MSBIC 2008 Day Two

General Session

Crushed.


Don't get me wrong, Ben Stein is a FUNNY guy. He had some great comment on the current financial crisis, how it got to be so bad, and his relatively positive outlook on how it looks going forward.

But even with the humour, he wasn't a spectacular speaker. It was a rambling, disjointed, unfocused comedy hour with healthy doses of sober reality thrown in. And the "reality" bits had absolutely no tie back to BI or Microsoft.  It was a nice break (like a BI Power Hour) but not of any real benefit.

The second half panel discussion can be summed up in one word - crickets. Yes, the audience evaporated continuously as the "panel" of Platinum Sponsors alternated between bald-faced sell jobs of their companies and uninspired commentary on BI trends.  Bob Lokken who moderated the panel asked some very good questions - but for the most part, the panel fell down badly in answering them. When Bob asks "where do you see BI five years from now?", I don't want to hear the (obvious) "I see storage and analysis requirement of petabytes or zetabytes of data". Duh. Like I said, crickets. The standout was Todd ? from Hitachi consulting - he had some vision, and wasn't trying to sell anything.

Unless there's clear evidence of a different focus in the promo material for the next MS BI Conference when that time comes around, I won't be attending - despite the stellar technical content.

High Points of the Day

The SSRS Programmability Chalk Talk was well done, and got me a little demo of what I wanted to see: "push" reporting.  In short, we want to render our ERP reports in SSRS, passing SSRS a completely fabricated and ready-to-render dataset.  No "pull" querying by SSRS or parameters required.  I will post up a summary of how to do that when we get around to making it work, because it's a solution that allows Microsoft to compete against Business Objects' Crystal Reports - in our environment anyway.

The "Driving Business Value" session was the first (that I'd found) that echoed what I'd seen in MS BIC 2007 - a session that primarily addressed the "why do BI?" question.  The business exec I brought along attended that one, and the short two minute conversation we got in after the session, and before he had to deal with real business was positive.  I think that one is a winner, and may salvage the conference for him.

The BI Power Hour winner: Carolyn's SSRS "Speed Battleship" game.  Yes, an honest-to-goodness game of Battleship using SSRS 2008.  Hilarious!  She had two audience members use two laptops to play, each one with an interface that showed the "empty" playing grid they "shot" at (by clicking).  To the side, they could see another smaller grid showing their own fleet arrangement.  When they "shot" at the enemy grid, their click was pushed back to the SSRS server and registered.  They received the feedback of a "splash" or "explosion" on that grid cell to indicate if they'd hit the enemy or not.  On their own fleet grid (to the right) they saw their enemy's shot results - the misses and hits their competition was lobbing their way.  She called it "Speed" Battleship because there was no turn-basis for it - the faster clicker could shoot faster.  Carolyn did say they would publish the RDL... Apparently, the team actually crashed their SSRS server when they played several games at the same time.  So there you go - want to performance test your SSRS farm?  Play Battleship...