I was happy to see that the SubSonic project is back in full swing and better than ever. I had a few post on the SubSonic project a while back when they were on version 2. Rob really took the bulky version 2 and slimmed it down tremendously with a lot of new features and the excellent use of VS.NET templates. With what seems to be a strong emphasis on leverage LINQ has turned into a superb product. And, of course the SubSonic project remains free, which is not the best part of the project but it doesn’t hurt any either. Actually, Rob has thrown together several different methods for accessing database data via your code. He even took a principle that I have only seen in Ruby on Rail which allows objects in code to basically create/build database schema, which is pretty powerful. I am writing this post quite late into the game since I really haven’t done any major .NET development since last year but better late than never.
I’ll be using SubSonic again on one of my next projects and posting some goodies here when I run across them. If you are not familiar with ActiveRecord or O/RM you can breeze through some of the SubSonic pages to get an idea of what is going on.
Reviewing some disconnected solutions I came across CodeRun.com. CodeRun.com is basically a web-based development environment that let’s you write,test, and debug code online - in the cloud so to speak.
And, it’s no joke, this is a powerful interface. It let’s you, with syntax highlighting, write the most popular code syntax out there including ASP.NET, PHP, AJAX, Java, etc. This is clearly not enterprise-level team based software but if you need to transfer code, test a quick snippet out, or are looking to train users in a classroom setting this is really functional.
The more tools that I have in my arsenal the better versed and prepared I am. So, I’ll keep this in my favorites regardless.
I’ve been integrating SalesForce.com with OBIEE and some other data warehousing projects for clients for some time now and had a moment to throw this tutorial together. Also, I mentioned earlier in the year that I would definitely be providing a few blog posts on this topic of SalesForce.com integration. And, What better way to start off than by explaining with another tutorial video? Since the Informatica Video series is the most viewed post on http://www.artofbi.com right now, I figured I’d keep that trend going.
Below is the video tutorial which will be a precursor to the full OBIEE / SalesForce.com integration. Today I am showing the quick and dirty ability to connect to SalesForce.com via Informatica 8.6 PowerCenter in order to push up some new account data. I’ll get into the weeds sometime down the road.
Informatica is a great tool for ETL and clearly the only way to fly with the OBIEE pre-builts. This video tutorial shows one how to get rolling with their own base integration using one of the many SalesForce.com objects, Account. If you have any questions, or comments, post them as usual and I’ll try to get back to you as soon as I can.
A colleague of mine is huge on Microsoft SharePoint (MOSS) and with good reason; It is Microsoft’s #2 best sold licensed software product behind Microsoft Office. It is a collaboration tool, a CMS, a document repository, and now with PeformancePoint 2007 rolled into the suite is will be an analytical tool. And, since quite a few organizations that have implemented SharePoint use it as their launchpad portal for all things internal (intranet) it only makes since to be able to integrate SharePoint with more powerful heterogeneous analytical tools like OBIEE. But the big question I have heard over the last few months is, “What is the best approach to integrating OBIEE into SharePoint?”. In this blog post I will point you to a White Paper on the subject and some integration code you can use to get started with your integration.
Ultimately we need to look at the limitations of communicating with OBIEE as I describe below. Read the full story
Understanding web services in general is a big benefit for anyone using integrated technologies today. That includes any system that integrates a web client on a closed intranet network or open network with access to the world wide web. Because OBIEE presentation services is ultimately a web-based tool using your favorite web browser one would hypothesize that utilization of web services could also be incorporated by bringing in external data or reading from network data sources.
This post will show how to leverage presentation services to pull in a web service and integrate the web service data into our Dashboard. This is a low level example just to get you thinking about the grand possibilities of the integration.
The data we will consume stems from a Yahoo.com web service built inside an Answers report view. It does not require any database integration or schema modifications. We will display it in the dashboard. In the dashboard our final product looks like this:
My name is Christian Screen, a Business Intelligence mastermind working with mainly Oracle and Microsoft technologies. The views expressed here are my own and do not reflect the views of Oracle, Microsoft, or my employer.
