“Nearly a third of the IT managers were disappointed that the business intelligence operations themselves were slow and laborious, and over a fifth found the data failed to reveal important information.”

So, 2/3 were not disappointed in one potential negative of BI – that is is slow and laborious. And almost 80% found the data revealed important information.

“Only just over half, 54 percent, said end user satisfaction levels were as expected or better.”

You could replace “only just over half” with “More than half”. It’s also difficult to apply one satisfaction metric to an entire body of users. This could be taken to mean that 46% of implementations have just one user for which BI is not meeting expectations.

“Nevertheless, two thirds of interviewees reported that business performance was improved by the technology and 56 percent saw more accurate data. And 54 percent of respondents were confident enough in the technology to extend it to other parts of the business.”

Yes!

I don’t see where the 87% in the opening comes from because that does not jive with the statistics mentioned. Anyway, attention grabbing headlines like this need to be balanced so that's why this blog entry is so titled.

Technorati tags: Data Warehouse, Business Intelligence

create procedure Load_Date_Dimension_Sp @year_start int, @year_end int
as
begin
declare @yr int
set @yr = year_start
while (@yr <= year_end)
begin
insert into year_d (the_year) values (@yr)
set @yr = @yr + 1
end

declare @qt int
set @qt = 1
while (@qt <= 4)
begin
insert into quarter_d (the_quarter) values (@qt)
set @qt = @qt + 1
end

declare @mo int
set @mo = 1
while (@mo <= 12)
begin
insert into month_d (the_month) values (@mo)
set @mo = @mo + 1
end

update month_d
set quarter_key = (select quarter_key from quarter_d
where the_quarter=1)
where the_month in (1,2,3)

update month_d
set quarter_key = (select quarter_key from quarter_d
where the_quarter=2)
where the_month in (4,5,6)

update month_d
set quarter_key = (select quarter_key from quarter_d
where the_quarter=3)
where the_month in (7,8,9)

update month_d
set quarter_key = (select quarter_key from quarter_d
where the_quarter=4)
where the_month in (10,11,12)

declare @wk int
set @wk = 1
while (@wk <= 52)
begin
insert into week_d (the_week) values (@wk)
set @wk = @wk + 1
end

declare @dt1 int
set @dt1 = 1
while (@dt1 <= 31)
begin
insert into day_d (the_day) values (@dt1)
set @dt1 = @dt1 + 1
end

declare @dt datetime
declare @dt_end = ‘12/31/’ + @year_end
declare @day_k int
declare @week_k int
declare @month_k int
declare @year_k int

set @dt = '01/01/’ + @year_start
while (@dt <= @dt_end)
begin
select @year_k=year_key from year_d where the_year = year(@dt)
select @month_k=month_key from month_d where the_month = month(@dt)
select @day_k=day_key from day_d where the_day = day(@dt)
select @week_k=week_key from week_d where the_week = datepart(wk,@dt)
insert into date_d (the_date, day_key, week_key, month_key, year_key) values (@dt, @day_k, @week_k, @month_k, @year_k)
set @dt = @dt + 1
end

end

The Procedure can be executed as:

Exec Load_Date_Dimension_Sp 1985, 2030

…which will populate the date dimension for the years 1985 through 2030.

All the syntaxes are based on SQL Server TSQL.

Technorati tags: Data warehouse, Dimensional Model, Date Dimension

Technorati tags: Microsoft, Stratature , Master Data Management