Business Intelligence and SQL Server

SSAS tools: mdx studio

Sid — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:39:00 -0600

So many good tools out there, and yet not all of them get noticed….. At the SQL Pass conference the week before, I attended one of the classes by the Microsoft CSS groups on common Analysis Services support issues. While not the best presentation format or speaking, the information and thought processes were very relevant and thought out, so all in all – good session. What surprised me was...

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Sharepoint server 2010 Insights

Sid — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:57:00 -0600

You may or may not have heard by now that the business intelligence capability in SharePoint 2010 now has a platform branding called INSIGHTS. I will blog more about the features in my “down time” at the SQL PASS conference next week, but I wanted to put the links out to everyone so you can start ramping up on what is coming inside SharePoint 2010 with respect to business...

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SSIS on a cluster

Sid — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:25:00 -0600

I figured this was worth a quick post: while many of SQL Server’s aspects are cluster aware, SSIS is not. Why? My guess is that there is not a pressing business need for this to be a cluster aware service – while many companies have vital ETL processes to help run company business, the need for failover in this scenario is not as pressing as in transactional systems. With that...

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Awesome speaker for our next BI User group!!

Sid — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 16:45:00 -0600

I am excited to announce that we have secured a great speaker for our next Central Texas Business Intelligence User Group meeting on October 21st at the Microsoft office in Austin. Bryan C. Smith, prolific SSAS author and now of Microsoft fame, will be coming down to speak on a yet to be disclosed topic on SQL Server Analysis Services. If you have not done so, and you live/work in the area,...

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Design Tip - Analysis Services Aggregations

Sid — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 12:17:00 -0600

I was cleaning up a cube design for a customer, primarily working with the current implementation to resolve some performance issues and make some minor alterations to the dimensions, when I ran across an aggravation in designing aggregations for the partitions I implemented ( there were none before, part of the issue). I had just finished designing my partitions when I started to design the...

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Reminder: BI User Group meeting August 13th!

Sid — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 16:53:00 -0600

Reminder, we are having our next Central Texas Microsoft Business Intelligence User Group meeting a week from today, August 13th, 2009 from 6:00pm to 8:00pm at the Microsoft Austin office. Session Topic: “PerformancePoint Monitoring and Analytics 101” Description: In this session we will cover the basics of PerformancePoint: what it is, how it is deployed and sample architecture...

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WhitePaper: PerformancePoint in an extranet environment

Sid — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 15:06:00 -0600

Great read for when you are stuck in the airport: Publishing PerformancePoint Server in Extranet Scenarios. This is actually a very detailed document outlining many of the aspects around establishing an extranet deployment, particularly a secure one. Important Note: We have run across a bug in Server 2008’s implementation of Kerberos. This issue will cause a fatal flaw to your...

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PerformancePoint, Security and Account Access

sid — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 12:04:09 -0600

I was assisting a client clean up an installation of PerformancePoint. They thought they had followed all of the steps, but were perplexed by an error they were getting after deploying the dashboards to SharePoint. Given what was at the bottom of the error, and how few people realized this slight difference in authenticating accounts, I figured it was worth a quick post. To start, the error...

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Installing SSRS for SharePoint, the fun way

Sid — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:09:00 -0600

I figured the search engines would do a good job of delivering the answers to these questions, but as I have seen this theme reoccur many times over the past few weeks in the MSDN forums, I am going to write out the steps for everyone (if nothing else, at least I’ll just be pasting a link to this versus copying the steps all over again in forum responses). For many people installing the...

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Book Recommendation: Drive Business Performance

Sid — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 14:32:00 -0600

Good sales staff for consulting and services firms are hard to find. These great sales people are always working to strike the balance between knowing enough about the services, and in our case, the Microsoft products to talk intelligibly, but at the same time, not be overwhelmed in studying details and product nuances so that they are distracted from selling. Bruno and Joey’s...

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Central Texas BI User Group First Meeting

sid — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:33:52 -0600

We kicked off the first BI User group meeting for Austin last night and had a very decent turn out for our first meeting. For our first topic, I covered the sticky points of implementing Kerberos in order to support Reporting Services 2008 running in integrated mode in a MOSS farm. As doing the entire implementation would take longer than the time allotted for our meeting, I will be posting a...

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64 bit Report Builder 2.0 Installation Issues in SharePoint Integrated Mode

Sid — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 11:13:00 -0600

If you wish to upgrade to SSRS Report Builder 2.0 and you are on a 64-bit environment, you may run into this issue when running the April 7, 2009 download: Text (so it is search-able): Reporting Services Add-in for SharePoint products and technologies is not installed. It must be installed before you can install the SQL Server 2008 Report Builder 2.0 for SharePoint. If you are like me...

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Adding PerformancePoint Web Parts to multiple sites on the same SharePoint Server

Sid — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 17:37:00 -0600

Without fail, there exist many ways to resolve an issue. Mine? I have multiple WSS web applications on my machine for various purposes, several of which require the PerformancePoint web parts. For anyone having gone through a deployment of PerformancePoint Monitoring, the appreciation of the problem becomes quite plain: the site collection is declared during the initial setup and...

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PerformancePoint Training Materials

Sid — Tue, 26 May 2009 13:18:00 -0600

I walked through two PerformancePoint labs with the class in Florida, both of which are available online. Given the time for that day, I was only able to run through the first, Dashboard End to End, all the way and the third, SharePoint List, halfway – -we took a break as soon as we finished with pulling the SharePoint list data into the scorecard, built the KPIs and published. They are...

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BI Bootcamp in Florida

Sid — Wed, 13 May 2009 14:01:00 -0600

As I write this I am in the airport in Austin waiting for my flight out to Ft. Lauderdale. I will be supporting tomorrow’s presentations around PerformancePoint, so if you are one of the lucky few who knew about this event and will be there, I look forward to seeing you. Unfortunately, these events are not widely broadcast (try a search on any of the large search engines, you...

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