Configuring SAS ROLAP – Solving Excel Pivot Size Issues
Had some issues with users using the SAS Addin for Microsoft Office against Info Maps where the size of the Excel file gets massive when you save it.
It seems Excel must be caching the data somewhere.
We are working on configuring SAS OLAP cubes in ROLAP mode as this removes the size issues with Excel.
Re-branding the Portal Theme
We are re-branding the project after the successful completion of decommissioning the old Data Warehouse environment at the end of the month. So we are currently changing the SAS Portal theme to match the new brand.
Making Reports Faster
We are using a combination of SAS Web Report Studio, for report creation/rendering and an Oracle database for data storage.
When users run reports, they effectively invoke this process:
- Connect to metadata and obtain authorisation
- Access info map and generate query
- Pass query to Oracle
- Oracle passes data to WRS
- WRS renders report
To make this faster we have been looking at configuring report scheduling to see if we can pre-cache the reports
Reporting Maturity Model
We really like the idea of staggering a roll-out of BI capability within organisations.
From our point of view it enables some value to be (relatively) quickly delivered to the business, without them having to wait 1-2 years for the full blown solution.
However the concept of quick wins is very different to the concept of "best of breed" or "point solution" implementations. We are vendor agnostic, so work with organisations who have IBM (Cognos), Microsoft, Oracle, SAS and SAP (BO), but we do believe an integrated platform provides ease of implementation and reduced ongoing administration compared to trying to integrate multiple disparate solutions.
To highlight the capabilities we think organisations should deploy as an integral part of their front-end Business Intelligence solution we utilise the following Reporting Maturity Model:
- Fragmented Systems
Source data for analysis is distributed over multiple system and the majority of users time is taken acquiring and validating data - Consolidated Repository
Data is available in a single trusted source, users spend their time developing reports in a variety of disparate adhoc tools such as Microsoft Office - Production Reporting
Users are able to access predefined reports, often parameter driven, which enables them to quickly and easily access detailed and summary information - Data Exploration
Multi-dimensional data and tools enable users to easily slice and dice information to manually explore data and gain insight - Ad Hoc Analysis
Analysts are able to access data from multiple trusted internal data sources and external data sources and perform what if and scenario based modeling - Advanced Analytics
Advanced data mining based capability enables analysts to automatically uncover hidden patterns based on large volumes of historical data
How many of these capabilites have you delivered to your organisaion?