Business Intelligence and SQL Server

powerpivot many to many relationships

sid — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 10:54:20 -0500

Transitioning from an Analysis Services mindset to working with PowerPivot is not always the easiest transition. One of the recent snags came in trying to work out a demo over some data where there are bridge tables – a common scenario in dimensional modeling that sits behind our OLAP cubes – but not a concept that PowerPivot is ready to handle. So, thank goodness Marco Russo wrote a lengthy...

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BI Conference 2010: PowerPivot

sid — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 13:51:43 -0500

I have attended a couple of PowerPivot sessions at this conference 1) because it’s so damn cool and 2) very practically, it is one of the only real new product releases prior to this conference (yes , SQL 2008 R2 is out, and SSRS enhancements are nice and MDS is, well, we can cover that later….). The sessions that I attended were all very well thought out, the speakers were enthusiastic and...

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You may call him Master

sid — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 18:37:53 -0500

Congratulations to my friend and colleague Greg LeClair for officially becoming a SQL Server Master! It became official today. For anyone unfamiliar with the Master’s program, check out the link above – grueling program. Greg joins a select few – if you filter out all of the Microsoft guys, there currently are thirteen SQL Master’s (2005 and 2008) and four Architects in the world – nice crowd to...

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BI Conference 2010: Keynote now online

sid — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 15:33:48 -0500

Just posted earlier this afternoon, Ted Kummert’s keynote speech for the 2010 BI conference can be viewed here. Other notable speakers during this keynote: Donald Farmer, Microsoft Principal Program Manager for Microsoft SQL Server Amir Netz, Microsoft Senior Architect for SQL Server BI

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BI conference 2010: PowerPivot and Visual Studio 2010

Sid — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 15:12:00 -0500

One of the great topics in today’s keynote session centered around shortly? coming features for PowerPivot – namely: Integration with Visual Studio 2010 Ability to utilize SSAS 2008 R2 as point of storage for billions of rows, not just hundreds of millions Pivot Reporter extension for PowerPivot and SharePoint integration Record Viewer view to help manage wide tables in PowerPivot data source...

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BI conference 2010: a few good sessions

Sid — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 08:57:00 -0500

And this was one of them: “Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services Consolidation Best Practices Considerations”. The SQL CAT team continues to deliver – every conference I have been to, this group at Microsoft always delivers great content. Now, before I start to rave too much, I will say the title of the session fails a bit; rather, it should have read: “Really cool things we did with Analysis...

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ssas processing problems

Sid — Mon, 31 May 2010 23:17:00 -0500

By now, some of you may have come across this error when processing your dimensions: File system error: a FileStore error from WriteFile occurred. Physical file: \\?\some path to a file. Logical file:…. At the core of this error is the fact that the asstore, bstore, kstore and string.data files for your dimension is hitting the 4GB limit and it cannot no longer be written to by SSAS. This is...

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SSAS tools: mdx studio

Sid — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:39:00 -0500

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 -0500

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 intelligence....

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SSIS on a cluster

Sid — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:25:00 -0500

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 said, I had a...

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Awesome speaker for our next BI User group!!

Sid — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 16:45:00 -0500

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 -0500

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 -0500

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 -0500

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 -0500

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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