Work » Ross Goodman

Blogging Whilst Employed – Beware!

Business Objects, Dimensional Modelling, Work, XI 3.0 7 Responses »

Mar 232009

photo credit: eshm
I was having a flick through my employment contract and I found the following clause:

13.2
You agree that during the course of this contract and after the termination of the contract for whatever reason without limit in point in time you will keep in confidence and shall not disclose to any person unless authorised to do so with the prior written consent of the Company the following:-
13.2.1 Any consultancy know-how, methods, tools, techniques or intellectual capital.

I realised that some of my blog entries or tweets could fall foul of this clause so I asked for written permission to continue blogging generic “work related” content such as Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, Data Modelling and Business Objects.
Rather than granting this and leveraging the fairly good google rankings that my posts seem to get I was asked to remove all work related posts.
Business Objects Best Practice (higher ranking than BusinessObjects.com)
Business Objects New Features (Page One)
Dimensional Modelling (Ralph Kimball ?)
As such I have password protected all of my work related posts.
If you are struggling to find content there are a variety of searches that could turn up interesting content.
Alternatively you can go to my company site, contact details can be found here or here.

A Song For Business Intelligence ?

Work No Responses »

Mar 112009

What song do you think best sums up Business Intelligence?

photo credit: mistress_f
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Protected: Business Objects – Best Practice – Report Design

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Mar 042009

Business Objects – Best Practice – Universe Design

Business Objects, MIG, Maxima, Maxima Information Group, Work 7 Responses »

Mar 012009

Business Objects – Best Practice – Universe Design

The purpose of this document is to provide a description of what I consider to be best practice when designing a Business Objects Universe. We will also describe the reasoning behind the suggestion.

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GTD and RTM – The Missing Link (Penny Drops)

Work 2 Responses »

Jan 312009

I’m a big fan of Remember The Milk (RTM) and David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD).
The one concept that I have been missing in the whole process is how to set reminders for following up emails.
I regularly use a waitingfor tag and a tag for each persons name but my habit of actually creating the task is not quite there yet.
The habit is no longer needed now.
I have “discovered” that from RTM | Settings | Info there is an “Inbox EMail Address”. For any e-mail I want to chase I simply BCC the message to this address and it creates a task in my inbox. The body of the message goes into a note attached to the task.
All I have to do then is move it to the appropriate list and set any tags or due date.
I would recommend using BCC, if anyone discovers your inbox e-mail address then they will be able to create tasks in your inbox too!

A Year In Retrospect

Business Objects, Dimensional Modelling, Emma, Family, Photography, This Site, Twitter, Work, XI 3.0, Xcelsius 2008 No Responses »

Dec 312008

Just a quick summary of my on-line presence this year.

Twitter

I have invested a lot of content to Twitter this year.
This is primarily due to the convenience of the platform racking up almost 1200 updates in the year here.

Flickr / Photography

I can’t find a way to get stats for the year so here are my top five photos:

Web Site / Blog

By far the most popular post on the site was the photos page here.
Second most popular page is the “About Me” page here.
As for the blog entries themselves they rank at:
1 – Business Objects XI 3.0 New Features – Conditional Prompts
2 – Crystal Xcelsius – Filtered Rows From A Filter Component
3 – Modelling Change In Your Dimensions
4 – Business Objects XI 3.0 New Features – Change Data Tracking
5 – Dimensional Modelling – Facts
As you can see here the site only really started getting traffic last January so that gives me 17300 page views.

Personal Stuff

Obviously the biggest news of the year was the passing of my daughter Emma.
Celebrating the Life of Emma Berry Goodman
And the year ends on another low point with the passing of another member of my extended family.
George Miller – Footballer | 1939 – 2008

Protected: Security – TrueCrypt – Encrypt Your Files

MIG, Maxima, Maxima Information Group, Technology, Work Enter your password to view comments.

Dec 112008

Protected: Oracle Design Tool – SQL Developer Data Modelling

Dimensional Modelling, MIG, Maxima, Maxima Information Group Enter your password to view comments.

Nov 302008

Crystal Xcelsius – Filtered Rows From A Filter Component

Business Objects, MIG, Maxima, Maxima Information Group, Work, Xcelsius 2008 4 Responses »

Aug 272008

This is really obvious with hindsight but it took me ages before “the penny dropped”.
Most of the time I find myself using the “Filtered Rows” option on my selectors.
The main selector that I want to use is the “Filter”, but strangely this does not have the option of filtered rows.
What I have resorted to doing in the past is to use multiple selectors:
A date drop down list box filters the rows from “Raw Data” sheet to the “Monthly” sheet.
A product drop down list box filters the rows from the “Monthly” sheet to the “MonthlyProducts” sheet.
A customer drop down list box filters the rows from the “MonthlyProducts” sheet to the “MonthlyProductsCustomers” sheet which now lists all of the sales made for that combination.
The filter component could do that, but this component assumes that there will only be a single row in the output. As soon as you have multiple rows in your result set then you can’t use the filter component.
Ahhh, but you can with a little lateral thinking; that’s what Xcelsius is all about.
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