This is a big topic and frankly it's too ambitious on my part to tackle it. Assuming equivalent multidimensional (BISM Multidimensional) and tabular (BISM Tabular) models, I was curious how a multidimensional cube fares against VertiPaq in terms of performance. To be fair to VertiPaq, I decided to use native DAX queries. As you've probably heard, BISM Tabular in SQL Denali will include a variant…
Read articleI had some fun lately setting up a Reporting Services farm of two SSRS 2008 R2 nodes and a hardware load balancer. We followed the steps in BOL only to find out that the report server will return sporadic empty pages or MAC viewstate validation errors although the machine key was identical on both servers. We fixed the issues by: Enabling sticky sessions in the…
Read articleMicrosoft published release notes for PowerPivot and SQL Server Denali Community Technology Preview (CTP) 3 Release Notes. This means that the CTP3 release is imminent although the download link is not live yet. The release notes cover the new features pretty well. UPDATE 7/12/2011 CTP3 got released today.
Read articleI am partnering with Data Education to deliver an intensive five-day onsite class on Analysis Services and PowerPivot. The class will be held September 19-23 at the Microsoft Technology Center in Boston. The class doesn't assume any experience with Analysis Services. We'll start from zero and build a multidimensional cube sharing along the way as many as best practices as possible. More information about the…
Read articleUDM scope assignments are incredible useful because they let you write to the cube space, such as to implement custom aggregation, allocations, currency conversion, data calculations, and so on. Unfortunately, scope assignments have limitations. One of them is that more complicated scope expressions result in "an arbitrary shape of the sets is not allowed in the current context" error. Recently, I tried to use a…
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