Metadata for BI Solutions in the Microsoft stack

Hi Mr. Russo,

I’m terribly sorry, perhaps I didn’t understood you correctly, but when you say that Microsoft doesn’t have metadata for BI Solutions, aren’t you overlooking the SQL Server Metadata Toolkit and the Rowset Viewer?

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/SqlServerMetadata/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=1174

http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/barbaro/archive/2007/12/29/discovering-your-metadata.aspx  

Or are you saying you find them as incomplete solutions to your needs?

Could I possibly ask you to clarify your point?

With thanks in advance,

Ella

Hi Mr. Russo,

Thank you for your quick and detailed reply. I see what you mean now, and I admit I know of no solution that answers the needs you raised. You make a very good point.

Thank you,

Ella

Hi Marco,

What I know of Oslo is that it builds on a very essential link that is currently missing today in almost every platform (even SAP). That is the functional - natural language - fact models and business rules where applications and data models should build upon.

As you mention, this could be a great platform to build IT solutions (including BI) from. The short term problem you have this fundamentally changes the way people build software today. Looking at the past with business rule engines-companies and where they are today, this does indicate that the whole world must build model driven in the future to get most benefit. This is not realistic I think.

As a company we are currently looking into how to build BI systems model driven, but the handicap you have is that a BI systems is always are a snapshot of the metadata of OLTP systems at a certain point in time. When they do not synchronise metadata automatically I am afraid you end up building separate environments with separate lifecycles.

In my opinion integrated platforms (ERP + CRM + BI + ...) built upon model driven architectures might score very well in this situations.

But the next problem you run into is: what to do with external and unstructured metadata that you don't control / own?

In the end, a very interesting topic and we certainly will take a look at what Oslo can bring to the BI space. We certainly do also find that standards like SBVR play a key role in this area.  

Ron Torrico

Hi Marco,

This is a very timely topic for me. In my consulting capacity, I have ended up writing some custom apps to help our clients manage their metadata. There are three issues I am seeing with customers relating to metadata:

1) Ability to mine existing metadata out of the SSAS and relational databases, keeping dependencies between both.

2) Ability to easily manage an online corporate glossary and tie these business terms and definitions to elements of the data warehouse. (This to me is a huge problem on the business side that often gets overlooked by us folks on the IT side).

3) Ability to tie process/job control tables or functions to the metadata in the repository.

4) Ability to tie this in with downstream applications. For instance, if you had a metadata chain from enterprise reports --> data dictionary --> data warehouse elements -->process control/ jobs, you could really add visibility to both the IT and the business sides.

Another question for all of you: Where do you think business metadata (i.ei dictionaries)  should be stored and managed? Within BIDS? Within a separate application, like a web front end? Is anyone actually using extended properties or descriptions to house their business metadata?

I am very interested in hearing if this resonates with people or have you already found solutions out there that do all of this?

Here's a link to a webinar I did recently on this subject. One of the challenges I am finding is educating the business side about metadata and why it costs them so much money to ignore it.  http://www.tallan.com/events/pages/090416-246a4bc7c08846f48ca70645d5e4435a.html

Hi Marco,

I attended a presentation of MS Marcel Westra about MS MDM, available in SQL Server 2008 R2 Master Data Services (http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/mds.aspx).I was greatly impressed by his presentation, with functions like:

"Master Data Hub that provides central management of master data entities and hierarchies and provides a comprehensive role based security model that ensures fine-grained, secure access to master data."

and

"Flexible Data Model completely defined in a metadata driven data model. Data administrators are free to define the data model in any way that satisfies the needs of their organization. As new business entities appear or current business entities change, the master data hub data model can change to accommodate the new business requirements."

it appears to be the masterdata management tool you were asking for.

What i would like to know is how this data will be made available to the organisation? By means of Dublin with entities described by Oslo? and how the BI get access to this data, Gemini to use the Berlin webservices? It would alter the way we work greatly but i like the SOA way of getting the data to not only BI but other applications in the organisation. Or would this MDM replace our datawarehouse and would we Query it to fill our cubes/reports.

So many question, but still great changes are on the horizon.

Kasper

The whitepaper about metadata driven ETL architecture has somewhat remarkably been removed http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc313017.aspx.

MDM is about distributing likewise business keys throughout diverse apps easyfying integration efforts.

MS Oslo, for now, provides the foundational layers which will expand over the total MS stack to provide MDA engineering. Somewhat different with current MDA approaches it is able to run Apps as a model instead of codegenerated apps which 'comes from models'. The difference in MDA style , like the UML PIM camp it could serve, can be found here http://loekb.blogspot.com/2006/02/will-real-mda-please-stand-up.html. A MDA fashion also executed by Mendix.com, a 'cool vendor' stipulated by gartner.

A few days ago, I talked about Oslo and metadata issues with BI stack . I got several comments and the

hello

with SQL 2008 R2 does it offer the metadata management for BI solution ?

I am new to this and try to find how to put in place metadata management.

thanks

Al.

Hi Marco,

Have you seen Microsoft's Project Barcelona yet?  It looks really neat.  I was impressed by the "Web Crawler" approach to collecting enterprise-wide meta-data.  Plus, they plan on letting us write our own crawlers for non-MS products (like Oracle, or Business Objects for example...).

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/project_barcelona_team_blog/

Best,

Chris

Hi ,

I'm interested with this topic. Recently we have build a BI Reporting Solution on SSRS platform, but the data warehouse is produced in Oracle environment (ETL & Database as well).

In the future, we have plan to build a "Business" Metadata solution to make easier for the users while browsing the report from SSRS, they could also get some answers of most questions such :

*) where does the data come from ?

*) what is the formula to get the value ?

*) what are the justification to have that kind of value ,

*) etc..

Do you suggest we should just prepare a separate repository table, insert the documentation manually,  and displayed it on SSRS ? :)

Thanks

Octoni Simbolon

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