Photo Switcheroo

Everyone knows that my web logs go into a cube and provide a demonstration of how powerful OLAP cubes are (http://RichardLees.com.au/Sites/Demonstrations) Well I have noticed an increasing number of hits from personal sites that have links to photos on my site. One in particular - the surfing photo on at top left. I am not sure if they do it for copyright or web performance reasons. Anyway, I have switched the top left photo for one of myself - top right. Is that an awful thing to do? If my conscience gets the better of me, I will switch them back.

Here is a list of a few of the sites that are using the photo and now have my photo. No doubt they will notice the old guy on the surf ski, at some stage, and update the photo.

http://www4.ncsu.edu/~btcapo2/
http://forum.fok.nl/topic/1222710/5/50
http://www.myspace.com/apinos
http://www.myspace.com/szandrathequeen

There are more sites using the surfing photo. If you are interested, you can query my weblogs cube and look for Referrers to Surfing.jpg It is one 0f the top referring targets. You can also see which sites are still using it. Just look for hits after April 20.

Richard

For real time OLAP and data mining demonstrations go to http://RichardLees.com.au/Sites/Demonstrations

Web Analytics using SQL Server and PerformancePoint

The default page for my live demonstrations http://RichardLees.com.au/Sites/Demonstrations is currently showing a PerformancePoint dashboard of the web statistics of the site. SQL Server Integration Services is regularly (aprox every 15 minutes) incrementally loading new web log records into SQL Server and incrementally processing the OLAP cube. The PerformancePoint dashboard is continuously available and will show the latest (0-15 mintes of real-time) web analytics information.

For example this is the scorecard showing key information for the last 3 days. This image shows the web data is up to and including the 12th hour of October 2nd. Note, that is Sydney Australia time, so if you are looking from Europe or America, it will appear to be in the future. This isn't the future, it is the current time in Sydney.

The key metrics shown include the number of web hits, average response time for .aspx resources, error rate, number of distinct client sessions, MB transferred and cpu utilisation on my two machines.

There are several other charts and tables on the dashboard. A couple of my favourites are the (bottom left) table of Cities by Hour for the last 3 days. This table shows the top city for each hour over the last 3 days. For example, on this day, New York generated the most activity to my site from 9AM to 12AM, with Bologna, Dublin, Sacramento, Toronto and others featuring earlier on this day.

Another one of my favourite charts on this dashboard is the Top Referrers Last 3 Months. This table shows an ordered list of the sites that refer the most traffic to my site.

Many of the charts and tables are interactive, so you can right click on numbers, heading, columns, lines etc to drill down, drill up, drill across, drill through, change chart type, pivot etc. Essentially, when the chart/table is interactive, you can perform ad hoc queries as you would in any thin client cube browser. Try it out. http://RichardLees.com.au/Sites/Demonstrations Every few minutes, you will also see that the data is incrementally changing.

The purpose behind this demonstration is not to show you web analytics of my site (although I find that useful) it is to show you how powerful SQL Server and PerformancePoint are in creating a dynamic and useful business intelligence solution. The only software employed on this site is Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft PerformancePoint and Microsoft SharePoint.