Presentation delivered at the Singapore Ruby Brigade meetup 6-Jan-2010 (at hackerspace.sg). Discusses BI and DW in the Rails context, and test drives ActiveWarehouse and ActiveWarehouse/ETL with a "Cupcakes Inc" sample application.

1. NB: This presentation was delivered at the Singapore Ruby Brigade meetup 6-Jan-2010 (at hackerspace.sg)

2. BI & DW for Ruby/Rails “!???”

4. Or maybe you want to pitch for the dashboard/BI projects themselves? ..using your rails skills of course BI Business Intelligence CPM Corporate Performance Mgmt BPM Business Performance Mgmt B&P Budgeting and Planning EPM Enterprise Performance Mgmt Dashboard Enterprise Dashboards

5. BI Basics No, BI is not (always) an oxymoron

6. BI = Business Feedback & Control Systems Keeping the doors open Uptime on the servers; alerts Infrastructure & Systems

7. BI = Business Feedback & Control Systems Keeping the doors open Optimising in the short term intra-day Focus on systems in isolation Need extra call centre staff on shift? Daily sales numbers? Infrastructure & Systems Operational Management

8. BI = Business Feedback & Control Systems Keeping the doors open Optimising in the short term intra-day Focus on systems in isolation Strategic performance monthly, quarterly, yearly Across all systems Profitability by product Utilisation and sales performance Infrastructure & Systems Operational Management Executive Management

9. Traditional Rails perspective.. e.g. NewRelic Custom AR reports Someone else’s problem (opportunity) Infrastructure & Systems Operational Management Executive Management

10. Someone Else’s Problem.. Your Rails Storefront App Fulfillment (maybe a third party) To report on sales fulfillment.. AR/AP/GL To report on revenue and profitability.. To report on sales revenue, actuals and forecast.. And don’t forget all those other systems.. CRM MRP FA

11. Who is “Someone Else”? The gigaohm network: “ 5 Free Business Intelligence Crunchers for Your 2010 Arsenal ”

13. ETL ODS Your Rails App Other Transactional Systems Data Sources DBoR, relational reporting BI & DW A copy of transaction data specifically structured for query and analysis Extract – Transform – Load Or, Extract – Load – Transform Or, Transform – Extract – Load (depending on the technology)

14. “cubes” Sales = $22 Customer ID Product ID Date ID … Customer dimension Date dimension Product dimension Fact categorisation “ Fact”

15. MOLAP, ROLAP, HOLAP MOLAP: proprietary format to optimize for analytical queries ROLAP: use relational database to mimic multi-dimensionality HOLAP: hybrid. Drive analytics from MOLAP, drill down to relational Star schema Snowflake

17. ActiveWarehouse ActiveWarehouse-ETL

21. The Cupcakes Store Use Activewarehouse-etl to load seed data from csv to app db (mysql) 1 The Cupcakes BI Dashboard 2 Use Activewarehouse-etl to load dimension and fact data to the warehouse (mysql to mysql) 3 Use Activewarehouse to build a simple analytical “dashboard” and reporting tool Follow the documentation at http://github.com/tardate/cupcakesinc to see how this works (and try it yourself)

22. Product listing at Cupcakes Inc..

23. Customer listing at Cupcakes Inc..

24. Order listing at Cupcakes Inc..

25. Order detail at Cupcakes Inc..

26. Sales By Product AW Report

27. Sales By Product (drill to 2009)

28. Reasons to be Cheerful..

29. Language ETL processing, cube rules etc typically use custom languages (often archaic and limited) BI Suites It’s … ruby!

30. UI Customisation and Presentation Integration Web delivery typically very constrained. Often rely on strong integration with office software (Excel). Leads to “custom application development in Excel” syndrome. BI Suites It’s … ActionPack! Google maps mashups, social graph links. .. you get full UI control, as long as you have the development budget.

31. Speed of development Basic deployments can be very fast. But UI inflexibility can lead to either lots of time wasted trying to shoe-horn, or need to “reset customer expectations” BI Suites It’s … Ruby & Rails. Say no more ;-)

32. TCO Top-tier suites can come with a hefty $ tag. And prices are going up.. But some analysts are predicting 2010 to be the year BI gets FLOSS momentum (see gigaohm review of 5 well established alternatives) BI Suites It’s … Ruby & Rails. Say no more ;-) Trade-in software license costs for more development.

33. Caveats..

34. Native MOLAP Generally good support for database MOLAP features. Can be platform specific though – e.g. Microsoft MDX, SQL Server Analytical Services BI Suites A gap. No real support currently available. ActiveWarehouse uses relational model to “fake” MOLAP (ROLAP)

35. Performance Generally, all established analytical engines (and backing databases) have great performance track record. Huge scalability (millions of rows) BI Suites Unproven. ActiveWarehouse/ETL does not have many (public) proof points. Given that it is tied to AR performance, expect scalability could be an issue.