The self-service BI journey starts with the business user importing data. With Microsoft Power Pivot, we encourage the user to import tables and create relationships among these tables, similar to what they would do with Microsoft Access. This brings tremendous flexibility because it allows the user to incrementally add new datasets and implement sophisticated models for consolidated reporting, such as for analyzing reseller and internet…
Read articleEven though the SSIS catalog and the new project deployment mode in SQL Server 2012 take care of many of the mundane monitoring needs, a custom ETL framework is still important for handling features such as restartability and parallelism. Join our next Atlanta BI User Group meeting on Monday, March 31st when Aneel Ismaily will talk about this subject in his "Building a Custom ETL…
Read article
Scenario You need to assign a dimension dynamically to a cube measure group, such as to calculate binning. In the extreme example, you might need to perform fact row level evaluation to determine where the dimension "fits" in. Consider the following example from the insurance industry. An ODS-style Claim table interprets every change to the claim table as a Type 2 change by creating a…
Read article
Some of your might be familiar with the PushBI mobile BI offering of Extended Results. The company was recently acquired by Tibco. Now rebranded as Tibco Spotfire Metrics, its mobile BI offering is now available for the most popular mobile platforms, including Windows Phone and Windows 8. As its documentation explains, Spotfire Metrics supports surfacing KPIs from a variety of data sources, including Analysis Services.…
Read article
