Data audiolization is clearly a real subject that someone, somewhere is researching... and after the fad for data visualisation, why shouldn't we be thinking about how to represent data with sound? Anyway, I'll cut to the chase. This video has been doing the rounds on Facebook, it made me laugh and if I didn't have a hundred better things to be doing I'd be downloading a copy of Microsoft Songsmith right now and working out how to hook it up to Analysis Services:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-BZfFakpzc

Adventure Works the musical, anyone?

I thought I'd avoided this meme, but since Darren Gosbell tagged me and since Mosha (who was also tagged) has already joined in, here are my five things:

• Like a lot of Brits of my generation my first contact with computers was a BBC Model B that my father bought in the early 80s. Once he'd got bored of typing in programs from BEEBUG magazine that did things like play the Star Wars theme tune I got my hands on it, and in between long sessions playing 'Elite' decided it would be cool if I too could write games. Unfortunately my coding skills have not progressed much since those days.
• I won the Computer Studies prize at school (I had moved onto Turbo Pascal 5.5 by then, on Sanyo machines which had <gasp> a floppy disk drive and <double gasp> 256Kb of RAM) when I was 16 but only because the two other guys in the class who were better than me told the teacher that they were too cool to accept it. I, however, had no such scruples and spent the £20 book token on a French/English dictionary.
• My first degree was in Modern History, although later on I picked up one of those two-year part-time conversion course Computer Science degrees. After winning the Computer Studies prize I didn't go near a computer for several years; I was much better at arts subjects and so I concentrated on that side of things. However a year after leaving university, after having spent a few months for a guy who wanted to reform the UK's National Lottery, I decided to find a proper job. I didn't fancy law, accountancy or any of the other things that History graduates seemed to end up doing so I thought I'd try to get on an IT graduate training scheme instead. I got a job at IMS Health in London where one of my first projects was evaluating a beta version of the new OLAP server from Microsoft that had been recommended by Nigel Pendse...
• While in that job I met my wife, Helen. She was headhunted to work for a large pharmaceuticals company in Switzerland and we decided to move out there together. I started looking for jobs out there and after one of my colleagues suggested sending my CV on spec to Microsoft I got a job in Microsoft Consulting in Zurich, where I stayed for three years. After the birth of our first daughter Natasha (joined last summer by Amelia), Helen and I moved back to the UK and I went back to IMS because they were doing some cool stuff with Yukon.
• After the project I was working on got canned, I decided to leave and set up on my own as a consultant. But you knew that already... so what I shall I write for my fifth point? How about that I'm incredibly absent-minded about everything except (as my wife pointed out when she was telling me off recently because I'd taken out buildings insurance on our house twice) work. My worst experience was at Copenhagen airport when I went through security, sat down and started reading and didn't notice that everyone else had got on the flight. By the time I did notice the plane was already on the runway about to take off, but had to turn back because my bags were on board. It couldn't go back to the same gate though and had to go to a different one which was at the wrong height, so I had to climb halfway up the side of it to get on before walking the full length of the plane to my seat while the captain was very rude about me over the intercom.

Here's a Yuletide song for you and your colleagues to sing (to the tune of "The Twelve Days of Christmas", if you haven't guessed already) before you disappear down the pub for an important offsite meeting this Christmas:

On the first day of work my consultants gave to me
A bill for their exorbitant fees.

On the second day of work my consultants gave to me
Two project plans
And a bill for their exorbitant fees.

On the third day of work my consultants gave to me
Three servers,
Two project plans
And a bill for their exorbitant fees.

On the fourth day of work my consultants gave to me
Four Gb of RAM,
Three servers,
Two project plans
And a bill for their exorbitant fees.

On the fifth day of work my consultants gave to me
SQL 2005,
Four Gb of RAM,
Three servers,
Two project plans
And a bill for their exorbitant fees.

On the sixth day of work my consultants gave to me
Six star schemas,
SQL 2005,
Four Gb of RAM,
Three servers,
Two project plans
And a bill for their exorbitant fees.

On the seventh day of work my consultants gave to me
Seven ETL jobs,
Six star schemas,
SQL 2005,
Four Gb of RAM,
Three servers,
Two project plans
And a bill for their exorbitant fees.

On the eighth day of work my consultants gave to me
Eight UDMs,
Seven ETL jobs,
Six star schemas,
SQL 2005,
Four Gb of RAM,
Three servers,
Two project plans
And a bill for their exorbitant fees.

On the ninth day of work my consultants gave to me
Nine slow reports,
Eight UDMs,
Seven ETL jobs,
Six star schemas,
SQL 2005,
Four Gb of RAM,
Three servers,
Two project plans
And a bill for their exorbitant fees.

On the tenth day of work my consultants gave to me
Ten lame excuses,
Nine slow reports,
Eight UDMs,
Seven ETL jobs,
Six star schemas,
SQL 2005,
Four Gb of RAM,
Three servers,
Two project plans
And a bill for their exorbitant fees.

On the eleventh day of work my consultants gave to me
Eleven hotfixes,
Ten lame excuses,
Nine slow reports,
Eight UDMs,
Seven ETL jobs,
Six star schemas,
SQL 2005,
Four Gb of RAM,
Three servers,
Two project plans
And a bill for their exorbitant fees.

On the twelfth day of work my consultants gave to me
Twelve angry users,
Eleven hotfixes,
Ten lame excuses,
Nine slow reports,
Eight UDMs,
Seven ETL jobs,
Six star schemas,
SQL 2005,
Four Gb of RAM,
Three servers,
Two project plans
And a bill for their exorbitant fees.

Here are the rules:

• Each entry must be an MDX query executable against any cube/perspective in the Adventure Works database, and must take the form of a limerick (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limerick_(poetry for details)
• The query must return at least one cell which contains a value other than null
• Entries should be posted as comments to this blog entry
• Extra points will be awarded for wit and creativity

It's actually pretty difficult. Here's my first attempt:

WITH MEMBER [Date].[Day Name].[TODAY]
AS 1 + [Date].[Day Name].[THURSDAY]
SELECT [Average Rate]
ON 0, [Date].[Date]
ON 1 FROM [Direct Sales] WHERE([MAY])

As an aside, this brings up the vexed question of how you should pronounce MDX. In my limerick I'm not pronouncing the punctuation so it reads:

WITH MEMBER DATE DAY NAME TODAY,
AS ONE PLUS DATE DAY NAME THURSDAY,
SELECT AVERAGE RATE,
ON ZERO, DATE DATE,
ON ONE FROM DIRECT SALES WHERE MAY.

However I'm prepared to be flexible on this point.

So come on all of you (and especially you Jon, as I know you can never resist something like this) and get composing!

UPDATE: I've decided two rule changes, to make things easier. First I'll allow queries from Foodmart 2000 for those of you on AS2K; second I'll allow statements other than SELECT statements (eg CREATE SET, UPDATE CUBE etc) so long as they execute without errors.

1. Open SQL Server Management Studio
2. Connect to the AdventureWorks cube
3. Run the following query:
   select [Measures].[Internet Sales Amount]
   on 0,
   [Geography].[Geography].[State-Province].[England].children
   on 1
   from [Adventure Works]
4. Scroll down the result set and point out that according to AdventureWorks, Scotland is a city in England.

Great tip from Roman Rehak here, if like me you're running Yukon on Virtual PC. NTFS compression certainly hasn't harmed my performance and it's saved me 4Gb of disk space!

OK, this is nothing whatsoever to do with BI, but my colleague Jon Axon has started his own blog here. If you're interested in concurrent programming then check it out - and make sure you hit the site several times to make him feel like someone is actually reading his blog! It will make him feel so much better...