BI-konferansen GOBI

BI-konferansen GOBI arrangeres for første gang i Oslo Spektrum den 10. juni i år. Dette vil være den største og mest omfattende BI-konferansen som noen gang er arrangert i Norge. Store navn som Wayne Eckerson, Cindi Howson, Donald Farmer, Timo Elliott og Marc Teerlink er på talerlisten.  Flere nye navn offentliggjøres kontinuerlig.

Over 25 partnere skal bidra til at dette blir det mest interessante eventet innen BI i Norge i 2013. Microsoft, IBM og SAP er gullsponsorer og vil etablere egne spor med talere relatert til sin teknologi.  I tillegg vil en programkomite fastlegge øvrige områder og talere etter at frist for «Call for Abstracts» utgår 15. April.  Agendaen vil bli noe du aldri har sett maken til på norske BI konferanser.

Dette arrangementet bør du ikke gå glipp av – her vil du bli inspirert, lære noe nytt, og møte og utveksle erfaringer med store deler av Norges BI-miljø!  Flying Culinary Circus står for mat på ulike restaurant stands hele dagen, hvor man kan mingle rundt og plukke fritt så mange godbiter man ønsker seg.

På kvelden blir det Flying Culinary Circus Show, konsert og mat, drikke og moro!

For mer informasjon og påmelding sjekk ut http://www.gurusofbi.no/

Du kan følge GOBI på Linkedin (allerede 400 medlemmer!), Facebook og Twitter.

My life in Norway: Pursuing the dream (part I)

Before I start telling my dream story, it would be better to say who am I in few lines:

Born and raised in Macedonia, spent 4-5 years in Kosova and then migrated first time in Norway. My family was one of the few interested in science, specially in math, where my father was a math professor and most of my uncles studied math or engineering. I inherited the love to science and math, continued developing my self focused in math by becoming one the best in local, national and international competition of both math and physics (kind of applied mathematics).
Studied computer technology at University of Prishtina and 3 year in row won the University scholarship.

Studied with International professors from Concordia University; Vienna Institute of Technology and Institute Jean Lui Vives.

Even physically in Kosova, my dream was just to move to a more prospered countries to pursue my dream of being a great scientist. I have heard of UK, US and the big american dream, but never thought of Norway....

I moved in Norway some years ago and then I come back May 2010, pursuing my dream for a better career. I never thought that this will the time when the Revolution of my life started. I will never forget the time when I was sitting home and got a call that was actually a job opportunity to work in Norway, to work for one the best companies in the World, Nordic Choice Hotels. I answered with BIG YES and came to the first interview. It was all by the plan, the first interview was successful. Waited in Oslo for a couple of days, where I got invitation for the second round which was decisive. One day after that, I got the call of my career, saying the your job opportunity is now a job offer. Without hesitating I said YES and that was the biggest "yes" of my life, because what happened after proved this conclusion. Still not understanding in what wonderful world I was stepping in.

After signing the contract and some official paper work I started to work in June/July. I was thrilling to start with my new company and bring the successful project of Business Intelligence into live.I had time read and understand the business concept and strategy of Nordic Choice Hotels, so I was ready to dive in directly to the solution.

One of the biggest highlights of my career here is meeting the owner of Nordic Choice Hotels and bunch of other business around Norway, Mr. Petter A. Stordalen. His ability to give energy at any time in the company was special. You could feel his absence or his presence without seeing him at all.


Me and Petter Stordalen at Garden Party

During the time being at Choice, I had the opportunity to meet other important people as well, so I learned a lot from them.

Me and my department made great efforts on creating the best BI solution for the company in a given condition and situation. So we excelled by creating this solution presented in the video:



But things came to an end, sometimes without our willing, so in April I had to change my job and pursue my professional dream at Nextbridge AS. 

Why Nextbridge AS?

NextBridge is an IT-consultancy dedicated solely to business intelligence (BI). The company encompasses more than 100 years of collective experience in this field. Our services span most areas of the BI field; from DWH to reporting, from scorecards and dashboards to data mining and statistical analysis, from BI Competency Centers to maturity analysis. 
NextBridge assists the largest and most demanding clients in improving their managerial information. Our client segment is Norwegian Top 500 accounts and include Sparebank1, SG Finans, Gjensidige, BNBank, Helse Nord and NorgesEnergi . NextBridge consultants are bilingual, and speak both business and IT. Our mission is ”Bridging business and IT at the next level”. Our vision is to be the reference in the field of BI.

The blog post is public, I would not share too much of the details, so I will just jump to give a introduction of my professional profile:

""
I am an IT professional with focus on Business and Data Analytic, prefer to call myself Data Scientist. I have in depth experience using and implementing business intelligence/data analysis tools with greatest strength in the Microsoft SQL Server / Business Intelligence Studio SSIS, SSAS, SSRS. I have designed, developed, tested, debugged, and documented Analysis and Reporting processes for enterprise wide data warehouse implementations using the SQL Server / BI Suite. I also have designed/modeled OLAP cubes using SSAS and developed them using MS SQL BIDS SSAS and MDX. Served as an implementation team member where I translated source mapping documents and reporting requirements into dimensional data models. Strong ability to work closely with business and technical teams to understand, document, design and code SSAS, MDX, DMX, DAX abd ETL processes, along with the ability to effectively interact with all levels of an organization. Additional BI tool experience includes ProClarity, Microsoft Performance Point, MS Office Excel and MS SharePoint.
""

Professional highlights:

1. Worked for Capgemini Norway AS

2. Worked for Nordic Choice Hotels AS

3. Working for Nextbridge AS


Academic Honors:

MIT Honor Code Certificate: CS and Programming (04.06.2013)

Harvard University Honor Code Certificate: Computer Science (15.04.2013)

Princeton University Honor Code Certificate:  Analytic Combinatorics (10.07.2013)

Stanford University Honor Code Certificate: Mathematical Thinking,, Cryptography (06.05.2013)

The University of California At Berkeley Honor Code Certificate: Descriptive Statistics

IIT University Honor Code Certificate: Web Intelligence and Big Data (02.06.2013)

Wesleyan University: Passion Driven Statistics (20.05.2013)

MCTS 70-448: Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 Business Intelligence Development and Maintenance

Career Highlights:

1. Over Nine years of experience in the field of Information Technology, System Analysis and Design, Data
    warehousing, Business Intelligence and Data Science in general

2. Experienced in implementing / managing large scale complex projects involving multiple stakeholders and
    leading and directing multiple project teams

3. Track record of delivering customer focused, well planned, quality products on time, while adapting to
    shifting and conflicting demands and priorities.

4. Experience in Data warehouse / Business Intelligence developments, implementation and operation setup

5. Expertise in Data Modeling, Data Analytics and Predictive Analytics SSAS, MDX and DMX

6. Strong Knowledge in Data warehouse, Data Extraction, Transformation, and Loading ETL

7. Excellent track record in developing and maintaining enterprise wide web based report systems and portals in Finance, Enterprise wide solutions and BI and Strategy Systems

8. Best new employee for 2011 of Nordic Choice Hotels AS


Achievments:

1. First place in reagional math competitions in 2 years in a row

2. First place in Physics competition in a Balkaniada (Balkan Olympics in Theoretical Physics)

3. First place in fast math competition in International Kangourou Competition

4. First place in Norway in Microsoft Virtual Academy (Microsoft Business Intelligence)

Research Work:

1. Riccati Differential Equation solution (published in printed version Research Journal)

2. “Everything” comes from “Nothing”: The Intelligent Universe, published IJSER 10 October edition

3. Personal Finance Intelligence; published in IJSER 8 August 2012 edition

4. Predictive Analytics vs. Data Mining (Is DMX dead already?) in Silicon India

Next you will read: Life in Norway: Living the dream (part II), STAY TUNED!

BIG Data

BIG Data: Is this about data at all?


Inspired by: Rafal Lukawiecki’s seminar about Business Analytics and Big Data, Microsoft Norway

Intro

Wikipedia defined BIG Data as a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand database management tools or traditional data processing applications. But this definition does not include the main reason why Big Data is actual nowadays and what was the purpose to re-invent this technology. Here is a visualization map for BIG Data and how is that large amount of data is generated:

Fig1. Big Data visualization by WIPRO

As you can see from the figure, Big Data aims to represent a large set of data with a single point (a value or a expression) so that make sense for us.

BIG DATA: how big is World data?

Big Data is one of the most famous words around the world describing a new technology that will handle the big amount of data that is generated every day for analytic purposes. But, anyway handling Big Data is not any problem because we are witnessing everyday that hardware capacity expands as data volume expands and also hardware is getting cheaper day by day. So the definition BIG is not at all the case of Big Data, so the hardware capacity can hold whatever BIG Data can be. The average data set of the whole World is calculated to be 1.5 GB and that is an average memory stick, even though an average RAM (in-memory) capacity.
Anyway, if the case is not capacity and size then what is it?

BIG Data: what about data?

Data is important part of BIG Data, but is this meaning of the concept behind the BIG Data? The answer is NO and to be correct BIG Data is just a meaningless buzzword created only for masses. Behind this name does not exist any concept of the Big Data. If you look at the data you can’t say nothing than is big or small, has 1, 2, 3 … n sources and is rapidly/slowly expanding etc…, but that is not what BIG Data is interested to solve at all. If you think the size is the matter, then you are wrong again, so Big Data is not about BIGness at all.

BIG Data is interested to answer the users and not developers, is not an optimizing tool but it is actually an answering machine.

BIG Data: The real case?!

The real deal in BIG Data is that BIG Data tries to generate a single answer (I like to call: the single truth) from a huge input of data. If the answer is the only output of BIG Data processing, so logically BIG Data is dependent on QUESTION. So, the real deal behind BIG Data is the question itself. If you are in a dilemma whether to choose or not BIG Data technology over traditional database technologies you should look not in the size and not in the data itself, but simply in your queries that you are going to use on that set of data. So, I agree totally with Rafal when he says that the reason existence of Big Data technologies are in the answer that we want to get from BIG Data.

Conclusion
BIG Data is just another buzz word without having to deal with the contest itself, but better when we know before we use it. Even thou, we can’t change the trends for this buzzword; at least we can support and use the technology as much as we can.

SSAS: Currency Conversion (Many-to-Many)

Original Link: SSAS: Currency Conversion (Many-to-Many)

This article is a complement of the book "SSAS Step by Step 2005". In this book, Reed Jacobson and Stacia Misner gave us some guidelines and generic directions about how to apply currency conversion based on many-to-many relationships, but they did not provide a step-by-step case. In order to make it complete, I will try to describe how I work on it, and I hope you can join in the discussion.

First of all, let's suppose that you have finished the exercises described before the part of "Supporting Currency Conversion". So that we can do the work based on a qualified "SSAS" cube.

1. Go to DSV, right click DSV pane, click ADD/Remove tables, add FactCurrencyRate and DimCurrency into DSV and click "OK"

2. Right-click "Diagram Organizer" to create a new diagram, and add DimCurrency, FactCurrencyRate, FactInternetSales and DimTime into it.

3. Go to "Cube Structure", right-click "Measures" to add a new Measure Group "Fact Currency Rate"

4. After we add the measure group "Fact Currency Rate", change the property "Type" of it to "ExchangeRate", expend it then
4.1 Right-click the measure, "Average Rate", to show its properties, change AggregateFuction to "AverageOfChildren"
4.2 Right-click the measure, "End of Day-Date", to show its properties, and change AggregateFuction to "LastNonEmpty". Save the project.

5. In Solution Explorer, right-click the folder "Dimensions" to create a new dimension using Dimension Wizard.

6. Make sure "Build the dimension using a data source" is chosen and the check box of Auto Build is clear, click Next

7.Available data source view should be "SSAS Step by Step DW" and click Next.
8.Dimension Type should be "Standard dimension"

9.Choose dbo.DimCurrency in the step of "Select the Main Dimension Table", key column should be "CurrentKey", member name can be "CurrencyName", click Next.

10. At the step "Select Dimension Attributes", make the setting like following, and click Next.

11. At the step "Specify Dimension Type", set Currency ISO Code to Currency Alternate Key, set Currency Source to Dim Currency, which is in fact CurrencyKey. Click Next.

For Currency ISO Code, please refer to:
http://www.iso.org/iso/support/currency_codes_list-1.htm

12. At the step "Define Parent-Child Relationship", click Next.

13. At the step "Completing the Wizard", name the dimension as "Currency". Click Finish.

14. Double click "Currency.dim" in Solution Explorer, rename the attribute "Dim Currency" to "Currency" and "Currency Alternative Key" to "Currency ISO Code"

15. Go to Cube Structure, and add Currency in the dimensions, then deploy the project. Save the project.

16. Right-click SSAS.cube to run Business Intelligence Wizard. Choose "Define currency conversion" and click Next (before we start to use BI Wizard, we should deploy the project first).

17. At the step "Set Currency Conversion Options", choose "Fact Currency Rate" and set other options like the following, then click Next.

18. Since we just simply use currency conversion to apply an exchange rate to measures, at the step "Select Members", we will only check Reseller Sales Amount and Internet Sales Amount. Click Next.

19. Select "Many-to-Many" as Conversion Type, then Next.

20. The step "Define Local Currency Reference" will be like the following, usually we do not need to change anything, so we just click Next.




http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms175660.aspx

Local currency:

The currency used to store transactions on which measures to be converted are based.
The local currency can be identified by either:
A currency identifier in the fact table stored with the transaction, as is commonly the case with banking applications where the transaction itself identifies the currency used for that transaction.

A currency identifier associated with an attribute in a dimension table that is then associated with a transaction in the fact table, as is commonly the case in financial applications where a location or other identifier, such as a subsidiary, identifies the currency used for an associated transaction.

21. At the step "Specify Reporting Currencies", select all reporting currencies, click Next.

22. At the step "Completing the Wizard", notice that BI Wizard will generate script about currency conversion in the script of the cube. This part gives us an idea, that is if we find there is something wrong with the result generated by BI Wizard, in order to roll back the state before we run BI Wizard, we can go the script of the cube, find the script of currency conversion and delete it, then deploy the project to roll back.
Click Finish and save the project.

23. Go to DSV, we can find a named query "Reporting Currency", and set CurrencyKey as Logical Primary Key. Relate "Reporting Currency" to "FactInternetSales" and "FactResellerSales" by dragging CurrencyKey to them.

24. Go to Dimension Usage. Click the intersection of Reporting Currency and Fact Currency Rate, set a regular relationship between them as follows.

25. Click the intersection of Reporting Currency and Internet Sales, set a many-to-many relationship between them as follows, then do the same thing to Reseller Sales. Save the project.

26. Deploy the project. We may run into the following issue. It tells us that there is something wrong with the named query, Reporting Currency.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Error 1 Dimension 'Reporting Currency' > Attribute 'Currency' : The 'Integer' data type is not allowed for the 'NameColumn' property; 'WChar' should be used. 0 0
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

27. Double click "Reporting Currency.dim" in Solution Explorer, and check the properties of the attribute "Currency" of Reporting Currency. We can find BI Wizard incorrectly set the data type of NameColumn to Integer. We need to reset it to WChar. Then deploy it again.

27. The deployment run into another issue which is saying "Conversion failed when converting the varchar value 'Afghani' to data type int " as follows.

28. In order to solve it, go to DSV, right click Reporting Currency to edit the named query

29. We can notice that the query tries to union 2147483647 which is an integer and CurrencyName which is varchar together. This might be a reason to explain the error.
So how about we update the second part of the union as follows:
---------------------------------------------------------------------
SELECT DISTINCT NULL AS [Local 0], Null AS Local, NULL AS [Local 2]
FROM DimCurrency
---------------------------------------------------------------------

When we deploy it again, it runs into another issue. It seems there should be a member called [Local] in Reporting Currency.dim

So let's edit the name query again and this time we will update the second part of the union as follows and deploy the cube.:
---------------------------------------------------------------------
SELECT DISTINCT NULL AS [Local 0], 'Local' AS Local, NULL AS [Local 2]
FROM DimCurrency
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Deployment Completed Successfully!!!

30. Drag Currency from Reporting Currency, Average Rate from Fact Currency Rate and Reseller Sales Amount and Internet Sales Amount in Cube Browser, we can get the final result!

31. Properties of the attribute of Reporting Currency/Currency (To be continued)
Because the attributes, "Currency" and "Currency ISO Code" are not groupable attributes, we should set the property "AttributeHierarchyEnabled" to False, but we need to set "IsAggregatable" to True. I will also talk about this later

Obama about Big Data

OBAMA talks about Big Data



* Is not the real President Obama

How Much Data is Created Every Minute?

Posted by Neil Spencer

The Internet has become a place where massive amounts of information and data are being generated every day. Big data isn’t just some abstract concept created by the IT crowd, but a continually growing stream of digital activity pulsating through cables and airwaves across the world. This data never sleeps: every minute giant amounts of it are being generated from every phone, website and application across the Internet. The question: how much is created, and where does it all come from?
To put things into perspective, this infographic by DOMO breaks down the amount of data generated on the Internet every minute. YouTube users upload 48 hours of video, Facebook users share 684,478 pieces of content, Instagram users share 3,600 new photos, and Tumblr sees 27,778 new posts published. These are sites many people around the world use on a regular basis, and will continue to use in the future. The global Internet population now represents 2.1 billion people, and with every website browsed, status shared, and photo uploaded, we leave a digital trail that continually grows the hulking mass of big data. See where else big data is coming from in the infographic below

IT Training By Experts

At Technitrain we believe the best way to learn a technology is to learn from an expert. Our courses are taught by top consultants who have a wealth of hands-on experience to share and who can answer all of your difficult questions. You'll acquire the practical skills you need to do your job as well as learn the tips and tricks that only the experts know.

Here is the link to more information.

Our trainers are the best in their field: Microsoft MVPs, authors and well-known bloggers such as Chris Webb, Gavin Payne, Christian Bolton.