[sims] Is it just me, or is Discover a little flaky ?

[vikpaw]

I saw some funky Business Intelligence Tools from Microsoft the other day, included in SQL Server 2012 which looks surprisingly similar to Discover, except you create the underlying data sets you get to work with, and can point it at any datasource, Access, Excel, CSV, etc. I think it can also be done in 2008, but it's not as powerful.

 

I'm waiting on copies of the presentations at the mo', but i don't think it would help much, as you still need to define the core dataset for analysis, which i think they called the semantic model, and understanding how the data is arranged in SIMS backend is painful. However, you could run reports to extract the data and use them as a basis.

[matt40k]

I saw some funky Business Intelligence Tools from Microsoft the other day, included in SQL Server 2012 which looks surprisingly similar to Discover, except you create the underlying data sets you get to work with, and can point it at any datasource, Access, Excel, CSV, etc. I think it can also be done in 2008, but it's not as powerful.

 

I'm waiting on copies of the presentations at the mo', but i don't think it would help much, as you still need to define the core dataset for analysis, which i think they called the semantic model, and understanding how the data is arranged in SIMS backend is painful. However, you could run reports to extract the data and use them as a basis.

 

BI is a beast, it's too complex for 99% of schools.

[DavePriorHLS]

Folks,

 

In a couple of hours , I've performed a simple data extract (via reports) to an Access DB (hmm, copying data to an external DB, where did I get that idea from?), on which I can then use Excel Pivotcharts to provide rather nice pie-charts giving me what I want.

 

No cost option too, apparently.

 

Happy to supply to anyone who wants a copy.

Edited May 31, 2012 by DavePriorHLS