM looks like a good candidate for moving away from Access and towards CRM.
My question is, what are some best practices when it comes to gathering requirements and expanding them for the CRM 2013 environment?
i.e. (for simplicity sake)
MS Access db has two tables.
Table A stores names of employees.
Table B stores the employee's favorite food.
Should each table have their own entity (Table_A 1:N, Table_B N:1), or are there times when you should combine multiple tables under a single entity?
Is it considered bad form to just put everything under one entity?
If it is bad form, how do you determine when to split the information
into multiple entities?
Business processes seem to remind me of SharePoint workflows. When should you rely on a BP?
I hope this makes sense, I'm still trying to make sense of it all. Any help is appreciated, thanks!
The Dynamics CRM is backed by a SQL Server, so think in terms of SQL tables and what's better. Splitting into smaller objects which have single responsibility is is better in most cases, but this might affect the performance on joining records. Honestly, we are moving away from CRM in cloud because it's not scaleable, not reliable (if it goes down you need to wait when it goes up - no second replica), no control over underlying SQL data or SQL Server instance size (DTUs), hard to test, and is just painful for a big project. And we are going to replace all Business Processes with code, because they are not testable as well - you cannot write unit tests.
Although #sergeSemenov has some good points, you have to start what CRM was is. CRM is a Customer Relationship Management suite, built on top of Xrm, a RADP, Rapid Application Development Platform.
Xrm is not designed to be the most flexible, most performant platform in the world. If speed of use and the ability to use any specific technology/sever topology to meet your demand is a requirement for your app, don't start with XRM.
If speed of development, speed to market, reduced costs by having non developers doing work that in the custom app dev world are required by developers, or even a desire to be in the cloud on day 1, are more highly valued, then Xrm, and consequently CRM is a great place to start.
As far as your questions, it all depends. The more normalized your data is, multiple entities for each relationship, the less work involved in ensuring they are all in sync, but usually the more difficult it is for your end users to work with the information. They'll have to navigate to multiple forms for data entry, and have lots of joins to configure in reports.
I generally try to keep the data as normalized as possible, but if anything is a 1:1 relationship, combine that into single entity. Or you know it's going to be a 1:2 or 1:3 relationship (See addresses on contacts and accounts for example)
Basically, it is an answer that requires a unique look at the application requirements, and personal experience. I would highly recommend seeking a consultant with CRM experience. Another advantage of a platform, is that there is a whole resource pool of developers, and BAs that already know the framework, and can provide value to the business on day one, rather than taking 2 or 3 weeks getting up to speed on your specific architecture.
Good luck!
Do there exist any (ideally free or open-source) tools for performing OLAP analyses on arbitrary tables in a relational database, without requiring any advance specification of dimensional hierarchies, cardinalities, or any other meta-information about the table beyond what can be extracted automatically from the table itself?
My inability to Google for anything like what I'm describing makes me suspect I'm using incorrect terminology and what I'm searching for isn't properly considered to be OLAP. If this is the case, what I specifically want is anything that would let technically unsophisticated users create cross-tab or contingency table aggregations using tables in a relational DB without needing to write elaborate SQL queries.
Or, in other words, I'd like something that mimics Excel's PivotTables on a larger scale. I appreciate that Excel does indeed generate extensive caches behind the scenes when you make a PivotTable, but it does this without the user having to explain to it which caches need creating. This is the functionality I'm trying to find elsewhere, if it exists.
The best options I know of are Excel and Access, but of course they are not open source. This space kinda got trampled in the explosion of interest in what is now called Business Intelligence and a lot of companies got bought by MS and others. It's pretty thin now as far as I can tell. I'll watch this thread though.
The most useful paradigm to attach to is I think spreadsheets and there's not much competition there any more. Google Docs spreadsheets can import csv etc. exported from databases, and there's a pivot chart available, but not much more.
The other place I've seen OLAP capabilities is in the Adobe Flex libraries to build on with ActionScript if you have any inclination in that direction. As usual, Adobe manages to get it about 90% right but doesn't quite provide a whole product.
icCube aims to setup an OLAP cube as simply as possible. It is not schema-agnostic, but I guess this is quite simple to define dimensions and facts from existing DB tables. Nevertheless, this could be not so "simple" depending on your tables - difficult to say without knowledge about them. I guess there's no generic easy solution ;-)
Then you can use Excel pivot table (amongst others) to access the cubes. Note as far as I know Excel does not do any caching neither aggregation when connecting to a cube. Indeed, it is generating all the required MDX requests to the cube.
Hope that helps.
I'm looking for some decent examples/samples using SSIS to do some ETL from one SQL Server database to another not necessarily within the same instance.
The idea is to migrate rows of data with their heirarchies (relationships) from one OLTP database to another.
There are some advantages SSIS offers us which makes it a good choice as the migration/ETL platform (amongst other things it needs to be fully configurable and able to be executed on an automated schedule).
Does anyone know of any decent samples/examples besides the MS community samples (on Codeplex)?
Edit: I've also had a look at http://www.sqlis.com/ though I haven't found exactly what I'm looking for..
There are Microsoft Tutiorials on how to use each Task Component and concept available here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms141767.aspx
You will likely need to review several tutorials in order to aquire the knowledge to create a solution for your specific scenario.
Another excellent source of SSIS tips is Jamie Thomson's Blog. The man is a bit of wizard with SSIS:
http://blogs.conchango.com/jamiethomson/
Once you have had a look over the material, if you require specific assistance then feel free to drop a line.
Here are some good articles/tutorials from Microsoft on ETL:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms169917.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc671624.aspx
Check out the Sql Server Central and Sql Server World Users' Group (SSWUG) sites. If you can't find the examples/tutorials/experts you need in those two places, give up coding and take up cooking, because those sites are treasure troves!