I tried to create a connection in SQL Developer with a remote SQL Server database. The first steps to configure Oracle SQL Developer are described in the introductory article to SQL Developer, and had already done some testing with a SQL Server installed on the same machine as SQL Developer, but when I tried to do it with a remote BD SQL Server I found some additional difficulty that I think it's interesting to comment.

Great video showing through the use of social media an original story of Jesus' birth at Christmas.

Besides being fun, it's a good way to make a quick tour of the main features of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google, Wikipedia, Google Maps, GMail, Foursquare or Amazon ...

How times change:)

Redgate has organized a contest for DBA's with a spectacular prize: A space trip!

The winner will be the first DBA to go into space. A very original initiative. If you want to apply, visit the page www.dbainspace.com

If you take part, count with my vote 

This is the promotional video of DBA in space: 

Good luck!

This article is the first of a total of three that we are going to publish from LITEBI, each one will be part of a Whitepaper focused on the effects and contributions of Business Intelligence to the company from the point of view of the CEO. 

What is Business Intelligence?

Wikipedia gives us the following definition on this concept:
“Computer-based techniques used in identifying, extracting, and analyzing business data, such as sales revenue by products and/or departments, or by associated costs and incomes”

In other words, software tools that enable that all the information of a company (sales, purchases, financial information, production, marketing, etc.) “flows” in an organized way through the business, reaching the right person, at the right time. To this, in LITEBI we would also note that achieving Intelligence needs full-featured and integrated tools to manage and optimize the performance of the company as a whole and to align it with the business strategy.

A tool with all these characteristics makes things easier for those in charge of the decision making in each department: a CFO, a Sales Manager, a CEO or a Controller.

In a Linkedin debate members have proposed a list of references and useful links about Cognos BI, as well as forums, blogs and resources. I've organized a bit the proposals. I hope you find it useful..

MySQL has some special features when making a connection from a remote client that if we do not know can complicate access to a MySQL database from a different machine that hosts the database.

With other databases such as Oracle or SQL Server, once that no firewall or anything like that prevents us from the client machine access to the server, using normally data acces from a database user we can 'enter'.

With MySQL, although access to the port, usually 3306, is open, the database can be configured to shut out external connections, and the result is the same as if the port was closed by a firewall..

Interesting tutorial about Aggregate Table Management with Mondrian (Pentaho)

The emergence of twitter, facebook, Groupon, amazon, etc ... is becoming increasingly popular new forms of large data storage and fast access to them. The terms NoSQL , Big Data , Hadoop ... are rapidly becoming popular.

Not long ago we talked about it:

- Comparison of NoSQL Databases ( Cassandra , MongoDB , CouchDB , Redis , Riak and HBase ) 
- Infographics, the potential for big data . 
- Pentaho also is accelerating much its integration with Big Data.

Today we give you some more detailed presentations, where we can research:  

I found very interesting the initiative of the European Central Bank, to provide a statistical service on-line in the so-called Statistical Data Warehouse (SDW).

This Data Warehouse is aimed at a broad spectrum of users (financial analysts, journalists, businesses, economists, researchers, etc. ..). Provides macroeconomic data on-line in the euro zone: inflation, exchange rates, labor costs, unemployment, productivity, public deficit, public debt, payments balance, international investment position, sociodemographic data, tax information, etc...

Addressing a business intelligence project is important to proper assessment of the ETL tool that we will use. The tool based on which we will implement our procurement processes of the Datamart, Datawarehouse or storage structure based on which further exploit the data. It is a cornerstone for the design, construction and subsequent evolution of our BI system. We will analyze technical issues only, without entering into the economic aspects or otherwise (licenses, agreements, technical support, tool changes, etc. ..) . Note that the ETL processes, are closely linked to the processes of data profiling and data quality, here we will not consider.