I was called upon to troubleshoot an issue with creating an aggregation design for an existing cube. The Design Aggregation Wizard would refuse to design aggregations with the following cryptic message: Errors in the aggregation designer. The 'Perspective' dimension has no attribute for the aggregation design. The server cannot design aggregations when this attribute is missing. Upon a closer look, it turned out the Perspective…
Read articleNow that the age of in-memory databases has dawned on us, I've been experimenting with different aspects of VertiPaq and I find its technology fascinating. It's safe to say that VertiPaq will propel Microsoft Business Intelligence for years to come with all of its three flavors: PowerPivot (self-service BI), Business Intelligence Semantic Model (corporate BI), and data warehousing (column-based stored indexes). Unlike Analysis Services MOLAP,…
Read article
Now that a snow blizzard has paralyzed Atlanta for a week, what a better way to start the new year than sharing a PowerPivot success story. A bank institution has approached Prologika to help them implement a solution to report the customer's credit history so the bank can evaluate the risk for granting the customer a loan. Their high-level initial requirements call for: Flexible searching…
Read article
A recommended practice for implementing time calculations in PowerPivot is to have a Data table with a datetime column. Kasper de Jonge explains in more details in this blog. This approach will probably save effort when importing data from normalized schemas and won't require specifying additional arguments to the PowerPivot time functions. However, it will undoubtedly present an issue when importing data from a star…
Read article
