Andrew Wiles Olap Warehousing Blog

SQLBits 2008 is over. It is the first time that I have attended this event and I have to say that I was very impressed with the quality of the speakers and the content. I was particularly pleased that there was a strong, well attended BI track. A huge amount of kudos and credit should go to the organisers who cooked up this top notch event in their spare time and for no financial gain. If you have not been to a SQLBits I can definitely recommend it as a superb resource for understanding what is going on in the world of SQL Server.

 

I was privileged to provide one of the seminars at this year’s event. My slot was scheduled for early afternoon and I have to say that once I had attended the first 2 sessions of the day I was more than a little concerned about matching the standard of the other speakers. The session seemed to go well and I enjoyed the interaction with what was clearly a very knowledgeable audience. I would like to thanks those who got engaged for your questions and comments.

 

For those reading this blog who were not there the presentation was entitled “Does your cube support your users reporting needs” and was based on the warehouse toolkit work which caused me to kick off this blog in the first place. Preparing the presentation has also given me the impetus to update the databases for the first time in quite a while. If you follow the File Downloads links on this page you will see a new SQL 2008 relational and Olap database.

 

Over the next few days I will try to get my PowerPoint deck uploaded and as the whole of SQLBits was filmed by Microsoft I will also see if I can get hold of a copy of the video so that those who didn’t attend can see what I was talking about. This of course subject to the provision that it is not too embarrassing!

I will be attending SQLBits on September 13th this year and have had a paper accepted!

 

I will be presenting in the BI track on the subject "Does your cube support your users reporting needs?". The agenda for the event looks great and I am looking forward to meeting a few folk that I have corresponded with in the past.

 

For more details check http://www.sqlbits.com/default.aspx

I have just watched a presentation by Jensen Harris of the Microsoft Office team on the development of the "ribbon" menu system. Every web designer should be forced to watch this presentation at least once a day until they have got it

"The Story of the Ribbon"

Earlier this week I downloaded and installed the latest Silverlight and Expression tools to start some research for a new project. My intention is to determine whether it is possible to create a rich web client version of the Intelligencia MDX query builder that can be distributed via the web. I suspect that this will be a reasonably long process given that this is entirely new technology to me.

 

My observation in this blog entry however is not about my project but on the user interface for Expression and how this ties in with the influence the web has had on user interface design.

 

I understand Microsoft's decision to separate design from implementation. In larger development shops this is a logical and useful step toward building applications with a better user experience. For smaller organisations the designer and developer are likely to be the same person - i.e. me. Now maybe I am a bit old fashioned (and maybe my eyesight ain't what it used to be) but based on my very brief first introduction to Expression I really don't like the user interface. Gray on Black may look "modern" but it provides poor contrast for actually seeing what you are doing. It also seems that Microsoft have abandoned many long standing "fat client" UI givens, for example the right mouse click to obtain context menu's. In fact, even though I have a good idea of what I want to achieve I have had to refer to the documentation in order to carry out some very simple and basic "getting started" design tasks such as applying a background color to an object. Clearly the designer for the Expression tool comes from a very different background to me.

 

A long time ago - remember when Windows 98 came out - Microsoft published a guide to user interface design for Windows applications. The guide was highly proscriptive about how a UI should look and work right down to the greyness of the window and the exact fonts which should be used for labels and captions. The thrust of this guide was to encourage developers to build applications with a consistent look and feel. The reason for this was to make life easy for users. Application menus were proscibed to contain a File, Edit, View, Tools and Options menu (unless the application simply did not fit these terms). This meant that irrespective of which application you were using you stood a reasonable chance of finding the functionality you wanted by looking for it in the same place as the last app you used. By-and Large this worked where software companies bothered to read and apply the guide.

 

As the web has blossomed the influence of "design" has become a bigger and bigger factor in product development. The design of your web page says a lot about the character of your organisation and the role of graphic designers has taken on a great deal of importance in the projection of corporate identity. Recently however I have noticed an unwelcome (at least to me) shift in the software industry. We seem to have moved to a point where design has become more important than functionality. As part of my Sliverlight research I visited as many sites as I could find which use the technology and I have to say that I was somewhat stunned by how bad they were. Not, I have to say that the technology itself is bad because it most certainly is not (and I have to say that sites built on flash technology are equally bad), but the designers seem to have become so overwhelmed with the ability to spin, fade and animate that they have lost sight of the whole issue that a user has to be able to understand how to navigate the site. Here are a few of my gripes:

 

The bigger problem is that this approach to design led applications s now bleeding through into fat client apps. More and more I am opening tools to be presented with something that looks very nice but in reality is worse to use than the equivalent product from around 1980.

 

Am I just sad and old or has the software industry lost the plot when it comes to usability? 

In my last blog entry I described the work we have been carrying out on data entry in Intelligencia.

 

In parallel with this activity we have also added that ability to update the MDX script associated with a cube allowing users to add/edit cube calculated membes and cell calculations. This functionality relies on AMO to read the cube script and then allows the user to interact with the calculations via our spreadsheet calculation interface. At present this functionality is only appropriate for users with administrative rights due to the way in which SSAS handles security.

 

 

The next stage in the development process will enable interaction with write enabled dimensions allowing users to add/remove data bearing dimension members.

 

Once this work is complete we should be quite close to providing a modeling interface that is not dissimilar to a multi-dimensional spreadsheet. It would not be a far stretch to allow users to create new cubes and add dimensions/hierarchies allowing ad-hoc building of small OLAP models. An interesting challenge would be to allow business end-users to add to a corporate planning/budgeting application so that they can model the specific behaviour of their part of the business.