BI

Taking a critical eye to those ‘old’ Microflows

Taking a critical eye to those ‘old’ Microflows

This entry started as the first in my next series that I planned about reporting with Mendix, but when capturing my screenshots I realized my example was so poorly designed in a working, production application that I needed to address it. While I don’t have the story prioritized to actually do the work to fix it versus competing higher priority issues, I’m going to explain what I did wrong in one of the first processes I ever wrote in Mendix and how I would design it differently had I followed my BI best practices and understood Mendix as well as I do now. Hopefully this comparison will help others who develop in Mendix when trying to optimize their application and look at each step more critically.

What is the value of being right?

This question appears often in research papers focused on the disciplines of psychology and philosophy. They tend to explore the dissonance of interpersonal relationships that is created when one party ‘digs in’ because of their belief in being “right”. Or the research might seek to philosophize what it means to be “right” in the context of correct, accurate, or self-assured. I want to take a few minutes to setup a different paradigm and confine it to the ideals of empowering decision maker’s by handing them tools for analysis.

How to build a better analytic engine in Mendix

I was recently asked my thoughts on how I would solve a slow reporting and analytic environment within Mendix. The developer described the following scenario:

I have been working on a project that creates a lot of data (millions of records per year) with no issues but I am not so happy about the analysis and reporting side where dealing with the large number of records means I need to summarise/abstract many views in order to get a reasonable response. What I have works but I wonder whether there is a better solution that will provide even more benefits for the client. With this in mind I was looking to get in contact with the person who blogged with a view to discussing/sharing approaches and how to optimise such large data set BI type applications using Mendix.