SAP Business Objects 4.1 Audit Dashboard

Amidst of all the amazing data visualization tools available out in the market, I'm writing this post to show what wonders you can do by leveraging Web Intelligence tool from SAP Business Intelligence 4.1 product suite. My idea for this post is not to compare it with any of the Data Viz. tools but just to share something useful for the organizations which are using Business Objects as their main reporting tool.

I have seen Business Objects evolving as a rich product; versions after versions from the ages of BO 6.5 and with the complete hands-on experience on all the versions since then, I feel BO 4.1 is very stable and a mature product of its own race. In order to effectively manage an enterprise product for a global user base, one needs to ensure its availability to the users and should be aware of the platform issues they might encounter in advance.  Out of several methods of system monitoring, I'm sharing a practice that I'd implemented using BO audit universe.

How do I begin with Hadoop?

"Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn."

                                                                                   -Benjamin Franklin

I'm a big fan of practical learning, "implement as you learn" is my mantra for learning anything. Hadoop being open source gives the best opportunity for getting your hands dirty as you read about it. There are plenty of free resources online that you can refer to get started with and in this post, I'm going to list and refer some of the good ones I've come across.

Getting Started with Hadoop

Depending on your level of interest in learning and exploring Hadoop, you can enroll in any of the free online fundamental courses offered from Big Data University or watch video tutorials form edureka on YouTube. These two sources do not require a sign in from your corporate email id and give a basic overview on what Hadoop is? And of-course the documentation provided by Apache helps in understanding it detail, alternatively you can read the Yahoo Hadoop tutorial.

DataWarehouse vs BigData

To Be or not To Be is the question to ask today. I'm not being Hamlet here but with the evolution of Big Data and looking at the current technology trends, I'm curious to discover the cases where it can overcome conventional Data warehouse, where it cannot and most important what are the areas where both DW and BigData can be implemented in conjunction?

Data Warehousing concept has been in place for more than last four decades now  while Big Data, In Memory and the Cloud concept started prevailing in early 2Ks and are in high demand today. Between now and then the data has grown exponentially in the network and the competitive analysis of this data has lead  to evolution of new tools and BI concepts.  Does it mean a slow sunset for DW? I'd say it's a myth as the business cases differ, an ideal approach will be a blend of both for sure.