Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms 2009

Recently, Gartner published its report called Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms 2009. This report is Gartner's opinion about the market of BI and their main vendors. Gartner defines the report: Early in 2008, the megavendors took ownership of a majority share of the business intelligence platforms market via acquisition. The repercussions of that consolidation are still working through the market, with a growing split in buying behavior becoming evident.

Gartner also published two other reports:

- Magic Quadrant for CPM Suites
Gartner defines the report: The market landscape for corporate performance management suites continues to dramatically change and grow. Users should evaluate vendors carefully according to business needs and their broader business intelligence and performance management strategies.

- Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse Database Management Systems
Gartner defines the report: The data warehouse DBMS market is expanding at a record pace with new vendors, new offerings and high growth. We discuss this, the growth of appliance offerings and how data warehouse DBMS software-only vendors are responding with enhanced functionality and low-cost, market-entry solutions.

In the three reports, Gartner separates the vendors in four quadrants, considering the ability to execute and the completeness of vision. The reports define the market overview and also the strengths and the cautions of each vendor mentioned.

Data Warehouse Failure? Look to Your Metadata Management

B-Eye-Network announces that tomorrow, December 11, 2008 at 11:00 am ET will happen a Web Seminar entitled Data Warehouse Failure? Look to Your Metadata Management, with Bill Inmon, hosted by ASG Software Solutions.

According B-Eye-Network: "By providing a single version of the truth, analytics and reporting for decision making, a data warehouse can be considered a miracle cure for your organization.

However, the full value of using your data warehouse to solve specific business problems is often not realized. Surprisingly, the problem may not be with the data warehouse, but with the metadata.

Metadata can be an underlying force in providing consistently reliable business information via the data warehouse. Conversely, if metadata is not properly managed, it can cause confusion, inflexibility and curtail the ability of the data warehouse to support new business processes.

Featuring renowned data warehouse expert W. H. (Bill) Inmon, ASG Software Solutions presents the secrets of a successful data warehouse. Among other things, these secrets will be revealed:

Metadata infrastructure is the key to building your data warehouse environment…Why?
Your metadata must be managed across the breadth of your data warehouse implementation…How?
End-to-end data impact analysis ensures that planned changes won’t disrupt the flow of business information…How?
ASG’s data warehouse solution provides an entry point for smaller businesses as well as manages terabytes of information at larger organizations…How?"

When you register, you will can download a complimentary copy of the white paper, A New Breed of Data Warehouse.

Decision Intelligence

Recently, I read an interesting article in B-Eye Network, by Claudia Imhoff and Colin White, called Full Circle: Decision Intelligence (DSS 2.0), where they are defining the concept of decision intelligence.

In the article, they talk about the BI trends, and explain the concept and the components of Decision Intelligence.

They are considering how decision intelligence brings together traditional and operational BI, operational processing, and the collaborative and business content environments:

- In traditional BI, applications query, report on and analyze historical data stored in a data warehouse, and produce strategic and tactical analytics.
- The operational BI processing is integrated into the operational environment To support high data volumes and close to real time decision making.
- The collaborative and business content environment is the third component involved in decision intelligence. Unstructured business content can come from the collaborative environment itself (office productivity suites, social computing tools), BI environment (reports, spreadsheets) and operational processes (purchase orders, call center logs).

Architecture for Decision Intelligence:


They finished the article explaining why the concept of decision intelligence:
"Our motivation in creating the concept of decision intelligence is to break the misconception that you must have a tight connection between business intelligence and data warehousing. Data warehouses are not going to go away. They are very successful at producing both strategic and tactical business data intelligence and, in some cases, operational business process intelligence. There are, however, a growing number of solutions that don’t require a data warehouse. These solutions don’t replace data warehousing, but provide valuable additions to it. It is important to remember that data warehousing came about to overcome issues with earlier decision support systems, and modern technologies are removing the need to always store data first in a data warehouse before it can be used for decision making."

I think the BI/PM fields are shifting dramatically, creating increasingly new concepts and different approaches.

New York Stock Exchange improves its Data Warehouse

New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) improves its Data Warehouse, migrating its main data warehouse to Netezza Performance Server (NPS). NYSE replaces its Oracle data warehouse, after a successful proof-of-concept project on a Netezza Performance Server (NPS) in early 2007. According Netezza, the Netezza Performance Server (NPS) is a "architecturally integrating relational database, server and storage into the compact and power-efficient system, the NPS system delivers 10-100x the performance of traditional systems."

Steve Hirsch, NYSE's chief data officer, said that "it's very possible that we could hit 40 to 50 terabytes of data in a single query"; "just one of more complex queries took 26 hours on the old platform, but it now takes just two and a half minutes on Netezza Performance Server (NPS)" and also said: "We're not massive in terms of our user base, but we're pretty big in terms of the types of analytics and the time span of data that a single query might hit."

I think Stock Exchange is an area where is essential the performance and also it is important to apply the concepts of real-time enterprise.

The biggest Data Warehouse in the world

Computerworld published today a news about the Yahoo's database. Yahoo has a database with 2 petabytes, and claims "that it is not only the world's single-largest database, but also the busiest". A petabyte equals one thousand terabytes, one million gigabytes, or 1 trillion megabytes.


The database, specially built data warehouse, it uses to analyze the behavior of its half-billion Web visitors per month. Yahoo bought a database start-up that changed the open-source PostgreSQL to run as column-based database instead of row-based one, and continued to enhance it, including tighter data compression, more parallel data processing and more optimized queries. Yahoo has others large databases to store unstructured data such as video and sound files.

The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit - Second Edition

The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit - Second Edition - Ralph Kimball, Margy Ross, Warren Thornthwaite, and Joy Mundy

In this second edition, launched in January/2008, Ralph Kimball and his team from Kimball Group, updated the Kimball Lifecycle methodology, defined in the book's first edition. They refined the methodology, based on their experience in training, consulting and developing, always focused in Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence applications.

The Kimball Lifecycle methodology provides a general framework that connects all the necessary activities of a DW/BI implementation. They explain, step by step, all the sequence of tasks required for an effective DW/BI project, covering: Project Planning, Project Management, Business Requirements Definition, Technical Architecture Design, Dimensional Modeling, Physical Design, ETL Design and Development, Designing and Developing BI Applications.

The book is a complete and detailed roadmap and must be read for all professionals that designing, building and implementing DW/BI Applications.

Another excellent book by Mr. Kimball and Team.

New Books about Business Intelligence and Performance Management

Lately, I have read several good books about Business Intelligence and Performance Management.

The growing interest in these areas are making that increasingly expert professionals write books.

Some of them are:



- The Performance Management Revolution - Howard Dresner





- Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit - Second Edition - Ralph Kimball and Team






- Successfull Business Intelligence - Cindi Howson









- Five Key Principles of Corporate Performance Management - Bob Paladino









- Business Intelligence Competency Centers: A Team Approach to Maximizing Competitive Advantage - Gloria Miller, Dagmar Brautigam and Stefanie Gerlach











I will make book reviews of them later.

Classics Books about Business Intelligence and Performance Management

In my opinion, some books about BI/DW/BSC/PM have already become classics.

Some of them are:


- e-Business Intelligence: Turning Information into Knowledge into Profit - Bernard Liautaud

- Business Intelligence Roadmap: The Complete Project Lifecycle for Decision-Support Applications - Larissa Moss and Shaku Atre

- OLAP Solutions: Building Multidimensional Information Systems - Erik Thomsen

- Data Warehousing, Data Mining, and OLAP - Alex Berson and Stephen Smith

- Data Mining - Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques - Ian H. Witten and Eibe Frank


. Data Warehouse - All books by Ralph Kimball and Team (I am mentioning only 3 below)


- Data Warehouse Toolkit

- Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit

- Data Warehouse ETL Toolkit


. Balanced Scorecard - All books by Robert Kaplan and David Norton


- The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action

- The Strategy-Focused Organization: How Balanced Scorecard Companies Thrive in the New Business Environment

- Strategy Maps: Converting Intangible Assets into Tangible Outcomes

- Alignment: Using the Balanced Scorecard to Create Corporate Synergies