I have just started on a project which his regulatory in nature and the business area of the IB I work with uses ActivePivot to manage their securities (inventory).
One of the tasks we need to do is that the ActivePivot data set and run some sort of simple rules engine over the data that feeds ActivePivot. There is a little bit of netting involved at the transactional level but it's mostly simply rules using basic operators. I haven't used ActivePivot before but the users are telling me it doesn't really allow them to add fields within the cube which I understand from a technical perspective. I also noted that ActiveViam have a product called ActiveUI which on the surface appears to do this?
Has any one any tips/advice on what worked for them? The business also want a better data visualisation tool (graphs and the likes).. I was looking at tableaux but open to suggestions. Many thanks for any help given.
There is no clear question here so I will answer to your different points one by one:
run some sort of simple rules engine over the data that feeds ActivePivot
Then you can add your rule engine in your project on the data set before feeding ActivePivot as if you were not using ActivePivot afterwards.
users are telling me it doesn't really allow them to add fields within the cube
you cannot add fields once the cube is started but you can update the description of your cube in your project to integrate the new fields brought by your new logic.
I also noted that ActiveViam have a product called ActiveUI which on the surface appears to do this?
ActiveUI is a UI for the ActiveViam products (including ActivePivot), so it provides you (among others) tables, charts to navigate your data.
The business also want a better data visualisation tool (graphs and the likes).. I was looking at tableaux but open to suggestions
ActiveUI can provide you this. ActivePivot follows the standard for OLAP databases (XMLA) so it is also compatible with other XMLA clients like Excel and Tableau. Your BI has probably already chosen which client they would use so you should see with them.
Related
I have a data set of about 1 million employer names. These names are from a free-form text field so they include misspellings and variations in the way they are inputted (e.g. "Amazon" .. "Amzaon" .. "Amazon.com" .. "Amazon Web Services" .. "AWS").
I want to either A) group these 1 million so I have a somewhat accurate sense of how many unique employers are in the data set or B) be able to find all variations of any given employer.
So far, I've been using the data in Tableau, then filtering on "employer name" and searching all variations of the name I can think of. But it's tedious and I'm pretty sure I'm leaving many out.
I've also used the fuzzy add-in for excel but it hasn't worked that well on misspellings, special characters...
Tableau just isn't suited for doing this kind of analysis straight out of the box, and I would highly recommend doing some pre-processing on your data before putting trying to build a workbook around it.
Like another commenter said, you could look into using Tableau Prep Builder for a one-time transformation on your data set, but if you wanted to automate this process it costs extra to add functionality to whatever Tableau Server installation you have.
If you're familiar with Python or R (and the integration between Tableau Server and those services is supported by your organization), you could look into building a script to run the transformation real-time, but it probably won't be too efficient.
Try experimenting with Tableau Prep Builder - the companion tool that comes with your Tableau Creator license. It has a group feature that is designed for just these problems.
In Prep Builder, you’ll just need to connect to your data, add a cleaning step, and then add a group to your cleaning step.
I need certain custom entity fields to calculate and display values based on operations on the data in the system.
For example an a booking system implementation with contacts and custom entity: tickets. There is a one-many relationship between contact and tickets.I would like to create a field that calculates and displays in the contact form:
frequent flyers: more than 10 tickets bought.
a field that displays yes or no based on whether a first class ticket has ever been purchased. Ticket ref would start with say, FCxxx
If this isn't possible perhaps someone could suggest an alt method for displaying this info?
This is possible and you have some ways to do that: Workflow or Plug-in.
If you make a lot of calculations i think the best way is doing a plug-in. You can register in post create event of tickets entity and there you can make all this calculations and update the custom fields of contact entity.
You can check some tutorials about developing a plug-in:
http://mscrmshop.blogspot.pt/2010/10/crm-2011-plugin-tutorial.html
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg695782.aspx
http://crmconsultancy.wordpress.com/2010/10/25/plugins-in-crm-2011/
Specific information about registering a plug-in:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh237515.aspx
In SDK you can find more examples.
As far I'm aware, it's not possible to achieve without coding. So, if you're looking for a way to customize it by mousing, you might be just out of luck.
If you wish to display that information upon retrieval of the a customer, it's probably fastest to get it using JavaScript. You can add a custom script to onload event. However, that means that you'll have to write JavaScript so if you're not into coding you'll have problems.
If you do know how to code, perhaps creating a plugin with C# is the most preferred way (that's what I'd do at least). The advantage of that lies in extensibility, should you realize that you wish to perform more operations.
Also, if you wish to store the computed values, you'll have to go with a plugin. Otherwise, only GUI operations will perform the computations. If a program will enter/retrieve data in the background, you can't rely that the values will be computed, unless you listen to the messages of Retrieve, Create etc.
I have an external list built from a BCS .net assembly.
It's been in production for a year or so and works well but now the volumes are rising. We implemented paging which has made significant improvments but after adding paging, we lost filtering.
To be more specific, filtering works, but only against the single page dataset. i.e. I can filter on the 10 or 100 displayed records.
This is not what the business want. I need to find a way to pass the filters back to my backend system (which both have filtering support.
Any tips are appreciated.
Kind Regards,
Ashley
I'm evaluating Magento for a travel company who will need to do product searches and recommendations based on geographical distance. The company is creating custom holiday packages based on various components (eg: accommodation, tours, restaurant vouchers, etc). These components potentially have overlapping locations (ie: a particular tour might be close enough to several hotels to be considered related to each of them).
As a user builds up their custom package by adding stays at various hotels, I'd like related product recommendations to appear based on geographical location. And, if they search for tours, I'd like closer tours to be weighted toward the top of the catalogue search results.
Nice to have: the ability for the user to select how close / far they consider "close enough" to be (eg: 10km, 50km, 200km, etc).
My research indicates there isn't out of the box support for any sort of spatial queries in Magento. The best solution I could come up with was custom product attributes which list "location" where each product is manually assigned to various locations. But I think that's going to get pretty hard to manage for more than ~50 locations. Is my research correct? Is there an add-on / extension which will fulfil this scenario? Do you think overlapping 50 locations will be manageable in the backend?
Coming from a Microsoft background, my natural inclination would be to enable SQL Server 2008+ spacial functionality and do the queries in the database. Obviously, this option isn't available in the LAMP stack. Am I wrong? Does MySQL support spatial queries like WHERE productA.Location.GetDistanceFrom(productB.Location) < 50km?
Mysql supports spatial queries as well http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/4.1/en/spatial-extensions.html but nothing will help you or free you from entering the relations between products and it's location and you have to implement it yourself as well as extend the search based on location
I'm building a network business model in excel. A similar model is that of Gawker Media.
In my model I have a number properties that have some over lap of audience. Each property attracts users, which in turn affords cross promotional opportunities. In the case of Gawker they have a series of blogs whose audience will likely read several of their blogs in their network.
If gawker launched a new blog they're able to direct traffic from their blog network.
Creating a model for a single blog is fairly simple - although the initial assumptions are harder. The next step is to model the network effect.
Excel provides a scenarios manager that allows me to vary the key assumptions in the basic model. This is almost perfect, I can model the launch of 10 properties, each with different launch assumptions and see the summary.
Where I need help is figuring out how I can vary the initial number of users for the launch of each property. In other words, once the network is established, its possible to drive people to any new property launched on the network.
I don't believe the scenario manager will do what I need.
So, I'm wondering if its possible to use the model work sheet as a UDF? The UDF would need to spit out the monthly revenue and unique users given a number of input assumptions.
I would then be able to create my own summary sheet for the 10 properties and using the total uniques for each property get a summary for the network. This network summary would be used to determine how many people could be driven to the launch of a new property.
In effect, the only difference to the scenario manager is that I need one of my input variables (initial users) to be programmatically generated as a function of the number of people in the network at the time of launch.
I'm hoping its possible to achieve something along these lines in excel. I could drop down and create the whole model in Java, but then its much harder to share with business colleagues!
Thanks - Matt.
You could try Data Table.
It only allows you to analyse the effect of varying 2 input parameters, but you can create several data tables, and each parameter can take hundreds of different values.
It's little know, but efficient and available since Excel 3.0.
There is a product that I have researched but never used - search for calc4web. It takes a sheet of formulas and generates code (C++) that can be compiled into an XLL add-in. Then you can call a function that does what your sheet does. But of course then you have an XLL to distribute, and a build step every time you change your logic, which defeats much of the point of using a spreadsheet.
In my case, I wound up writing some very simple VBA code to vary my sheet "inputs" using the scenario manager, and capture my "outputs". This works if you have a batch of inputs that you can just point your macro at and step through.
EDIT:
See here for a VBA-only example of doing this:
using a sheet in an excel user defined function