As 2011 is winding down, it's time to reflect on the past and plan for the future. 2011 has been a very exciting year for Microsoft BI and me. Gartner positioned Microsoft as a leader in the 2011 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms. Although SQL Server 2012 will technically ship early next year, we can say it's a done deal as it's currently in…
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As I mentioned in my blog post on this subject, I've found a good use of SQL Server 2012 columnstore indexes to speed up significantly ETL processes that need to aggregate large datasets. But we run into a snag, which got promoted to a bug by Microsoft Support Services. Under some conditions, SQL Server would create a plan that uses a "stream aggregate" operator instead…
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Issue: Migrate a PerformancePoint dashboard from MOSS 2007 to SharePoint 2010. We used the Import PerformancePoint Content feature to import existing dashboards from the PerformancePoint database and this saved us a lot of effort. However, filters failed with this rather obscure error: After tracing with SQL Profiler and looking at the Windows Event log, we saw the following almost as useless error): Microsoft.AnalysisServices.AdomdClient.AdomdErrorResponseException: Query (1,…
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SQL Server 2012 introduces columnstore indexes. Using the same in-memory VertiPaq engine that powers PowerPivot and Analysis Services Tabular, columnstore indexes can speed up dramatically SQL queries that aggregate large datasets. For a great introduction to columnstore indexes, see the video presentation, "Columnstore Indexes Unveiled" by Eric Hanson. I personally don't see columnstore indexes as a replacement of Analysis Services because an analytical layer has…
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