Kalido Virtual Conference 2009

Quite a few days back on Oct 6th 2009, i attended Kalido virtual conference, ya you read it right virtul conference by Kalido. For those who may be wondering what Kalido is, basically in one line i would say this tool would help you build your warehouses in 50% less time than the normal methodolgy we use to build the warehouses. Kalido is a tool used for Adaptive Warehousing and it combines the methodolgy of both Ralph Kimbal and Bill Inmon who are the fathers of Data Warehousing. So isnt it amazing you get the best of the both worlds in one tool. How cool is that,for more information please visit Kalido. Now back to the conference...

I had never attended the virtual conference from morning 5.00 am to 6.00pm, that was a lot of time to sit in front of computer, as people around the globe were attending the conference and Kalido had to cater to everyone's needs. But frankly; it didnt feel like i was in front of computer for more than 12 hours, because it was soo real and we had avtars moving around the screen, we could chat with people we know and share the documents and look what other customers are doing and how are they implementing this tool and sharing their problems.

My Company Project Performance Corporation was one of the platinum sponsors for this event,so we were given a booth and it was fun standing at the back of booth, customers coming to us; asking for solutions and our old customers giving us their reference, everything happening live.Pretty cool.. We has some great presentations from the Kalido team which always helps me to learn a lot about the tool and the concepts of Data Warehousing.

We had C-level people coming from all around the globe,attending this event so it was a great networking event too. I wish i could have shown some screen shots of this event,but i did not capture any:(, may be next year i would capture some. But i would like to encourage you all to have a look at the strengths of Kalido and i am sure everyone of you would be amazed; this tool is capable of doing :) . For e.g. Date variance is automatically handled by this tool,out of box and we never need to worry about it. Those who work in Data Warehouse industry do understand the gravity of Date Variance.

So in all it was nice experience for me and i will surely keep you updated about the next exciting event from Kalido

I would be posting some articles on Kalido, so do keep in touch...See you then

Modifying Excel Worksheets using .NET

Quite a few times i have been working with Excel sheets for generating Data to load into warehouses. During Proof of Concept's(POC) most of us do not have enough time to clean real Data, so this application comes handy and helps to generate the data on the fly, which can then be loaded in the data warehouses.

I am sure there a lots of tutorials available online, which guides you through modifying the Excel sheets. But i did not find any tutorial which explains step by step to modify the excel worksheets. So this is my attempt to give a step by step description for beginners to modify their Excel application using . NET. So here i go....

The Prerequisites are basic understanding of .NET principles and any one programming language;i have used C# for my example.

Step 1:

In order to use the library functions which are available for working with Excel, we need to add a reference called Microsoft.Office.Core.Excel. This is available at the following link Microsoft XP PIA's. Then add the reference to your project/solution. Add this line

using Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel;


Step 2:

We need to create an instance as shown


Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel.Application xlApp = new Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel.Application();
//
if (xlApp == null)
{
Console.WriteLine("EXCEL could not be started. Check that your office installation and project references are correct.");
return;
}


Step 3:
Then we open a a workbook and then the worksheet as shown


Workbook wb1 = xlApp.Workbooks.Open("C:\\" + NameofFile,
0, false, 5, "", "", false, Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel.XlPlatform.xlWindows, "",
true, false, 0, true, false, false);
//
Worksheet ws1 = (Worksheet)wb1.Worksheets[1];
//
if (ws1 == null)
{
Console.WriteLine("Worksheet could not be created. Check that your office installation and project references are correct.");
}


Step 4:

Then the last step, accessing each cell in the worksheet


((Range)ws1.Cells[row_num, column_num]).Value2 = "Customer";
// E.g
((Range)ws1.Cells[1, 1]).Value2 = "Customer";
((Range)ws1.Cells[1, 2]).Value2 = "Target_Proceeds";
((Range)ws1.Cells[1, 3]).Value2 = "Target_Contribution";


Here we can dynamically change the values and do n number of things as we all programmers know :)

Step 5:

Finally we close the application and give the resources back to the system


xlApp.Workbooks.Close();


This application comes very handy when we want to transpose the data available to us. As many of us who has worked in Data Warehousing industry, converting rows into columns and vice versa is common issue. We can convert rows columns and vice versa using SQL also, but .NET is one more option who loves to do programming. I hope this is helpful and would make of our lives easier :)