Who's #1?
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I was checking out the Reader's Choice Awards from Intelligent Enterprise for various categories and found myself interested and excited to see Microsoft doing well, especially in the database related categories.
I'm pretty skeptical of the awards themselves since most vendors play games. We had that problem here at SQLServerCentral and that's why we stopped running awards. We found lots of voting for particular products, like 50 or 60 votes in a few hour period, all from 1 or 2 IP addresses. I'm sure similar things go on at other sites, including "advertising influences", but I can't specifically accuse anyone since I don't know for sure.
So while I'm not sure if you can really differentiate between 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place, you can see who's being considered. Microsoft had wins in 9 categories, and runner up in a variety of others. While SQL Server wasn't listed as the best DBMS, a number of BI categories had Microsoft listed as 1st or 2nd, which I guess means they're a player.
I'm still not completely sold on the whole Analysis Services model for BI work, but I'm starting to see that BI in and of itself, with other data sources and tools for business people to use, is a growing market. More and more it's in the news, which means it's just a matter of time before it becomes more mainstream. I heard about the wonders of XML in 1998 at the PDC and the last few years, XML is truly a mainstream technology. Probably in 2011, BI will be something that's as much a part of our work as XML is now.
One nice SQL Server 2005 highlight is Microsoft took first place for the best ETL tool over Informatica. While I'm not sure which is the better tool, I think you have to at least consider SSIS when you're looking for a new ETL system.
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I knew when Microsoft bought Extera an aggregation tool maker Informatica have to change or will be run out of business because even in Beta 2 SQL Server users are getting 60-70 aggregation in simple test boxes. Informatica a few years back was a million dollars for enterprise deployment SSIS is free, Informatica is in trouble. BI mainstream is not going to be easy because that means a user can point and click and get Relational Calculus right.
Kind regards,
Gift Peddie -
I would love to have you elaborate on this, "I'm still not completely sold on the whole Analysis Services model for BI work".
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From someone who knows nothing...
I believe "Good morning HAL" is more likely to be viable by 2011 than BI
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I've written about this before, but for most DBAs I've talked with, the cube/dimension/measure concepts are not something they understand. It's a huge leap of understanding to go from the relational model to the cube model.
It's not that people are stupid, but I think that it's a paradigm shift, much like the CLR is, and many DBAs will be slow or have trouble moving to that model. I also think MDX is a very big change in how you query a cube.
To me it's kind of like moving into advanced calculas. There are lots of people that might get basic derivatives and integrals, but diffQ's and partial equations are much more difficult to just understand. Same with series and statistics work. I had lots of friends that excelled in Calc I and II, but had issues in 4 and beyond.
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As a former employee of a SQL Server tools company which was recently acquired by a large Oracle tools company, I can tell you that the Reader's Choice Awards are completely rigged.
Whenever the SQL Server Central reader's choice awards came out, we would receive an email from Sales which told us:
- how we should vote
- create multiple accounts so we could put in multiple votes
- tell everyone we knew to go and vote (even if they didn't even know what SQL Server was, let alone which product they thought was best).
Sales deemed this as appropriate as they were of the thought "if everyone cheats then it's a level playing field".
At least Sales got to brag that we were the "Reader's Choice" for nearly every category for two years running (even though some of the products we were voting for had not been released yet).
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If we assume that all votes are rigged, how do you get reasonable, measurable feedback on anything?
Vote rigging is an extention of 'Guerilla Marketing' - like ad agencies sending attractive actors into bars that journalists frequent and creating a 'buzz' about a drink or a magazine or something. Ever wondered how 'word-on-the-street' stuff happens?
Feedback is essential and soliciting textual feedback ensures that chain-letter style opinion forming fails and you get more meaningful responses.
But I think the only way to judge stuff is to create an identifiable panel of people who decide what is good and bad. Politics in democracies work in just such a way. What? Eh! Oh.
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BI just got more interesting Oracle buys Hyperion Microsoft caused that because last year IBM canceled its long term contract with Hyperion, but Oracle still needs to buy Informatica to compete with Microsoft.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/03/01/HNoraclehyperion_1.html
Kind regards,
Gift Peddie
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