Video - InEight Estimate - Data Warehouse Management

TRANSCRIPT

Hi, this is Rick Deans with InEight, and this video tutorial will cover managing the Data Warehouse within InEight Estimate. So a couple basic questions we're going to attempt to answer here. What is the Data Warehouse? How do I manage the Data Warehouse?

And can I control which users have access to the Data Warehouse Register? First off, what is the Data Warehouse? Well, the data warehouse is a single SQL server database that contains information from many individual estimate job folders. So some of you may realize this whenever you create a new job folder within, in a, within InEight Estimate, uh, the way the tool is architected is each one of those job folders kicks up its own instance of a SQL server database.

And we do that for a number of reasons. Um, one of which is we have customers that have many, many, many large projects. And if all of these were contained within the same database, uh, from a transactional perspective, from a performance perspective, uh, all of that data would be competing for the same, uh, resources. So by parsing those out into separate job folders, uh, when I open a job folder, I'm connecting to that SQL server database and I can use all of my resources just for that job folder.

And then when I close that job folder, those resources are then made available to other projects. Or if I wanted to open three or four projects, again, all of my system resources can be devoted to looking at just those projects that I've got opened up, as opposed to one big database that contains all of the data from all of my projects. However, having said that, uh, many times our customers want to be able to report across jobs. How much concrete am I going to need, uh, for these upcoming projects?

Uh, how many, what's going to be my demand for carpenters or finished carpenters, uh, based on, uh, the, the status of, of these estimates? So it is important to, to report off of those, and that's where, where the data warehouse comes in. We can selectively choose which projects are going to be included in the data warehouse, and we can, we can then manage how those projects update within the data warehouse. Next question...

How do I manage the Data Warehouse? Well, that's the, that's the meat and potatoes of this video tutorial. So we're going to jump inside of the tool, uh, to cover that. Depending on which version of InEight Estimate you're running, you might find it in a couple of different places.

So for instance, in version 19 and beyond, we introduced this Navigation ribbon. And what the Navigation ribbon allows us to do is to freely navigate through the various stages of putting an estimate together. I just clicked on a job folder so you can see this ribbon across the top. When I click on a specific process within estimation I get a list of different forms I can go to.

And when I do go to a specific form, there are specific actions that I can perform when I get there. Some of our forms, like the CBS contains a More Actions, button that allow me to even do more great stuff here. So if I'm running this version with the ribbon, how I get there is I choose File > Jobs and then you'll notice the Data Warehouse is a selection that's here. If I'm not using the ribbon, and I'm gonna switch my setup here really quickly.

If I go into File > Settings, this is where I can choose whether I wanna look at the ribbon or what we call the classic interface. And the classic interface is more of that, uh, nested menu, uh, paradigm that we've had for many, many years. And the Data Warehouse is just located right off the File menu. So whichever interface I'm using, all roads lead to the same area of the tool.

Um, in this case, I've brought up the Data Warehouse and this register looks very familiar to the Jobs register, if you're familiar with that. You see that every time you go to open a job, right? Um, so many of these columns are the same columns that you would see there: the job code, the description, the status, the type, the location, schedule, et cetera. What's different about the Data Warehouse are the inclusion of these four columns.

Um, this first column called Included, it does just what it says. It, it's a tick box that will tell me whether or not a specific project is included in the Data Warehouse. The Auto Update allows me to choose how I want that to get updated when changes are made to the working file. We'll go through an example of that.

Last Update... that's just simply a date and timestamp telling me when I last updated the Data Warehouse with data from this individual job folder. And the Data Status column has a few different values. It can tell me that it's not included. It can tell me that it's current, meaning all of all of the data has pushed over and it's all currently synced with the data warehouse.

You notice many of these are out of date. So I, at one point I had pushed these over to the data warehouse, but I did not continue to keep them updated. So that's a, that's a, a decision you would wanna make organizationally, maybe I've pushed these projects over in a state where I felt that's where I want to do the reporting. And then I've gone through and I've made subsequent edits to those, but I didn't want to disturb the data that I had in the Data Warehouse.

So we kind of really leave it up to you in terms of how you're gonna manage that. Uh, in order to include and push a project's data to the Data Warehouse, you simply select the project and then the, the updates are done from the right-click menu option. This is where I would choose Update. So once I'm updating a project, you notice the Data Status immediately changes to Update and it's basically going to take that data from that individual job folder and it's going to push it up to the warehouse.

And as long as it took me to explain what was happening, you can see that it is now current and it's date and time stamped when that update was made. So what is different between Update and Auto Update? Well, the "include "just simply pushes it in. It's a one time push.

If I have the Auto Update selected, now this box gets ticked and any changes that I make in the job folder that I'm saving would automatically get pushed into the data warehouse. I wouldn't have to come out back here and look and see if anything's out of date. So we leave it up to you. If you want it to auto update as you're saving that project, great.

It's gonna auto update the data warehouse. If it's a one time push and you just want to really have kind of static data there, regardless of what's going to happen in the job folder afterwards, then we would just include it that one time. But that's really the management of the data warehouse. There's really nothing more to it than that.

And then finally, the last question that we had was...

"Can I control which users have access to the Data Warehouse register?" Yes. Just like any other form or menu command in the application, you can, you can govern that through the user profiles that are included in the library. And, uh, many organizations, uh, decide we only want certain types of administrative people to be able to, uh, update the data warehouse with projects and, uh, they can create a group that has exclusive access to do that.

So we hope you found this, uh, video tutorial to be helpful. Uh, as always, keep those cards and letters coming. We love to hear from you. If you have any questions, please reach out to us at InEight.

Thank you very much.