SQL Business Intelligence

May 14, 2008

This evening I attended a nice SQL 2005 BI presentation by Kathrine Lord of Microsoft.
She took the Arizona SQL Server Users Group through a nice tour of a datawarehouse that she built for a call center. (Thanks to Pete Miller of Statera for all these years of running and organizing the AZ SQL Server User’s group).

Her presentation was a quick end to end walkthrough: building cubes, MDX calculations, creation of named sets, Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) and using the Pivot Tables inside of Excel 2007.

Just imagine being able to provide inside a sharepoint site, reports using business Intelligence capabilities from SQL to demonstrate long term trends with Identities in your organization. Being able to show how long between hire date and active directory account creation date, between term date, and disabling the account.

At the 2007 Directory Experts Conference in April of 2007, there were two excellent presentations that began to scratch the surface of how to perform such reporting from ILM – Brad Turner on Reporting from MIIS and Rob Allen “Leverage MIIS Statistics and Provide Trend Analysis”

Imagine adding KPI’s and building scorecards hosted in Sharepoint through SQL Reporting Services. Imagine the high-level visibility you can add to your IDM project. Imagine more clearly demonstrating the ROI of your project.

She also discussed the new SQL 2008 GeoSpatial Data types and being able to tie into Virtual Earth. Interesting capabilities for showing user account creation by geography.

Additionally, SQL 2008 adds new data types in the Date time area:
http://www.sql-server-performance.com/articles/dev/datetime_2008_p1.aspx
Splitting off Date and Time. Yet we still have no Date or Time datatype in the Metaverse in ILM 2007. Would love to have that in ILM 2!

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