Meanwhile back in the (BI) jungle ;-)

Seems to me that this would be a good destination for VFP people. Forget pure development, it's destined for commodity. Whereas BI is challenging, not easy for the usual cowboys to pop up claiming expertise, and has to have a good 5 years in it. Well spotted KG. JMHO.

Haha, thanks.

BI is incredibly challenging - I have a joke that I tell my students....."you know how people will be trying to fix a flat tire, and they say, 'You know, this isn't exactly rocket science'? Well, somewhere in the world, some rocket scientists are struggling with a rocket ship, and are saying, 'You know, this isn't exactly Microsoft BI" :)

Actually, many VFP people with great entrepreneurial spirit and good business sense would love the BI arena. Tons of data (and I guess you win the argument....PowerPivot has auto-spanning, haha).

A large # of companies in the last 10 years tried to stretch client-server OLTP systems WAY beyond their means (producing creative results, but still stretching beyond their means) - and now some of these outfits are just now realizing the value of data warehousing and OLAP. Even today, people think of data warehouses as back-up tapes stored off-site in some dingy room. <s>

The irony is that the MS BI tools are powerful, but not "quite" as intuitive as one would hope. A common criticism is that the tools still require a "gear-head" mentality, which winds up initially alienating "power-users" and even experienced developers who believe the BI tools will be easier than they actually are. (And that's not a rip of MS - the same issue happens with the BI offerings from Oracle, from Business Objects/SAP, etc.)

With the latest set of tools (SSIS/SSAS/SSRS in SQL 2008R2, SharePoint 2010, PerformancePoint Services, and PowerPivot), one can produce some tremendous analytic results - but there are just a ton of details to learn...not just each tool on its own, but the integration points as well. Even the newest kid on the block (PowerPivot) requires knowledge of a DAX expression language that's a cross between MDX and Excel macros.

And I guess it's close enough to the end of the month that I can announce what I was going to announce on Sept 1 - later in the fall I'm releasing a set of commerical videos for each of the toolsets, that will be completely unlike any set of training videos out there.