Webcast Wednesday: Reserve Your Spot
Argument for Change Control
How implementation Change Control can help your business.
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> 8/19/2009 at 12:00pm Noon Pacific
Featured Article(s)
Customizing SharePoint advanced search options
SharePoint Advanced search does not only have advanced search features for users, it also has set of extendable properties that developers and SharePoint administrators can use to make their user’s search experience more applicable to the organization. The goal here is to show you how to make quite an impressive search customization within 15 min or less.
*2* Seats Remain for DBA School in September
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BI, Data Control and What Happens with User-Changed Data…
I asked yesterday about what types of things would need to be considered in the bold world of Microsoft Office having more complete and open access to databases and the information they hold. Some interesting initial responses – feel free to drop me a note with your thoughts here.
Jeff’s comments: "Unfortunately, I’ve already experienced the “Why don’t our numbers agree?” issue with an application that utilized an Access front-end and SQL Server db where Reporting Services was later added to the mix. Sadly, the question often came from the same person that requested the Reporting Services report, approved it when it was ready for production and then somehow forgot they had modified the Access query that previously provided the same results.
This type of “research” is one of the least glamorous and often a very time-consuming part of my day. I’m all for giving users access to what they need but I’m concerned with the amount of support it may require from data/database professionals."
and Russell writes "We use SQL Server as an intermediate database in the business process, our company is part of a global SAP implementation which has many constraints on localisation of data. Data is extracted from SAP by overnight batch processes and transferred to our local servers, where it is read into our SQL database. The data goes through several stages of cleaning and validity checking and then extra local detail is added, before it is incorporated into the full data set. We have been using Cognos Powerplay as our BI front end for a decade now, the data cubes are created each night by Cognos Transformer, reading the data directly from SQL Server. Users can develop their own reports in Powerplay or use Powerplay to create a subset of the data for further analysis in Excel. It is a complex process but does provide consistent data to the user’s desktops and enables them to explore and report the data freely with the confidence that they cannot corrupt the underlying data. We will always face problems of 2 or more users claiming that their data is correct after they have manipulated it, but with Powerplay as the main extraction / analysis tool most problems can be explained by checking which filters are set. "
Featured White Paper(s)
Top Ten Things You Should Know About Optimizing SQL Server
Optimizing SQL Server performance is difficult. There is a lot of information out there, but very little of it is specific o… (read more)