I ran into a couple of snags with the PowerPivot Management Dashboard and CTP3 of Denali. In this case, I've installed PowerPivot for SharePoint on a standalone domain controller. The Actions web part of the PowerPivot Management Dashboard refuses to load with the following exception logged in the SharePoint URL log " Unable to acquire information about the NT group 'Enterprise Admins'" Resolution: This is…
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One welcome improvement in the forthcoming "Denali" release of Reporting Services is exporting to Excel 2007 (*.xlsx) file formats. I bet many companies will upgrade just to get this feature. In fact, the default rendering option when you export to Excel is to xlsx. The old Excel 2003 renderer is still there but it's hidden by default. And, yes, BI projects now integrate with Visual…
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A week ago, I raved about how the new PowerPivot Configuration Tool would simplify configuring PowerPivot for SharePoint. Guess what? Setting up Reporting Services for SharePoint integrated mode got simplified too! In SQL Server Denali, Reporting Services leverages the SharePoint service application infrastructure and it doesn't require installing a Reporting Services server. Not only this simplifies setup but improves performance because there is no round-tripping…
Read articleContinuing on BISM Tabular performance (see my Cube vs. VertiPaq Query Performance blog), I was disappointed to find that there are no performance improvements in PowerPivot/BISM Tabular in CTP3 in the area of detailed (transactional-level) reporting which has plagued me since the R2 release. Consider the following report build on top of an Adventure Works PowerPivot model. This report shows all Adventure Works customers and…
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One great enhancement in SQL Server 11 (Denali) is the PowerPivot for SharePoint setup refactoring. Previously, the PowerPivot for SharePoint setup and configuration was included and performed at the end of the SQL Server setup. Consequently, it was very difficult to figure out what went wrong. In Denali, you need to perform the PowerPivot for SharePoint configuration as a post-installation step after the SQL Server…
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