First things first – Metapedia is a silly name. It doesn't sound "business serious" to me and that's a shame as I think it's likely going to be the entry point for most business users to the value of SAP's Information Steward. In a nutshell from the manual, the SAP Information Steward Metapedia module "allows you to implement a business glossary of terms related to your business data and organize the terms hierarchically." Many businesses and organisations will already have a glossary of business terms, perhaps even initial mappings to database fields. This may be called a Data Dictionary, Mapping Document or Business – IT Mapping Document but, for many, it's usefulness will be restricted by the fact it's hosted in Excel. Metapedia breaks those spreadsheet chains and allows the business end of Data Governance Teams to really direct the focus of those tasked with managing Data Profiling, building Data Quality Scorecards and prioritising Metadata Management.

In this, the final post in my series looking at how the new SAP Information Design Tool (IDT) can support the delivery of Agile Analytics, I'm going to be reviewing the capacity of the IDT to cope with adaptive design processes. As in the previous two posts – covering Collaborative Working and Testing – I'm taking my lead on Agile Analytics from Ken Collier's excellent, recent book on the topic. In "Agile Analytics", Collier devotes the first of his chapters on Technical Delivery Methods to the concepts behind evolving, excellent design. It's a superb guide through the benefits, challenges, approaches and practical design examples to delivery through an adaptive design process and I'm not going to attempt to capture it all here. In a nutshell, though, Collier argues that "Agility benefits from adaptive design" and stresses that this is not a replacement methodology for your existing DW/BI design techniques but rather a state of mind approach which uses those techniques to deliver more value, faster.

This post continues the series looking at how the new SAP Information Design Tool (IDT) can support the agile delivery of SAP BI projects. In the previous entry I looked at how collaborative working and a degree of version control could be delivered using the IDT in line with the concepts laid out by Ken Collier in his recent, excellent, book "Agile Analytics". In this entry I turn to how IDT can support the testing methodology that Collier explains in the seventh chapter of his book. As is the situation with version control, the IDT is far from being a complete solution but it is an advance on what is available on what is available in the traditional Universe Designer. Fundamentally, I'm going to be making using of the IDT Business Layer Queries. These Queries are mentioned, briefly, in the IDT documentation but it's not really clear what they're intended to be used for so hope no SAP developers mind me co-opting them in the name of testing!

In my previous blog post introducing this series of posts, I discussed both the concept of Agile Analytics (with particular reference to the recent, excellent book by Ken Collier, Agile Analytics) and how the new SAP Information Design Tool (IDT) could go some way (but, by no means, all) to support it. This blog explores a specific area of detail here, namely how the IDT facilitates a degree of collaborative development and version control in SAP Universe development. It's far from being a complete version control solution – lots of room for improvement – but it's certainly an advance on what is possible in the old Universe Designer traditionally used by SAP developers and does allow developers to work together on aspects of the single Universe artefact.

Last year there wasn't a Business Intelligence event I attended that didn't cover the topic of Agile BI in one sense or another. It was always a fascinating source of discussion that quite often raised considerable passion. To me, it seemed a common sense approach and one that, to varying degrees, the BI projects that Maxima have been delivering over the years have pretty much been in line with.

At the start of this year, I was browsing various BI discussion boards and came across a recommendation for a new book title "Agile Analytics : A Value Driven Approach to Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing" written by Ken Collier. There are many wonderful things about 21st Century living but one is surely the fact that, minutes after reading these recommendations, I'd downloaded the book onto my Kindle and was fully engrossed in what Collier had to say. I'm happy to report that the recommendations were well made and I've been adding my own to clients ever since finishing it (the first time round – it's one of those books you can't help going back to). What I thought I'd do here is tie in some of the concepts that Collier raises in his excellent book to some of the features in the new SAP Information Design Tool.

In my previous blog I showed how shortcut joins can prove useful when trying to minimise users being prompted for unnecessary contexts. For the example discussed, the data would not change if I selected objects from the Dimension table and did not include any measures from the Fact tables. There were a number of potential shortcut joins that could be used to reduce the number of tables used in a query without affecting the results (and preventing the user from being prompted for a context).

After designing and reviewing several Universes over the last few years one question that often comes up is how do you stop users getting prompted for contexts? Often I bite my tongue and reserve judgement until I have seen the Universe as more often than not the Context use is entirely relevant. Often the Universe shown presents the user with a context and each one can provide different answers and as such represent an area where a context is entirely relevant to use. Often the change required is to use a measure to resolve the context and/or providing clear context names and descriptions to ensure the user would know what context to select.

It's time for another Maxima SAP Scotland Update. We held a couple of these events last year and they proved remarkably well attended (even with one of our seasonal winter 'hurricanes' blowing Central Scotland away!) so we're keen to make sure that everybody who attended those (and new names) will always learn something new each time we do them. This time round we've changed venue (it's the Whisky Experience up by Edinburgh Castle) and, more importantly, will be actually stepping into topics that cover project delivery with the SAP BusinessObjects product suite.

After finishing at my latest client site I have been doing the usual refreshers on what's new in the big, bad world of Business Intelligence and, in particular, SAP BusinessObjects 4.0. When reviewing the 4.0 platform search functionality it became apparent that the default setup of this tool can greatly impact performance (particularly where the content increases).

7th March 2012. The attention of the world was focussed on a new technology launch. I'm quite happy with my iPad 2 though thank you very much so my attention was with the official launch of SQL Server 2012. I'd imagine this is a product that will still be available and deployed long after the latest iPad has fallen from consumer favour. I suppose the other main difference is that there's nothing in the SQL Server 2012 release that hasn't been well trailed in advance. No unfounded rumours about what this new data platform would do or what the core themes were going to be. "Mission Critical Confidence", "Cloud" and "Breakthrough Insights" are the three key points drummed into the market long before this product launch. Perhaps the most interesting innovation at the SQL Server 2012 Launch then is the manner of the global launch. No big arena with whooping fans for Microsoft (well, not this time anyway). Instead they've chosen to promote their most important corporate product of 2012 through a three month virtual launch event. You can register for free to this launch at this site and I'd encourage you to do so to catch all the key notes and breakouts at your own leisure. I'd certainly encourage you to do so but thought I'd use this post to explain what Maxima are doing to help our clients understand SQL Server 2012.

I wasn't going to be writing any more blogs about the new SAP Information Steward Metadata Management immediately but confess to being intrigued by the range of third party metadata integrators available when preparing my blog on adding new SAP integrators. In particular, as both an Oracle and SAP BI Partner, I was interested in the potential of integrating in the metadata available within Oracle BI to the SAP Information Steward. It's proven to be an interesting investigation so thought I'd put up a little blog on what's possible and what, frustratingly, seems not to be.

In previous posts looking at the new SAP Information Steward Metadata Management I've given an overview of how metadata can be brought together from different sources and then walked through how to set up a new Metadata Integrator that will interrogate those sources. In this post I'll give a quick overview of how SAP BusinessObjects developers can use this gathered metadata to quick start the process of Universe Design. Of course building Universes will be bread and butter stuff to most SAP BusinessObjects developers but I think there's a potentially productive new discipline on offer through this SAP information Steward feature. As I've mentioned before in these blogs, SAP Information Steward is an environment where both Business and IT users can come together. By sourcing the tables and columns they are going to use from those verified in SAP Information Steward, Universe Designers can be sure that they are using the business preferred data sources or, alternatively, use the tool to suggest preferable options.

In my previous post I gave an overview of the Metadata Management module of the new SAP Information Steward. This provided a single directory structure for a number of Metadata Integrators providing a unified view of metadata across your BI environment. Metadata Integrators are available for a wide variety of integration points including SAP BusinessObjects, Data Services, Data Insight, CWM Models and Third Party interfaces such as Oracle Data Integrator or Microsoft SQL Server. In this blog I'm going to look at the process for setting up a new Metadata Integrator, specifically one which will gather the metadata details from an SAP Data Services Repository. The process is similar regardless of which Metadata Integrator you are setting up so hopefully of use for most scenarios.

In previous blogs about the new SAP Information Steward I've looked at the Data Profiling and Quality Scorecarding capabilities. Both are useful for developing a true picture of the quality of your data and ongoing initiatives to improve it - key requirements for any Data Governance programme. But what about the use to which that data is put? How is it transformed? Where is it deployed? What reports rely upon it? It's to answer these questions and more that SAP Information Steward also includes a Metadata Management module and this is going to be my subject for the next few blogs in this series.

The big BI news stories of 2012 seem to be Big Data and Mobile BI. Well, that's where many of the software vendors want to lead us; and it is true for many who are at close to the leading edge; and I guess I don't dispute the significance of both these trends. But, meanwhile back in the real world what's happening on a daily basis? What are the problems occupying many of our customers and what're we doing to help this majority a bit back from the leading-edge? Here are my top 3: