Ok, I know this is totally off topic but this poem from User Friendly AKA J.D. Frazer struck a very deep cord.

You never knew me
as you grew up on that farm
watched the clouds roll by
dreamed of life and love.

You never knew me
when you swore to fight
and kissed your last goodbye
to those who waved and cried.

You never knew me
when they stormed in,
shards of dark metal
quivering as they cut.

You never knew me
as you huddled in the grime
cold and so alone
wishing for the sun.

You never knew me
baker that you were
carpenter or farmer
not a soldier born.

You never knew me
but you cried out for freedom
and defied the coming dark
even as you fell.

And as I kneel by your cross
I realize that I never knew you
but I know you did this for me
even though you never knew me.

Copyright © 2000 J.D. Frazer

 

 

Thank you Father.

It just goes to show that you learn something new every day.

Mitch Milam writes on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Blog that you can click on the Dynamics logo in the top left of the record and perform actions and view the properties including your security rights for the record.

I have to admit that I have never considered clicking on this logo, I thought it was just eye candy.

I am sorry to a number of correspondents and commenters that I have  promised responses to but some bad family news has diverted most of my spare CPU cycles.

I hope that I will be back and focused in a positive way soon.

Charlie

joris poelmans has a a very interesting post that whilst it is entitled SharePoint Governance is also a good pointer to the depth of issues surrounding a good SharePoint implementation.

I am watching this video from Channel 9 on how the Dynamics AX team are moving X++ into the .NET world.

X++ is the bespoke Domain Specific Language (DSL) that is used within Dynamics AX or Axapta as it was when I was briefly introduced to it’s concepts. It had loads of really cool features that have since come back into the mainstream with the re-emergence  of DSLs in general and LINQ. It was also very closely coupled to the underlying application that resulted in very robust code.

The video is showing how they are moving the product out of the confines of the closed AX world and introducing the capability to work in the managed world of .NET so they can leverage the scalability of things like the Garbage Collector and widen the audience of developers.

This shows me 2 things; The AX world is about to get much bigger and the design decisions taken many years ago for such a modular DSL  are really about to pay off.

Conclusion

A couple of weeks ago I posted the 40th birthday of the Relational Model.

Then yesterday I posted about Microsoft’s Gemini Excel add-in and how I was scared by letting users loose on a Line of Business application.

My fear is driven by the massively complex and changing data models that underpin these applications. Anyone who has had to dig under the hood of applications such as Dynamics GP or NAV will know that even within the basic product the data model is very complex. This complexity is driven by and made worse by the requirement that these applications are configurable and extensible so as to be all things to all people.

Some of this complexity in some applications can be hidden through clever APIs and views. Microsoft CRM does this by creating views that users are supposed to point to but even these can be very confusing and overly complex for all but the most data savvy.

So my first conclusion was that users must be protected from the big nasty beast that is the application data model and be pointed instead to the nice soft data warehouse/cube where clever consultants have wrapped the complexity in candy floss.

However, on reviewing some other notes I have made on Gemini I have come up  with an off the cuff new idea.

Gemini seems to me to be very well suited to a star type schema. In addition to this from the VERY little I know about the world of cloud databases and massively parallel data processing they are also very effective at processing denormalised data.

So as a conclusion to this ramble I can envisage that the existence of Gemini will drive users to expect their business applications to present their data in a nice simple fashion and the existence of cloud data processing will force, through the nature of economics, business applications to flatten their data models and these 2 combined will force a sea change in the way Applications are written.

Conclusion

Ok I am going to blog this Channel 9 Video interview of the Gemini team as I am watching it so I may ask and answer my own questions!

Firstly the people being interviewed are from the Analysis Services team. Now this has huge implications as it means that AS and cube based people are developing this product. I have always felt (but not proved) that a BIG part of the problems that arose when connecting Excel to Analysis Services Cubes was the disconnect between the history, background and goals to 2 very different teams. That Gemini comes from the AS side bodes well.

They have achieved the scalability to allow for millions of rows by looking at, not the rows but the columns and compressing on columns. So a Post/Zip code column can be significantly compressed and a product code probably even more.

The compression happens when the data is loaded.

They nicely differentiate between “business” and pure analytics. This is for Business use where a star schema really works.

So it seems that a big chunk of what Gemini is trying to do under the hood is normalising a very flat de-normalised structure into a normalised one in memory.

They are trying to bridge the gap between the users who are familiar with BI and the traditional Excel users. I note that there is no mention of the users familiar with the Line of Business apps Gemini could be hooked up to.

“How do you take that (BI) technology to a mass market” My concern is that this is not and never has been an end user tool issue but a source data issue. There are tools out there but the data is not out there!

Classic quote from Charles (The interviewer) “Excel users don’t realise they are programming” I would say they are not programming as much as data modelling. Just as dangerous!

It seems that the team do realise the danger areas they are heading into when they discuss the implications of formatting –V – data types and relationships and getting Excel users to understand that “that’s pretty demanding” – No kidding!

Classic balance between the Clippy UI and the power UI.

12:33 (just spotted the time marker) There is reference to the internal politics that I mentioned in my first paragraph and more importantly how they blended the team to overcome them.

13:42 The AS team also embedded people in the Excel team and they worked on the new Slicers feature. Lets hope the resulting MDX queries perform properly!

17:08 Mashing up data. This still scares me. The ability to let business users hack multiple data sets together and most importantly make decisions on the result sends shivers down my spine!

19:20 There is a reason that the data warehouse does not have the 30 lines from Gartner. It is because there is no valid and consistent mechanism for matching the measures they apply to the measures available in the DW! Apples meet Pears!

19:54 Ok they realise that data wont come directly from back end systems but will be derived from reports from those systems. So if the reports are aggregating and managing the data what is the gain from being able to handle large data sets? Why not just write a SSRS import tool or use the existing export functions in SSRS?

23:11 Why is Gemini called Gemini? Bridging the gap between Information Workers and IT

This without doubt a very cool and smart toolkit for obtaining, mapping and displaying data. However I still have significant concerns about the result of giving many business users the impression that they can throw this tool at internal LoB solutions and external data and make decisions based on the results. On the positive side I see this as another boost to the concept of the corporate data warehouse/cube and a further drive to LoB suppliers to provide a proper structured data interface to their products.

Now if only Microsoft had held faith with PerformancePoint then they could have built a killer suite of analysis and management tools. Maybe one day.

I fought my way home today with every intention not to blog but then I saw this video posted by Patrick Husting

I don’t think anything could sum up the dealings I have had recently better.

It seems like great looking utilities are acting like busses. None then two appear at once.

I have been pointed in the direction of the direction of PowerObject’s entity documentation tool for Dynamics CRM.

I can think of a number of cases where this could shave many hours of work from our team and I will be circulating this as far and wide as I can.

Ok Steve I grant you your video had more danger and this one does not include the near certainty of death, but as someone who struggled to master a  unicycle seeing these 2 women achieve this staggers me. For the best bits hang on till around 02:30 ish.