It’s that time again: Since 2003, SQL Server Magazine has invited SQL Server professionals to submit their most creative solutions to technical problems
to the annual SQL Server Magazine Innovators contest. Our winning entries this
year—one grand prize, three runners-up, and two honorable mentions—show yet
again that SQL Server pros are a resourceful, technically adept bunch and emphasize
the prominent position that development has in the SQL Server pro’s skill set. The
solutions, though diverse, highlight SQL Server’s value as a tool for providing
essential business information.
Grand Prize
Ermedin “Dino” Selmanovic, BI Solution Architect
Moore Stephens Consulting, London
ermedin.selmanovic@moorestephens.com
Intelligent Install
When Ermedin “Dino” Selmanovic and his eight-member development
team at Moore Stephens Consulting, a UK-based firm specializing in
developing custom applications for the insurance industry, proposed a business intelligence (BI) solution for a client two years ago, their real challenge
wasn’t choosing the solution’s components, as The Challenge was using the
components together. Microsoft provides a strong set of BI tools for SQL
Server. Furthermore, says Dino, “We’re 100 percent Microsoft, in terms of the
solutions we provide—which tend to be SQL Server, Microsoft Analysis Services, SQL Server Reporting Services, and the ProClarity suite of products [which Microsoft recently acquired].” Dino and the
Moore Stephens team proposed a solution
that combined all these products to provide
business and analysis reporting functions for
the client. “On top of that, we needed to
somehow integrate Analysis Services cubes,
Reporting Services, and the ProClarity
products—ProClarity Desktop Professional,
ProClarity Analytics Server, and ProClarity
Dashboard Server—into one portal that
could be accessed internally as well as by
the third parties that sell the products that
the client provides,” says Dino.
The integration aspect proved to be a
tricky part of implementing the solution.
The development team needed to write code
to integrate the separate pieces of software
so that each time the developers updated
the solution—for example, to produce new
reports or replace certain old views with new
ones in response to the client’s request—all
the software components could communicate with each other seamlessly.
Even more problematic was the installation itself. When Dino and his team finally
had the first version of the solution ready for
the client to evaluate, Dino realized that the
manual process of releasing a new version of
the solution was impractical. “The manual
release process took five or six of us two to
three days to put together,” Dino explains.
“The release process required an extremely
high level of coordination and control and
had a risk of human error. We couldn’t
afford to jeopardize all the good work we’d
done in the development phase—as well
as the client’s respect for the solution—by
releasing the software in this way.”
The team decided to automate the process
of installing new releases of the BI solution by
developing an application called bIntelligent
Installation Manager, which the team wrote
using Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 and
C#. All the objects for the different software
components that comprise the BI solution
are stored in the Microsoft Visual SourceSafe
version-control system. When a new release is
ready for distribution to the client, the application retrieves the objects from Visual SourceSafe and packages them into an installation
file on a CD-ROM, which also includes
installation instructions. The Moore Stephens
team then sends the installation package to the client site, and the client simply configures and
executes the installation package to deploy the
release.
bIntelligent Installation Manager provides two key benefits, says Dino. First, “the
effort required to actually release a version
of a solution is cut down to half a day for
one person as opposed to two or three days
for four to six people.” But the best part,
Dino says, is that the bIntelligent Installation
Manager ensures “the consistency of a valid
release, because we minimized the human-error factor. We prepare the release, package
it, release it ourselves internally and test it,
and make any changes, if needed. Once we
sign off on the release form, it goes out to
clients, so we know that whatever we pass
on to the client is valid.”
These benefits were especially notable
in the solution’s early versions, when Dino’s
team needed to release weekly updates in
response to the client’s numerous change
requests. “For the first three or four months,
it was a volatile change-management environment,” says Dino. “At the time, we had
something like 150 to 200 different reports
and views, and every week the client was
changing the existing reports, adding new
reports, or removing some of the reports
that they decided they didn’t need.” Over
time, the client settled on a stable set of
requirements for the BI reporting it needed
from the solution, and the number of
releases has decreased drastically.
Dino says that Moore Stephens is currently upgrading the bIntelligent Installation
Manager solution to enable it to take data
from various insurance-industry sectors
and provide a standard set of analytical and
reporting views. “We actually sent out the
first version of the [updated] Installation
Manager a few weeks ago to a customer in
Oklahoma,” says Dino. The latest version of
the installation solution is also customizable.
“If a client, say, needs only cubes and not the
Reporting Services options, we can disable
Reporting Services and just package the
cubes,” says Dino. “The solution we delivered was designed, developed, and delivered
successfully thanks to a great team effort.
The main driver was a determination to
produce something that will be reusable and
that benefits our customers.”
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