Today, Microsoft released Report Builder 2.0 (build 10.00.1600.60) , as Robert Bruckner announced in his blog. This is a major milestone in the Reporting Services roadmap. In my opinion, Report Builder 2.0 is one of the most important and exciting features of Reporting Services 2008 as it bridges the gap between standard and end-user (ad hoc) reporting. You should definitely consider Report Builder and Analysis Services…
Read articleAt the BI Conference in Seattle, Microsoft announced the future roadmap for next BI-oriented SQL Server release, nee Kilimanjaro, that will focus on three major teams: • Self Service Analytics • Self Service Reporting • Sharing, Collaboration & Management The Self Service Analytics will encompass projects Madison (a share-nothing MPP scale-out version of SQL Server, powered by DATAllegro technology) and Gemini, which I mentioned before.…
Read articleAs the news arrived today (see Mosha Pasumansky blog, Chris Webb blog, and Marco Russo blog) , the BI Conference revealed what has been brewing for a while in the Microsoft BI nest. Project Gemini, which one may call Memory-based Dimensional Model (MDM) to draw a comparison with the Unified Dimension Model (UDM), will let business users create ad-hoc cubes that are stored in memory.…
Read articleMicrosoft has released the first for SQL Server 2008 cumulative update package. Among other issues, it fixes the SSAS bug with requesting measures with mixed aggregation functions which I previously reported.
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Issue: You use Excel as an OLAP browser connected to an SSAS cube. You've defined the name of the Month attribute in the Date hierarchy in the format MMM-YYYY. While months are sorted in an ascending order in Excel, descending sorting doesn't work; or rather Excel sorts them as strings. That's because Excel interprets these captions as strings instead of dates even if you set…
Read articleScenario: You need to personalize the captions of calculated members or/and KPIs of an SSAS cube. For example, a solution vendor may need to deploy a cube to multiple clients. Instead of maintaining separate cube definitions, the vendor may prefer to change the captions of certain calculated members and KPIs per client. There wasn't a good story in SSAS 2005 about such requirements. In SSAS…
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As I mentioned in my previous blog, Report Builder 2.0 RC1 has arrived. Although perhaps too early in the game, you may wonder how you can get the most out of Report Builder 2.0 and extend it when the built-in features are not enough. As Report Designer and Report Builder 2.0 share the same design surface, you may believe that they are equally extensible. Unfortunately,…
Read articleThanks to Robert Bruckner's blog, I've learned that the Report Builder 2.0 (previously known as Report Designer Preview) Release Candidate 1 is available for download. This should be a feature-complete build of Report Builder 2.0, which is scheduled for official release in October. IMO, Report Builder 2.0 is one of most exciting features of Reporting Services. I expect it to blur the "great divide" between…
Read articleA few readers are asking about the whereabouts of my book Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services, so I felt I need to write a short status report. The book is printed and it's on stock with the distributor. It's making its way slowly-y-y to the retail network. It turns out there are lots of things that need to happen before the book is finally…
Read articleThere is a nasty known bug with SSAS 2008, where if a query that requests two measures with Sum and LastNonEmpty aggregate functions side by side and the query uses NON EMPTY (which all OLAP clients use by default), the server forces the measure with the SUM function to display empty. Steps to repro: Use the Analysis Services Tutorial cube (Lesson 10) which is included…
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