WhereScape Builds data warehouses right, now

Some would argue ‘Run for your Freak’n Life’ does not qualify as tough enough to grace the high standards of the tough wall. Although not your traditional long distance challenge, making your way through a 5k obstacle course, which closely resembled that of the Actual Tough Guy course, with the addition of some very fast zombies, for me placed it squarely in the tough category.

Each person has four streamers attached at the start of the race. The objective being to complete the course with at least one of your streamers still in tact. In our group ½ ended up half dead loosing two of the four whilst the others ended up ¾ dead.

The WhereScape trainees for up and coming apocalypse were Trevor Eastabrook, Dave Paul, and Stewart Lomax. With the addition of a late ringer from Vodafone, Eoghan O’Sullivan. Eoghan finished a very respectable fifth with two lives remaining. Trevor followed not too far behind whilst Dave and I decided to stick with the masses and came in around 38^th. Dave also brought his son along. I guess he figured the zombies would go after the young and vulnerable.  He was wrong, they went after the old and slow.

Although not with us, Jake was also there. Looking way too friendly with the Zombie at the finish line.

The seriousness of the zombies rubs off and you find yourself running full tilt to escape them. They were not only on the sidelines but in the obstacles with you. I’m sorry to say I sacrificed many of the other competitors for my own survival. Even a member of our own team (Sorry Paul).

This was the first year the zombie run has taken place. I’m sure they’ll be repeating the event as it was such a huge success.

Hopefully we’ll be able to get a few more WhereScape victims to attend next time.

All in all a great day out.

WhereScape, in conjunction with Microsoft and MIP had a very successful week at the Masters of Business Intelligence & Data Warehousing Down Under Tour 26 – 30^th March. It was a pleasure to bring three of the world’s foremost thought-leaders in Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing to New Zealand and Australia. Keynote speaker, Colin White started off the presentations at the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron in Auckland on Monday morning. His engaging presentation about next generation Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing had the audience enthused and questions and tweets using the #MastersofBI hash were rolling in. Claudia Imhoff then inspired everyone with her presentation on DIY BI and Analytics.  Mike Ferguson’s practical guide to Agile Data Warehousing and BI spurred the biggest discussion of the event as the audience debated his positioning of data virtualization – now there’s a topic for the next Masters of BI. Feedback from the attendees showed that they enjoyed the great mix of speaker’s knowledge and experiences and considered Jimmy Lee’s real life examples as a great addition to the event. By the time day one’s panel session started there were plenty of questions to be discussed and answered.

Day two started with a great talk from Paul Muckleston, Managing Director of Microsoft New Zealand.  Interest in his talk was particularly high given the imminent release of SQL Server 2012.  The sessions covered Big Data, Self-Service BI and Data Governance, as well as another cameo from Jimmy Lee on the value of cross functional teams in an agile world.

The sessions were repeated in Sydney a day later.  Highlights of the Sydney event included speakers being awarded 6 out of 5 by the audience, and Ron Dunn from Microsoft Australia’s superb introduction. Overall the four day event was a great success with beautiful weather, great speakers and an enthusiastic audience at both at the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron (March 26 & 27th) and Dolton House, Sydney (March 29 & 30th). The lunch breaks and evening drinks were a great opportunity for attendees to network and mix with the presenters.

Due to the great feedback we plan to do this event again…. Possibly Down Under in another 18 months or sooner in another part of the world!

Photos of the event can be viewed on our Facebook page

The “Dual” is a great event that allows you to experience the hills, rocks and water of a couple of well know Auckland Islands, Rangitoto and Motutapu.  We had heard from people who had done this before that it was tough so we thought we’d give it a go.

On top of the rigorous training in the months leading up to the event, pre event hydration and carbo-loading on Friday lunchtime before was a must and can be seen below:

We had three mountain bikers in the 50km long ride and one runner in the 21/km trail half marathon

Once on the islands after a very pleasant scenic ferry ride, pre start checks were carried out and last minute food, drink, sunscreen application and banana hiding took place.

The 21km half marathon – entirely off-road loop course, and includes contrasting sections on gravel road, single track (forest & volcanic / lava sections), and wide flowing grass track and trails. The total ascent (ie. vertical metres gained) over the course is 553 metres.  Jacob finished in a very impressive 2hrs 15m and only had a few minor blisters at the finish line.

The 50km Mountain Bike – includes contrasting sections on the following terrain; gravel road, single track (forest & volcanic / lava sections), and wide flowing grass track and trails. The total ascent (ie. vertical metres gained) over the course is 1334 metres.  Nick, Stuart and Steve all finished between 3hrs 25m and 4hrs 20m.  Event adventures included brake failure/roadside repairs on Rangitoto Volcano, muscle cramps, pushing bikes up ridiculously steep hills, cycling off tracks into ditches and walking though streams.

Some event photos below show the touch terrain and beautiful country, plus the WhereScape’s finest athletes making light of another tough event

The finish line was a welcome sight, especially when you had pushed your bike as far as a few of us.

Hot debate continued long into the afternoon over a few refreshing beers about whether a 21km cross country half marathon was more challenging than a 50km cross country mountain bike.  Jacob’s comment of “How hard can cycling be ?  you’re sitting down” didn’t go down too well with the rather fatigued old timer cyclists.  The beers kept flowing all afternoon (we even helped fundraise for the restoration an old building on Motutapu by consuming beer!) and on the ferry home.

A great day and we will be back next year in greater numbers and will also stay on later into the evening for the accoustic concert.

Well done guys……

Someone asked me the other day: “How do I fix this data file before I load it?”

All they wanted to do was change one value that contained a reserved word their loader couldn’t cope with.

They were on windows and didn’t want to write anything that needed compiling (c, vb, etc).

Finally, it needed to run from DOS in a RED host script.

Here’s what we came up with – a really simple DOS program that generates and runs a windows powershell script:

@ECHO OFF
SETLOCAL ENABLEDELAYEDEXPANSION
SETLOCAL ENABLEEXTENSIONS
SET INFILE=c:\in.txt
SET OUTFILE=c:\out.txt
SET OLDSTRING=oldval
SET NEWSTRING=newval
SET FILEPS1=%WSL_WORKDIR%\wsl%WSL_SEQUENCE%.ps1
SET FILEAUD=%WSL_WORKDIR%\wsl%WSL_SEQUENCE%.aud
ECHO Get-Content “%INFILE%” ^| ForEach-Object { $_ -replace “%OLDSTRING%”, “%NEWSTRING%” } ^| Set-Content “%OUTFILE%” > %FILEPS1% 2>%FILEAUD%
powershell -command . %FILEPS1% >> %FILEAUD% 2>&1
ECHO 1
ECHO The string %OLDSTRING% in %INFILE% has been replaced by the string %NEWSTRING% to create %OUTFILE%
TYPE %FILEAUD%
EXIT

If you want to use this, just paste it into a RED host script and change the four variable SET statements to your file names and strings…

Once again, the “wannabe” tough WhereScapers took on the 2012 “Colville Connection”, a 72km (45 mile) mountain bike race around the tip of the “Coromandel Peninsula”.  Some of us had done this before and knew how hard this ride is, with most of the roads being rough metal with some huge hills and the non road sections being rough mud/rock/metal with some huge hills.  Some sections of the race have some really huge drop offs down to the sea and rocks below and some hills are so steep that you have to carry/push your bike up them….not for the faint hearted.

Due to a last minute injury of a thumb, we lost our strongest talking and only intelligent 33% and had only the two of us there on the day.

Adventures during the race were constant and between the two of us we managed to: ride into a ditch, ride into bushes, get hit on the head by large branches, ride into a rock face, bang our heads on rocks and go over the handlebars on a corner and somersault down a grassy bank with a bike!  There was also rain on and off and a very nasty headwind on the home 20km stretch.

Nick was taking part for the first time and finished in a very respectable 4 hrs 21 minutes and Steve beat his personal best and took 4 hrs 49 minutes.

Photos show Nick and Steve trying various methods of potential banana storage and post race photo looking very weary.

We hope to see more brave WhereScapers there next year.

Go the “Tough” guys…..

One of the guys was tidying up and came across a CD of one of the first releases of WhereScape RED.

Here it is, in all its glory….WhereScape RED version 1:

And what we supported way back when:

Aaahhh, those were the days.

This week we’re lucky to have Paul McCormick and Dave Welensky from Ixia Consulting in South Africa (www.ixiaconsulting.co.za) with us in New Zealand for partner and reseller training.

Rather than take Dave and Paul out for the usual Golf and endless dinners, we offer them a chance to go mountain biking in Woodhill Forrest north of Auckland last night.

Steve, Jason and Jacob left the city with Dave and Paul at 4pm for Woodhill.  Once everyone had a bike, we were off.  It turns out both guys love mountain biking and were keen to share stories of massive thrones that puncture tires, elephant stopping races, snakes blocking paths and baboons trying to steal your stuff whenever you stop.

We ended up doing about 13km (8 miles) of single track followed by 4km (2.5 miles) of gravel roads back to the carpark:

No ride is complete without some cooling down time so we stopped off at Hallertau Brewery in Riverhead for dinner on the way back to the city.

After skidding and sliding around all afternoon, Steve has promised to lower his tire pressure below 80 psi for future rides.

L to R: Steve, Dave, Paul, Jacob and Jason

WhereScape RED 7 adds support for analytic appliances, bringing rapid and agile data warehouse development and management to the entire data ecosystem

TDWI LAS VEGAS– February 13, 2012 –WhereScape today introduced WhereScape RED 7, a new release of its integrated data warehouse development environment that supports today’s leading database appliances. WhereScape will be demonstrating WhereScape RED 7 support of IBM Netezza and EMC Greenplum in booth #501 at the TDWI World Conference in Las Vegas.

WhereScape RED 7 generates code that will run on the appliance through a fully featured user interface, enabling practitioners to generate the same code they would otherwise have to handcraft. In the case of IBM Netezza, WhereScape 7 will enable practitioners to utilize the IBM Netezza platform for ETL transformations, generate NZPLSQL set based SQL, as well as creating tables, all of which are documented and all automatically included in WhereScape’s integrated and open metadata repository.

WhereScape RED enables practitioners to access source data from multiple environments, create procedural code, scripts, and tables, build cubes, schedule updates, and generate documentation in HTML format, all while maintaining existing BI front-end compatibility. In addition to the analytical appliance integration announced today, WhereScape RED provides native support for Teradata as well as IBM DB2, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server.

“The days of the enterprise data warehouse operating as the centralized hub for all reporting and analytics is a thing of the past. Database appliances are gaining traction as IT organizations warm to the notion of using purpose-built platforms for specific analytic tasks, but the speed of the platforms has naturally outpaced the productivity tools needed to support them” said Shawn Rogers, Vice President of Research, Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing, Enterprise Management Associate. “WhereScape RED 7 is ideally suited for today’s highly diverse, special-purpose IT infrastructures. WhereScape has increased its value proposition by moving from ‘let us build and manage your data warehouse’ to ‘let us manage your extended data ecosystem, which includes your data warehouse’,” Rogers said.

“Speaking as both a current WhereScape and Netezza customer, I am very excited by the announcement that WhereScape RED will be now be supporting IBM Netezza appliances,” said Johan Vendrig, GM of Information Services for healthAlliance, a New Zealand-healthcare services organization. “The development speed of WhereScape RED and the power of Netezza make for a great combination.”

“When WhereScape RED was first introduced, the data warehouse consisted of a single database, and we integrated our software with four of the industry leaders—Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2, Oracle and Teradata,” added WhereScape CEO Michael Whitehead. “Our customers and prospects now want to develop and deploy quickly across a multi tiered data warehouse environment. We are committed to providing appliance customers a seamless, end-to-end experience for quickly developing their data warehouse infrastructure as well as help them maximize their use of it. WhereScape RED helps accelerate the development of data warehouses and enables organizations to them in less time, with less money, while mitigating risk and resulting in fully documented implementations,” Whitehead said.

About WhereScape

WhereScape design, develop, sell and support WhereScape 3D, the industry’s first data warehouse planning tool; and WhereScape RED, the industry’s first and best integrated development environment for building, deploying, managing and renovating data warehouses.

WhereScape’s products are used in every kind of business intelligence project found in today’s commercial environment: from normal-form enterprise data warehouses and data vaults, through user access layers and tiers of dependent data marts, to standalone data marts and reporting systems.

Our more than 500 customers are active and satisfied users of our technologies, and report that, with WhereScape’s products, they are able to build data warehouses with fewer people, few if any diversions, missed deadlines or unmet user expectations, and in record time: in days or weeks, instead of months or years. WhereScape has offices in Portland Oregon, Auckland New Zealand, and Wokingham UK. For more information, please visit www.wherescape.com.

All products or company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Contacts

For WhereScape:
Scott R. Humphrey
Humphrey Strategic Communications
503-644-9709
humphrey@strategic-pr.com
TDWI Booth #501

The WhereScape Christmas night out for staff was in Auckland in late December 2011 and kicked off with a few swift “sharpeners” at the very trendy Britomart Country club bar in the afternoon. Luckily there were some other BI bodies from Vodafone there to keep us company before we headed to “Monsoon Poon” in the Viaduct in Auckland. It’s a large Asian fusion restaurant and they didn’t have a table big enough to accommodate the 32 of us who turned up. This got a bit rowdy after three and a half hours of food, cocktails and jugs of beer so we moved on to the even more trendy Snap Dragon bar also in the viaduct. At this stage some of were a little wobbly and had to bluff our way past the ridiculous number of security staff. Apparently some of us also looked a little too scruffy to be allowed in but we all got in eventually. After a few more hours there we finished the night with no style at all at Danny Doolan’s dark, dingy bar until after 3am.

Thanks to all who made the effort to turn up and made it a fun night, especially the Hamilton crew.

In the photos you can see two things:
i) Mike holding one of the longest bills ever at Monsoon Poon. Coincidentally we had all suddenly gone outside at this point so thanks for paying.
ii) The tragic effects of having one too many as a couple of BI Guys do a bit of boy bonding in Snap Dragon.

Happy New Year to all WhereScapers, 2012 will be a great year!

On the 10 January 2012, Phil, who was the Head of Consulting at MIP (WhereScape Master Distributor in Australia), passed away and our thoughts & prayers go out to Gail and the family at this difficult time.

Phil was passionate about his agile business intelligence work and he was instrumental in establishing WhereScape RED in the Australian market.

It was a pleasure to have known him & he will be missed.

Farewell big fella … Perry

• Put the script_html_merge.bat script into RED documentation directory.
• Double click on it to execute manually; it will create doc.html merged file. The execution of the script_html_merge.bat script can also be scheduled via RED Scheduler.
• Download http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/ PDF creator a free PDF printer for Windows. If desired, the other similar product can be used.
• After the installation, it will create PDF Creator printer.
• Open doc.html and print it to PDF Creator – it will create PDF file.
• For PDF creation, you can use any other tool allowing printing into PDF or convert HTML into PDF; I used PDF Creator simply because it is free and it does a good job.
• The code is two lines really, see attached code below

Note: Obviously, you can print out one doc at a time by Right Click on the doc and choose Print from dropdown menu

REM  *****************************************************************************

REM  Script Name    :    script_html_merge

REM  Description     :    Merges all the RED Documentation HTML files into one HTML file

REM  Generated by  :    WhereScape RED, manually

REM  Generated for :    WhereScape Customer

REM  Author              :    Raphael Klebanov

REM  *****************************************************************************

echo OFF

copy index.html doc.html

REM FOR %%G IN (dir /B w*.html) DO (copy doc.html+%%G d && copy d doc.html && del d)

FOR %%G IN (dir w*tech.html w*user.html ) DO (copy doc.html+%%G d  && copy d doc.html && del d)

REM this line will put the “tech” files first, then “user” files

REM  *****************************************************************************

REM  Notes

REM  *****************************************************************************

REM  1. “FOR %%G”  means for (each item)

REM  2. “/B” switch enabling the batch file to quit with a return code. “/B” option can be removed. I do not see any issues.

REM  3. DO (…&&…) means run the command following && only if the command preceding the symbol is successful.

REM  4. Small “d” is a temporary file used as a temporary copy.

REM  5. If the list of the files always contains the same files, then the remaining files can be added before or after w*, e.g. glossary.html

REM  6. To prevent cut off the images, configure the PDF Printer, e.g., use landscape instead of portrait.

REM  7. You can modify list of HTMLs that are processed within DO statement to include/exclude the doc files

Good luck!

Sunday 11 December 2011 was the first time cyclists have been able to ride over the Auckland Harbour Bridge since it opened in 1959. They also got to ride up the Northern Busway. The event was the “Telstra Challenge”. Several thousand people took the opportunity to ride the bridge.

The tough guy option was the 110km (68 mile) race. This was a difficult ride including 1550m of ascent (that’s 5000ft) and finishing at Kumeu show grounds north west of Auckland. Lucky participants got to ride past the front door of New Zealand’s only maximum security prison at Paremoremo then through some great scenery. There was even a 3.5km gravel (lose stone) section just before half way.

The not-so-tough guy option was 15km bike ride equivalent of a “Sunday stroll”. It included a leisurely ride over the harbour bride, a gentle cruise up the busway to Constellation Drive and a gentle roll back down to Shakespeare Road.

All money raised by the event will be used to support the work of the MS Society in Auckland and for MS research. The latest estimate of funds raised is $82000.

William Hayman (fresh from completing the round Lake Taupo 160km race two weeks ago) and Jason Laws both get massive congratulations for completing the 110km race. Super fit Jacob Hendrickx also deserves a mention for getting out of bed earlier than normal on a Sunday to roll his bike over the 15km ride.

The 6am start turned into a 7:15 start for most riders due to an “unknown hold up”. Even the elite professional group (averaging 1% body fat) were left shivering in 25 knot winds waiting to start. Luckily Jason and William were better prepared for the wind than the elite group and quickly warmed up with all the hill climbing. Both agreed it was a harder ride than Taupo (although shorter).

Jason finished in 05:05 on his single speed bike. William, with 20 gears to choose from, was just behind managing an admirable 05:19. There’s a rumour 10% of the 110km starters didn’t finish. After taking the smart option and choosing the untimed “Sunday stroll” ride, Jacob was cited in a cafe in Takapuna at 9am.

Being keen supporters of any charity who are prepared to sponsor and organise an event and give away goodie bags, WhereScape had a strong contingent entered in this years “The Great New Zealand Santa Run”.

All jokes aside, the KidsCan charity is a fantastic charity that supports disadvantaged Kiwi children.  With at least one in six New Zealand children living in poverty, this was a cause we wanted to raise money for.

KidsCan helps by providing food, school shoes, rain coats and other items to children in lower socio economic areas.  KidsCan assists children in schools where the needs are most acute and provides them with resources to overcome the physical obstacles to education.

 The event itself takes place in 6 locations across New Zealand and we entered the Auckland one, which consisted of a very short, 3km in length, completely flat course in the Viaduct Harbour.  Compared to some of the events we have done we thought this would be a walk in the park but we had forgotten the most difficult thing would be to run on a really hot summer night in a really hot and itchy Santa suit with a beard that was hard to breathe through!

 Last year there were 350 Santas taking part, but this year the numbers were up to 850 which was an amazing sight to see, especially for people dining in the Viaduct.  Despite the Santa suits all being “One size fits all” you can clearly see from the photo that some were a little tighter than others.

“What about the Chicken ?” I hear you ask.  Well, that just happens to the WhereScape CEO and Co Founder, Michael Whitehead.  We are not sure why he chose to run in an outfit that was even hotter than our “super hot” Santa suits (he even added a Santa skirt after the photo was taken), but the crowds loved and cheered the WhereScape “Chicken Man”.  They took some persuading that Mike was actually supposed to be a Christmas Turkey but a great effort.

A great laugh for a great cause and as usual we’ll be looking for even more people next year to take part to see if WhereScape can beat eleven Santas and one chicken, I mean turkey…..

A big thanks to all who took part.

The Lake Taupo Cycle Challenge is New Zealand’s largest cycling event and the world’s largest cycling relay.  Being a little competitive and big talkers, we all decided to skip the relay and do the “solo” event which is the full 160km anti clockwise circuit of the lake.

Apprehension crept in the night before as the wind woke some of us in the middle of the night, and sure enough by 7.30am the gusts had got even worse.  We seemed to have a headwind for the first 90km (including up hills!) then some side winds then no wind then some more headwinds as we approached the last 20km back into Taupo.  Where was the tailwind we all wondered…..

The highlights were the scenery, the amazing sight of Thousands of cyclists doing an event, the endless hills on the western side of the lake and crossing the finish line.

 This is definitely one event for the “Tough Wall” in the office as it was the hardest event all of us had attempted, physically, mentally and towards the end…..emotionally.

None of us managed to break seven hours, which we all agreed was a very long time to be sitting on a tiny plastic seat.

As usual, congratulations to Stephen Dickens, Wayne Lanting & William Hayman who all finished this gruelling ride.  We’re all looking forward to next year and will hopefully have a larger team!

WhereScape finishers from previous Lake Taupo Cycle Challenge events:  Jason Laws, Scott McKay & Chris Wyllie.