Nice Read: Interview with Nigel Pendse

Posted by Gilles on 28/01/2010 under Articles, Nice Reads | Be the First to Comment

There is a very interesting interview with Nigel Pendse on the blog from Rittman Mead Consulting. Nigel Pendse is a business intelligence and OLAP analyst and the editor of The BI Verdict (formerly The OLAP Report) and author of The BI Survey (previously known as The OLAP Survey). The interview is about the BI tools market in general, but with a specific paragraph containing some good comments on Qlikview, in memory analysis and powerpivot.  Nigels most important conclusions: Qlikview is blazing fast, easy to use and aimed towards the business user, but less useful in large enterprise deployments. Powerpivot is, according to Nigel, just a way to push upgrading to office 2010, the all new vertipaq in memory engine is very impressive and powerpivot isn’t able to handle very complex Analysis Services cubes.

Nigel is further more very critical about the consolidations and innovations made in the BI tools market. He states: ”

Actually, I’m disappointed by the level of innovation in the BI tools market, even before the industry consolidation, which will certainly make it even worse.

Many of the claimed ‘innovations’ are actually rehashed versions of ideas that have been around for ages. For example, in-memory was the original BI architecture from more than 40 years ago (with APL), and column-oriented databases are almost as old. Dashboards, too, date back more than 25 years, to the brief EIS wave.

But there’s certainly been a lot of consolidation, which is probably bad news for customers, as they’ll be paying higher prices for products that don’t progress as much as they would otherwise have done (or which may be discontinued altogether). The new owners of the BI products are much more interested in integration between their many products, than innovation in non-core products.

Anyway, read the whole article at rittman mead blog, which is by the way THE source for all your oracle BI related issues and topics. Very very detailed how to’s and best practices.