Archive for the ‘Spreadsheets’ Category

Spreadsheet is Still the King of all Business Intelligence Tools

Thursday, April 11th, 2013

Spreadsheet is Still the King of all Business Intelligence Tools by Jim King.

From the post:

The technology consulting firm Gartner Group Inc. once precisely predicated that BI would be the hottest technology in 2012. The year of 2012 witnesses the sharp and substantial increase of BI. Unexpectedly, spreadsheet turns up to be the one developed and welcomed most, instead of the SAP BusinessObjects, IBM Cognos, QlikTech Qlikview, MicroStrateg, or TIBCO Spotfire. In facts, no matter it is in the aspect of total sales, customer base, or the increment, the spreadsheet is straight the top one.

Why the spreadsheet is still ruling the BI world?

See Jim’s post for the details but the bottom line was:

It is the low technical requirement, intuitive and flexible calculation capability, and business-expert-oriented easy solution to the 80% BI problems that makes the spreadsheet still rule the BI world.

Question:

How do you translate:

  • low technical requirement
  • intuitive and flexible calculation capacity (or its semantic equivalent)
  • business-expert-oriented solution to the 80% of BI problems

into a topic map application?

Posted in Business Intelligence, Marketing, Spreadsheets, Topic Maps | 1 Comment »

Accelerating SQL Database Operations on a GPU with CUDA (merging spreadsheet data?)

Tuesday, January 31st, 2012

Accelerating SQL Database Operations on a GPU with CUDA by Peter Bakkum and Kevin Skadron.

Abstract:

Prior work has shown dramatic acceleration for various database operations on GPUs, but only using primitives that are not part of conventional database languages such as SQL. This paper implements a subset of the SQLite command processor directly on the GPU. This dramatically reduces the eff ort required to achieve GPU acceleration by avoiding the need for database programmers to use new programming languages such as CUDA or modify their programs to use non-SQL libraries.

This paper focuses on accelerating SELECT queries and describes the considerations in an efficient GPU implementation of the SQLite command processor. Results on an NVIDIA Tesla C1060 achieve speedups of 20-70X depending on the size of the result set.

Important lessons to be learned from this paper:

  • Don’t invent new languages for the average user to learn.
  • Avoid the need to modify existing programs
  • Write against common software

Remember that 75% of the BI market is still using spreadsheets. For all sorts of data but numeric data in particular.

I don’t have any experience with importing files into Excel but I assume there is a macro language that can used to create import processes.

Curious if there has been any work on creating import macros for Excel that incorporate merging as part of those imports?

That would:

  • Not be a new language for users to learn.
  • Avoid modification of existing programs (or data)
  • Be written against common software

I am not sure about the requirements for merging numeric data but that should make the exploration process all the more enjoyable.

Posted in CUDA, GPU, SQL, SQLite, Spreadsheets | No Comments »

Spreadsheet -> Topic Maps: Wrong Direction?

Wednesday, January 18th, 2012

After reading BI’s Dirty Secrets – Why Business People are Addicted to Spreadsheets and the post it points to, I started to wonder if the spreadsheet -> topic maps path was in the wrong direction?

For example, Spreadsheet Data Connector Released bills itself:

This project contains an abstract layer on top of the Apache POI library. This abstraction layer provides the Spreadsheet Query Language – eXql and additional method to access spreadsheets. The current version is designed to support the XLS and XLSX format of Microsoft© Excel® files.

The Spreadsheet Data Connector is well suited for all use cases where you have to access data in Excel sheets and you need a sophisticated language to address and query the data.

Do you remember “Capt. Wrongway Peachfuzz” from Bullwinkel? That is what this sounds like to me.

You are much more likely to be in Excel and need the subject identity/merging capabilities of topic maps. I won’t say the ratio of going to Excel versus going to topic maps, it’s too embarrassing.

If the right direction is topic maps -> spreadsheet, where should we locate the subject identity/merging capabilities?

What about configurable connectors that accept specification of data sources and subject identity/merging tests?

The BI user sees the spreadsheet just as they always have, as a UI.

Sounds plausible to me. How does it sound to you?

Posted in Marketing, Spreadsheets, Topic Maps | No Comments »

BI’s Dirty Secrets – Why Business People are Addicted to Spreadsheets

Wednesday, January 18th, 2012

BI’s Dirty Secrets – Why Business People are Addicted to Spreadsheets by Rick Sherman.

SecretMicrosoft Excel spreadsheets are the top BI tool of choice. That choking sound you hear is vendors and IT people reacting viscerally when they confront this fact. Their responses include:

  • Business people are averse to change; they don’t want to invest time in learning a new tool
  • Business people don’t understand that BI tools such as dashboards are more powerful than spreadsheets; they’re foolish not to use them
  • Spreadsheets are filled with errors
  • Spreadsheets are from hell

IDC estimated that the worldwide spend on business analytics in 2011 was $90 billion. Studies have found that many firms have more than one BI tool in use, and often more than six BI tools. Yet a recent study found that enterprises have been “stuck” at about a 25% adoption rate of BI tools by business people for a few years.

So why have adoption rates flatlined in enterprises that have had these tools for a while? Are the pundits correct in saying that business people are averse to change, lazy or just ignorant of how wonderful BI tools are?

The answers are very different if you put yourself in the business person’s position.

Read Rick’s blog to see what business people think about changing from spreadsheets.

Have you ever heard the saying: If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em?

There have been a number of presentations/papers on going from spreadsheets to XTM topic maps.

I don’t recall any papers that address adding topic map capabilities to spreadsheets. Do you?

Seems to me the question is:

Should topic maps try for a percentage of the 25% slice of the BI pie (against other competing tools) or, try for a percentage of the 75% of the BI pie owed by spreadsheets?

To avoid the dreaded pie chart, I make images of the respective market shares, one three times the size of the other:

BI Market Shares

Question: If you could only have 3% of a market, which market would you pick?*

See, you are on your way to being a topic map maven and a successful entrepreneur.

* Any resemblance to a question on any MBA exam is purely coincidental.

Posted in Business Intelligence, Marketing, Spreadsheets | 1 Comment »