Si Blog

Sum of Max

2010-03-02T08:35:00Z

How to get the total out of a max aggregation?...(read more)

Period to Date Calculations

2010-03-01T10:36:00Z

We frequently want to compare the current month-to-date (MTD) Sales to the sales of the same period in previous month(s), rather than to the sales of entire previous months. For example, if today is the n th day of the month, we would want to compare sales of the first n days in the current month (or quarter or year) to the first n days in the previous month (or quarter or year). PrismCubed has some built-in period-to-date functions that make this comparison very easy to implement. The basic function...(read more)

Exception Highlighting / Conditional Formatting in the Pivot

2010-01-21T11:21:00Z

How to implement exception highlighting/Conditional Formatting in the Pivot ...(read more)

Converting seconds field to HH:MM:SS format in ElastiCube

2010-01-20T12:42:00Z

We often receive questions from users who need to create special/custom fields. Here, I am happy to share with you the way you can convert an INT field [Seconds] into HH:MM:SS string format First, we will need to add three custom INT fields ( Hour , Min , Sec ) to our table: Hour Field = div([Seconds],3600) Min Field = div(Mod([Seconds],3600),60) Sec Field = Mod([Seconds],60) Finally, we will create a fourth field to contain the final HH:MM:SS string ( HourRep ). We do this by concatenating the three...(read more)

Saving Aliens, Web Analytics and Business Intelligence

2009-06-30T18:59:00Z

We just posted a new customer case study to the site, and since it is one of the coolest so far, I wanted to drop a word or two in our blog: Roy Man, the CTO of saveanalien.com , has strong opinions about web analytics. He is also in the business of saving aliens. Roy is one of the founders of a virtual alien (pet) site called saveanalien.com . Save an alien has 10 million unique aliens (each alien is one of a kind) and they are all up for adoption. The reason so many aliens are looking for a home...(read more)

A Look at the Business Intelligence Index

2009-03-17T12:56:00Z

This morning I discovered the existence of the Business Intelligence Index . It is a stock index of Business-Intelligence related companies published by Rick Sherman, the founder of Athena IT solutions . Rick says the index has been treading water, but compared to what's going on in the market, I'd say it is holding its head ABOVE water. He concludes that the "The software companies in the BI index, although many being in the middle of the performance rankings YTD, are likely to fare...(read more)

We're featured by Forrester in their Business Intelligence for a tough economic climate report.

2009-02-24T12:37:00Z

Forrester research just published a report titled "BI Belt-tightening in a tough economic climate". In it Forrester Analyst Boris Evelson discusses the role of business intelligence in tough economic times. "As an economic downturn becomes a sobering reality, enterprises look for various ways to increase revenues and reduce costs. While overall IT budgets become targets for cost cutting, business intelligence applications and infrastructure need not fall into the same category. Smart...(read more)

Eating our own dog food

2009-02-04T15:28:00Z

Working and founding a business intelligence company means that you (a) belong to the analytics-obsessed (b) when obsessively analyzing your own business you begin to eat your own dog-food. This is entirely the case with our AdWords campaigns: we pore over them using our Prism business intelligence software. In 2008, we released our Amazon S3 dashboards, created using SiSense Prism. Now, we're launching pre-packaged reports and dashboards that show how we analyze our AdWords data using SiSense...(read more)

Announcing the winner of the SiSense Dashboard Competition

2009-02-04T14:59:00Z

Well, back in December we announced the SiSense Dashboard Competition. We're pleased to announce we have a winner: Mahmoud Wardany of Madar Holding in the UAE. Here's the winning dashboard: A few words from our winner about the dashboard and its uses: "The dashboard is used to track orders sent to customers. We deliver thousands of orders a month, in the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars, using an Oracle based ERP. Our CEO is very concerned about the quality of the service to our...(read more)

Frequency of values and distinct count of values

2008-12-11T19:45:00Z

Have you ever wanted to see how many times a value appears in the data, so you casually dropped the 'Value' dimension onto the rows panel of a pivot widget and the 'Count Value' measure onto the columns panel and get the value '1' for everything? Then you scratched your head and said to yourself "hmm, this can't be right. I'm pretty sure I sold more than one Acer 2400 this month". Relax, you're not going out of business :-) There are two ways to count...(read more)

Filter a Widget With a Click Of a Button

2008-12-08T11:14:00Z

Have you ever wanted to give your viewers the possibility to filter a widget with a single click? Somewhat like the image below, that lets a user click on either the Best Selling Products or Least Selling Products and see the appropriate products in the pivot and their respective sales, cost and profit. Here's how you do it. ............................................................................................................................................................................(read more)

Question Composition - Quickly Create Filters and Segmentation in a Flowchart Manner

2008-11-18T17:27:00Z

Some of you may have probably noticed that apart from sheets, a Prism document may also contains 'questions'. Unlike a sheet that is used to visualize data, a question is a special type of canvas used to visually create filters and segment data. It is also useful for observing the structure of a complex filter. Defining a Dimensionality or Base Filter The first thing to decide before beginning is which dimension you wish to filter. Once decided, drag this dimension from the Data Browser and...(read more)

Pivot-like Excel Data to Flat Excel Data for Better Analysis and Reporting (Unpivot)

2008-11-14T16:05:00Z

Sometimes, data in an Excel file is not structured ideally to be imported by Prism. Occasionally, the data is presented in a Pivot-like manner that is more readable and takes up less storage space. A good example for this is marketing survey data that often comes in this form: Image 1 - Marketing Survey Data Sample Each row represents the answers of a single survey respondent. The first respondent - John, gave the answer ‘Good' to the first question, the answer ‘Best' to the second question...(read more)

Surviving tough economic times in IT

2008-10-30T13:51:00Z

Dennis Howlett quotes Sun Microsystems' Tim Bray on surviving the tough economic times . John Doerr lists ten points for companies to stay afloat on Venture Beat . Being frugal has become hip, there's no doubt about that. Both people quoted above suggest cutting software spending and large capex IT investments. We wanted to add our top software and IT cutting strategies.... And then say something about cutting expenses on business intelligence, dashboards and reporting. Business Intelligence...(read more)

Re-using Filters in Widgets and Custom Measures

2008-08-24T13:05:00Z

If you’ve dug around the product and/or the online documentation, you must have encountered the filtering and segmentation features Prism offers. If not, this is a good time to get acquainted with this powerful feature here . The first advantage of a Prism filter is that it allows you to filter your dimensions to focus only on the members that interest you, such as your best customers in terms of sales, products with a positive selling growth, the 20% of customers that account for 80% of your revenue...(read more)