July CTP of SQL Server 2008 (Katmai) is out. On the BI side of things: New SSRS Report Engine "Improvements represent the two major infrastructure changes for Reporting Services. Reporting Services enhances the processing engine and rendering extensions to enable new functionality, such as Tablix support, and scalability as well as remove the dependency on IIS. Additionally, new report designer and configuration tool are provided…
Read articleIf you have a cube with large dimensions you may have come across the following error: The expression contains a function that cannot operate on a set with more than 4,294,967,296 tuples. The culprit is the NON EMPY (or NonEmpty), as mentioned in the Chris Webb's blog and Mosha Passumansky's blog. It turns out that NonEmpty simply gives up when the number of tupples in…
Read articleFrom the latest MS press release "In anticipation for the most significant Microsoft enterprise event in the next year, Turner announced that Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 will launch together at an event in Los Angeles on Feb. 27, 2008, kicking off hundreds of launch events around the world." Whoa, I didn't expect Katmai so soon. Well, Euan Garden is telling us…
Read articleI was setting up Reporting Services 2005 today on a clean Windows XP machine and I came across the infamous error: The report server has encountered a configuration error. See the report server log files for more information. (rsServerConfigurationError). Access to the path 'c:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.2\Reporting Services\ReportServer\RSReportServer.config' is denied. Here is how I fixed this horrible problem. First, I open the Computer Manager and…
Read articleI spent a couple of hours today trying to get SSRS 2005 working on Vista. I was getting the infamous IIS 500 error when browsing the Report Manager (http://localhost/reports) and Report Server (http://localhost/reportserver) virtual roots. I triple-verified the Brian Welcker's recommendations and the Vista considerations in the SQL Server 2005 readme file. I couldn't figure what's going on especially given the fact that I installed…
Read articleI came across this little gem which I haven't noticed so far. A nice summary of the 10 things you should do to optimize the UDM query performance. The best one is kept for last - scale out when you can no longer scale up. So true, if I could only convince customers to do so J
Read articleSQL Magazine published the first part of my article Protect UDM with Dimension Data Security in its July issue. This article explains the fundamentals of dimension data security. I am working on making the article available for public access (as of now, it requires subscriber-level access). The article code can be downloaded from the publisher's website and from my website. I am currently writing the…
Read articleIf you use VS.NET deployment to deploy your SSAS project from one domain to another, you may get the following obscure error message on deploy. The trust relationship between the primary domain and the trusted domain failed. This may happen even if your workstation and the deploy server are on the same domain. The most likely reason for this error is that you have added…
Read articleBack to my When (null) is not Null post, there is a undocumented breaking change in SQL Server 2005 SP2 which you should be aware of. In response to the customer demand, SP2 treats aggregate rows as detail rows. As a result, if the report doesn’t use the Aggregate() function, the report will show all rows. For those using the Aggregate function, there will be…
Read articleI am back from an one-week vacation to Clearwater, Florida followed by TechEd 2007 US in Orlando. Overall, nothing earth – shattering on the BI arena from TechEd 2007. Product groups are between releases so most of the content was SQL Server 2005-based with a few sneak previews of some of the good stuff to come in Katmai. My presentation attracted a fairly large crowd.…
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