A different dashboard

There are some well known rules to follow when building dashboards:

• They have to display accurate information


• Fit in the environment


• Fast


• Fun


• Bug free

We almost got a hit, but failed on the last item. Too many bugs on the windshield ;)

FirefoxCup - Let the world cup begin!

The World Cup is here. Portugal may be going through a big financial crisis (just like in the last 10 years, we're actually used to it) but for the next month all of that will be forgotten: It's soccer time!


I may not influence how my team plays in field, but fortunately Mozilla started Firefox Cup, where I can, indeed, be a player in the field.


GO, PORTUGAL!!

What does this have to do with BI?

Well, actually, a lot! It's a well known fact - mainly because I keep repeating it proudly :) ) that we are part of the mozilla metrics team. And turns out that my alter-ego, pedro@mozilla.com, is in some sense the referee of this tournament!



This is a screenshot of the current score of the tournament. And where do those numbers come from? From the analysis of the logs generated by (much) more than one hundred million firefox users daily. This translates into the analysis of a few gigabytes of logs that are generated every hour. Through a somewhat complex and fine-tuned etl process, we are able to get all relevant data into a datawarehouse and, not more than 4 hours after midnight, be able to provide the accurate usage number for each of the existing 150k personas. Here's the current Portugal persona chart:



This numbers are then integrated into the Firefox Addons databases and are available for the world to see. In case you're noticing the discrepancy between the values in both of the charts, it's easily explainable - the number of users on the addons page is the 7 day rolling average, to prevent the "weekend effect', making the curve much smoother than just printing "yesterday's number"


And it's absolutely amazing the amount of cool analysis that we can do on this subject, and we hope to be helping the personas' team driving their strategy!

It's time! CDA 1.0 is available

And it's done! We finally released version 1.0 of CDA - Community Data Access. Despite the "1.0" version, we've been using this in production environment on our clients for a while now, and I can assure it's very stable!


I've talked enough about CDA (and I feel so tired about this release that I can't really find anything to say).


Get it at webdetails site, and have fun. Every feedback is appreciated!


And for the ones that still don't know what exactly CDA is about, we've made this presentation for you:

ps: For the ones asking: is this really opensource? What's the catch? There are no free lunches... You're right, there aren't. We have an evil plan: Convince you that we are able to do quality work and that we are the perfect partners for your Pentaho implementation. Email us :)