@ca_nicholls threw out an interesting tweet on August 1:

In memory capability will make dashboards obsolete, statement just made by SAP CEO Aus & NZ. Do you agree? I don't.

This tweet has certainly piqued the interest of more than just a few at this point. It's a pretty bold statement. Could it be a misquote? It's possible. I definitely do not mean to discredit or disrespect @ca_nicholls in any way by that question, but let's consider that he got it spot on...

For the record...I don't think dashboards are going anywhere, but let's talk about it.

I caught a tweetstream the other day that Diversified Semantic Layer's friend and past guest, Michael Welter, had a question on diagnosing and solving for long running queries in Web Intelligence (Webi)...at least I think it was Webi. I saw it fly by and really wanted to weigh in, but it got away from me. I did not necessarily see answers to Michael's question in that time frame, so I wanted to take some things that occurred to me and that I use in my debugging process.

I may be overly sensitive to this topic, now that I think of it. My first employer had a very very large data warehouse (at the time, largest in the world every other month). While full of rich data, it was painfully slow and as a result BusinessObjects was the perceived as slow by the business. Let's work on that.  I'm going to keep this post within the confines of Webi.  There may be similar settings and techniques that can apply to Crystal Reports, Xcelsius, Explorer, etc. (even Deski...sorry Jamie).

Over the last few weeks I've been working full steam on a project to lay Xcelsius on top of BW (Accelerated no less). One of the cool capabilities of BW to significantly improve performance over standard parameters is to use variables. Variables pass straight through from the BW query and look like a prompt in Webi.  The variable is a parameter that gets passed to the BW query before it actually runs vs. being applied to the result set. This can net a significant performance gain.

A few weeks ago, Chris Greer discussed a handy way to get data from a Crystal Report (universe, stored procedure, flat file, etc.) to a nice, clean XML file. In this post I want to explore this concept a little bit further to illustrate how this approach to scheduled XML creation can significantly enhance the performance of Xcelsius dashboards.

Where we’ve been…

• Created a Crystal Report that got data
• Created a report header and footer that provided the enclosing elements for the XML
• Created a detail section with variables that created well-formed XML

Interactively hiding and showing series on a chart is something that end users have been asking for as long as I have been working with Xcelsius. In the past, to accomplish this relatively simple task, it required a great deal of acrobatics utilizing dynamic visibility. Now with Xcelsius 5.3.0.0 (SP3) we have a quick and simple way to set this up with built in functionality.