I have to admit that my preoccupation with Reporting Services and Analysis Services don't leave me much bandwidth nowadays to tackle other Microsoft BI (far less third-party) offerings. One of the products I know I need to catch up is the planning component of PerformanceServer, formerly known as Biz#. Fortunately, Nick and Adrian followed up on their The Rational Guide To Planning with Microsoft Office…
February CTP is out. It brings the much anticipated integration with Visual Studio 2008 and the new BIDS Report Designer. Download the February CTP here: http://www.microsoft.com/sql/2008/prodinfo/download.mspx Updated Books Online for February CTP are available here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=19DB0B42-A5B2-456F-9C5C-F295CDD58D7A&displaylang=en What's new in Reporting Services February CTP (compared to the previous November 2007 CTP): Support for Microsoft Word Rendering This allows users to render reports as Word documents that…
Enterprise Edition of Analysis Services 2005 and 2008 supports semi-additive functions, such as LastNonEmpty, LastChild, and so on, to facilitate working with semi-additive measures, such as account balances and inventory snapshots. For example, the screenshot below shows LastNonEmtpy in action. To demonstrate this, I added a Last Sales measure to the Internet Sales measure group in the Adventure Works cube and set its AggregationFunction property…
Francois Ajenstat, Director of Product Management for Microsoft SQL Server, tells us that SQL Server 2008 will be released in Q3 2008 while Release Candidate (RC) is expected in Q2. The February 27th marketing launch date remains unchanged.
SharePoint always has a trick up its sleeve to surprise the innocent. I have to admit that I continue to be baffled by this technology. Not that I know too much about it, of course. But this thing is like the Pacific Ocean – web applications, site collections, sites, oh my. The further you go, the deeper it gets. Things that still escape my mind…
Visual Studio 2008 embraces the exciting new world of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) for communicating with services. However, pitfalls await the unwary. I've recently tackled invoking the Reporting Services Web service with WCF and I want to share my findings. The Visual Studio Add Web Reference menu has been renamed to Add Service Reference to denote that WCF can communicate with much more than Web…
The Microsoft CAT team has released a new whitepaper Analysis Services Many-to-Many Dimensions: Query Performance Optimization Techniques. "Many-to-many dimension relationships in SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services (SSAS) enable you to easily model complex source schemas and provide great analytical capabilities. This capability frequently comes with a substantial cost in query performance due to the runtime join required by Analysis Services to resolve many-to-many queries. This…
As he posted here, Brian Welcker (Group Program Manager of Reporting Services) is leaving the Reporting Services team and moving to the Microsoft Healthcare Solutions Group. Brian did so much to build and promote Reporting Services. SSRS wouldn't have been the same if it wasn't for Brian. The technical community (myself included) will surely miss him. Let's wish Brian good luck with his new career!
As you know, business scorecards are the latest BI craze. Nick Barclay was kind enough to send me a copy of his new book Monitoring and Analyzing with Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 by Rational Press which he co-authored with a co-worker and friend Adrian Downes. This is one of these relatively-small and very practical books which helps you hit the ground running quickly. As…
There could be 1001 reasons why IE asks you for credentials when you access a website configured for Windows Authentication and none of them has to do with Reporting Services itself. Windows Vista and IE 7 add yet another one. IE 7 will prompt you for credentials if your computer is not added to a domain and you access a local website configured for Windows…
