My Business Intelligence Experience

Currently I'm exploring new BI tools after attending some demos from major vendors like SAP and Microsoft. Microsoft has a free BI excel plug in that's simple to learn and use but very powerful, it's called power pivot. You can download it from www.powerpivot.com - check it out. Microstrategy has similar architecture as Cognos so it's easy to learn it from Administration,Development and Design perspectives.

I use prompts in FWM time to time when the data is huge and I want to filter it right from table and also in manual SQL. Every time I use it I search for the syntax so i thought would share it here: Macro-   #prompt(‘pmtName’,’ datatype’)# Parameter Map-  #$parametermap{prompt(‘ pmtName’,’datatype’)}#  Session Parameter-   #$parametermap{$ Sessionparameter}# Date Prompt-  to_date(#prompt('Start/END Date', 'varchar')#,'yyyy-mm-dd') If you have multiple values to pass on to these prompts use  'in' as part of where clause. where Data_Item = (#prompt('Param_Name', 'varchar')#)