Two reasons:
1) I have also a consulting job in Italy and I'd fall into a conflict of interests.
2) The Italian market is rather "muddy" so to say; having strong relations and affiliations is mandatory, to sell anything.
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Augusto Albeghi
Straysoft.com
Last edited by Stray__Cat; 12th March 2010 at 08:37.
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so this actually builds the cubes in SSAS in the background?
I see it only works with Excel 2007? I work with corporates, alot of whom are still running Excel 2003 does it work with that?
No, it does not build cubes in background, it works with the relational engine. This is done purposely for two reasons:
to support the free express editions
to relational engine is known by far more people, consultants and end-users as well.
Sorry but Viney@rd does not work with MS Excel 2007.
__________________
Augusto Albeghi
Straysoft.com
Last edited by Stray__Cat; 12th March 2010 at 08:52.
OK so how will it do aggregates on dimensions if I say have 500,000 transactions spread over two years and I need periodic and yearly totals by several dimensions? Its alot of number crunching which is why the big BI solutions use cubes populated overnight or is it aimed purely at the SME market?
Yes, you are right when you state that there’s a step somewhere , depending on HW, data volume ,query complexity etc. which gets too high to jump over by the relational engine. And, Yes, Viney@rd is aimed to SMBs or to niche sectors in larger enterprises.
So, I do not want to compete with the many stellar “data cooking” solutions that are out there, I can’t and they already did a fantastic job. At the end of the day, I do not run exactly a one man show but a close approximation of that.
I just want to address a couple of issues which rise in workgroups who make an heavy Excel usage.
First, files proliferate. They become confused and their relations become soon intricate. External references can’t be reached because a file was moved, the format you got is not exactly the expected one etc.
Viney@rd enables you, without leaving Excel, to save your data in a central repository and work from there. Nothing prevents to build something custom that feeds data automatically (the db structure is very easy to understand and it is open) but even the average user can adjust data as she needs they are. Often Excel sheets are used to collect data, and consolidating them often requires an ad-hoc app; with Viney@rd this job is greatly eased. Have to classify dimension values differently, to introduce a slicing level which does not exist on your system, simply add an attribute to the dimension and compile it on Excel.
Second, your report layout, often, is not the layout you need. Too often high level reporting is done by Excel because it can address a single cell while the usual tabular report layout can’t. With Viney@rd you can tie a cell to a certain figure coming out from the repository. You can limit the numbers of rows returned, sync two queries’ outputs or have the result of a calculation to be part of the query where condition. You have control on query results down to the single worksheet cell. So Viney@rd can refresh data even in the most complex layout without disrupting it.
If you need to analyze data, Viney@rd provides data connections to the models to place a pivot on top of them or load data into the new PowerPivot. They work far better than I could ever do, and you have already paid for those capabilities, so you must not buy them twice!
Should the queries become too slow, by Viney@rd data transformations you can add aggregated models and query from them. The automation of the process is still weak, but this is one of the scheduled improvements in the near future.
I hope I have replied to your question. Probably I’ll make a blog post out of this piece!
So you do not need to mess around with 1.1 to test it.
I’m looking forward for your feedback, either by mail or, just to spice up the forum a bit, directly here:
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