Next week will be SQL Server-intensive and your humble correspondent will be heavily involved: Monday, April 28th: Power BI presentation by Brian Jackson, Microsoft for Atlanta MS BI Group with Pyramic Analytics sponsoring the event. This presentation will cover new and compelling Power BI features including: the data manipulation of Power Query, Power BI Sites, the Data Steward Experience, natural language BI using Power Q&A,…
Read articleScenario: Inspired by the new SSIS 2012 capabilities, you've managed to convince management to install SSIS 2012 on a new server for new ETL development. But your existing ETL is still on SQL Server 2008 (or R2) and there is no budget for migration and retesting. You want to start SSIS 2012 jobs from the 2008 server, e.g. in SQL Server Agent on completion of…
Read articleSome scenarios require a fault-tolerant SSAS installation. In a real-life project, an active-active cluster met this requirement. Instead of installing an active-passive cluster where one node just plays a sitting duck waiting for the active node to fail, with the active-active cluster we had two active nodes to distribute processing and achieve high availability. The first node had the SQL Server database engine hosting the…
Read articleAll the three BISM flavors (Multidimensional, Tabular, and Power Pivot) supports default drillthrough to allow the end user to see the level of details behind an aggregated measure by just double-clicking the cell. However, the implementation details differ. Multidimensional supports default drillthrough on regular measures only, that is, measures that bind to columns in fact tables. Multidimensional doesn't support drillthrough on calculated measures, even if…
Read articleThe Power Pivot update story is somewhat convoluted. Excel 2013 integrates Power Pivot natively and the only way to get it updated (assuming the traditional MSI installation option) is through Office updates because the Office team now owns its distribution. Alternatively, if you have an Office 365 subscription, and have installed Office 2013 via the click-to-run option, then the Office and Power Pivot updates will…
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Recall that the Microsoft BI Semantic Model consists of three flavors: Multidimensional, Tabular, and Power Pivot. The default storage mode of Tabular and Power Pivot is the xVelocity in-memory engine. The default Multidimensional storage is MOLAP. You might want to analyze which objects consume the most storage space. This especially important for Tabular since computer memory is still a scarce resource. Windows Explorer The easiest…
Read articleWith all the tremendous interest around BI, new vendors and tools are emerging almost every day. In general, you can approach your BI needs in two ways. You can try a top-down approach starting with the presentation layer, hoping that a cool data visualization tool and self-service BI will somehow solve your challenges. Lots of vendors out there would love to take you on that…
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