I had the pleasure to read the book Professional Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel and SharePoint by Sivakumar Harinath, Ron Pihlgren, and Denny Guang-Yeu Lee. All of the authors are with the Microsoft Analysis Services team. Together with David Wickert, Denny Lee runs the http://powerpivottwins.com/ blog, which is "dedicated to all things PowerPivot". Siva has written the 2005 and 2008 editions of the Professional SQL Server…
Although late to the party, I announce the arrival of a very interesting BI technology - PivotViewer Extension for Reporting Services – CTP1. What's interesting is that it leverages several BI technologies to provide great data visualization: The Microsoft LiveLabs Pivot which was developed by Microsoft Research. PowerPivot – a Microsoft self-service BI tool. Analysis Services R2 Reporting Services R2 SharePoint 2010 You should keep…
I've just updated the Atlanta BI Group home page to announce the topic for our first meeting on August 23th. Given the great interest surrounding Self-service BI, I'll present "Self-service BI with Microsoft PowerPivot". Hope you can make our first meeting!
Kudos to Greg Galloway (SQL Server MVP) for upgrading his fantastic OLAP PivotTable Extensions for Excel 2010 add-in (now available in both x32 and x64). This add-in is one of the first third party tools I install on a new machine. Since the Excel team seems to be ignoring customer feedback for improving the Excel BI features, OLAP PivotTable provides what's lacking, including: Excellent search…
Every now and then, I run into mysterious report timeouts. This time the client had a farm of two report servers integrated with MOSS with long running reports that would time out after two minutes or so. Normally, you shouldn't have such report monsters but life is not perfect, right? The client did a due diligence and had checked/changed every possible timeout setting, including: Report…
The website for the Atlanta Microsoft Business Intelligence SIG is up and running although it's still work in progress. http://atlantabi.sqlpass.org 1. Please register. 2. Please fill in the two polls on the first page for the first meeting attendance and topic of interest. 3. You can post suggestions for our first meeting on the Discussions page (Meetings forum) as a reply to my first post…
The great search for a meeting place for the Atlanta BI SIG is over! I am happy to report that I found the perfect place. Matrix Resources graciously offered to host and sponsor our meetings in a training room at their premises at 115 Perimeter Center Place #250, Atlanta, GA, 30346. I visited their location and another location today and I think their place is…
