How the term “Business Intelligence” is born?

This is not about processes or usage of Business Intelligence solutions, it is about usage of this term. Unfortunately it looks like this is unknown to many (Unawareness for this is reasonable but I can remember that when a picture of Charles Babbage is shown at a session, many did not recognize or aware of him).

The term “Business Intelligence” firstly appeared in 1958. It was used by a IBM researcher, Hans Peter Luhn, in one of his articles. His definition for it was;

“The ability to apprehend the interrelationships of presented facts in such a way as to guide action towards a desired goal”

Although Hans introduced (or used) this word for processes related to business intelligence, it was not a widespread term until late 1990s. It was the time for Decision Support Systems. In 1989, Howard Dresner proposed “Business Intelligence” as an umbrella term but it looks like the real usage of the term started in 1996. Later Howard became an Analyst for Gartner Group, and it is Gartner Group (Gartner, Inc.) who labeled this on collective technology used for DSSs. This is how it was published;

“Data analysis, reporting, and query tools can help business users wade through a sea of data to synthesize valuable information from it—today these tools collectively fall into a category called ‘Business Intelligence.’”

PerformancePoint web-parts cannot be connected (linked)

Few days back, I faced for a strange issue with PerformancePoint web-parts. It was a simple thing, all I had was, a web page created with SharePoint and couple of web-parts. Once the page is open in design mode and web-parts are placed, tried to link two web-parts (a report web-part and a filter) through a connection as below;

Funny thing was, though it allowed me to create the connection (link) and save, it did not get saved permanently. If I open the connection window again, the created connection is missing.

I could not find the issue immediately but it was a terrible thing. Thanks for my colleagues, they have found the issue. It is with Internet Explorer. If you try to do this with Internet Explorer 8.x, it is not going to work. For some of my colleagues, older versions of IE have been worked. For some, older version of FireFox has been worked. Finally what I did was, installed FireFox 3.6 and got it done. Note that it is not going to work with FireFox 4.x too.

Anyone faced this issue? Why SharePoint gives an issue with latest browsers? If you know anything on this, please share with me.

Object Name Resolution – SQL Server

Understanding how SQL Server resolves objects’ names will be an effective remedy against performance issues. This name resolution happens if securables are not fully qualified. A statement like SELECT SalesOrderID FROM SalesOrderHeader will be a candidate for this. As you see, the SalesOrderHeader is not written as a fully qualified name, hence SQL Server tries to resolve it by adding Schema owned by user connected. If SQL Server cannot find an object like ConnectedUser’sSchema.SalesOrderHeader then it tries to find an object called dbo.SalesOrderHeader as the second step. Error is thrown, if it is not successful too. Here is an example for it;

USE AdventureWorks2008

GO

-- creating a new table with dbo schema

SELECT TOP (1) * 

INTO SalesOrderHeader

FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader

-- Create two logins for testing

CREATE LOGIN HR_Manager WITH PASSWORD = '123'

    , CHECK_POLICY = OFF;

CREATE LOGIN Sales_Manager WITH PASSWORD = '123'

    , CHECK_POLICY = OFF;

GO

-- Adding them as users with default schemas

CREATE USER HR_Manager WITH DEFAULT_SCHEMA = HumanResources

CREATE USER Sales_Manager WITH DEFAULT_SCHEMA = Sales

GO

-- Given users permission on data reading

sp_addrolemember 'db_datareader', 'HR_Manager';

sp_addrolemember 'db_datareader', 'Sales_Manager';

-- Execute as HT_Manager and see

EXECUTE AS USER = 'HR_Manager'

GO

-- This shows records from newly created

-- table, not from original table

SELECT * FROM SalesOrderHeader

-- This throws an error

SELECT * FROM SalesOrderDetail

REVERT

GO

-- Execute as Sales_Manager

EXECUTE AS USER = 'Sales_Manager'

GO

-- Both statements will work

SELECT * FROM SalesOrderHeader

SELECT * FROM SalesOrderDetail

REVERT

GO

As you see with the code, when HR_Manager executes SELECT statements, as the first step, names of them will be resolved as HumanResources.SalesOrderHeader and HumanResources.SalesOrderDetail. SQL Server does not find any objects and do the next step, resulting dbo.SalesOrderHeader and dbo.SalesOrderDetail. A match will be found for first one as we have created one with dbo schema but not for the second. In that case, second statement throws an error.

When Sales_Manager executes, SQL Server resolves objects’ names as Sales.SalesOrderHeader and Sales.SalesOrderDetail. In that case, both statements are successfully executed.

Even though Sales_Manager executes statements without any error, it would be always better to make securables as fully qualified objects, that helps SQL Server to quickly execute the code without performing an additional task.