The second CTP (Community Technology Preview) build of the forthcoming SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 was released today. Besides bug fixes, SP2 includes major BI features and enhancements including: Reporting Services SharePoint 2007 integration – this one is a true enzilla (enhancement Godzilla) and deserves a separate post. Suffice to say that unlike the previous Explorer and Viewer webparts, SP2 will allow you to…
Read articleMicrosoft Corp. today announced the completion of the 2007 Microsoft® Office system code and confirmed its release to manufacturing (RTM).
Read articleIn UDM, the cube space is defined by attribute hierarchies. Dimensions are just logical containers of attribute hierarchies. It will be great if the next release of SQL Server (Katmai) could expand further on the attribute nature of UDM and solve some nagging issues that modelers currently face. Let's consider an example. Say, you have Geography and Customer dimension tables (see the AdventureWorksDW database). It…
Read articleOne of the most useful features of the SSRS 2005 Report Builder is the ability to generate reports on the fly. As long as there is a navigational path in the model, the end user can click on a drillthrough-enabled attribute to see more details. This feature is officially called infinite drillthrough. Sometimes, the automatic drillthrough reports may get in the way. For example, there…
Read articleSome late code changes to the ProgressTracker CRI sample featured in my MSDN Magazine article "Jazz Up Your Data Using Custom Report Items In SQL Server Reporting Services" have introduced a bug that causes ProgressTracker to ignore changes to the CRI color and border style whent the reoprt is rendered. To fix: Open the ProgressTrackerRenderer.cs (or ProgressTrackerRenderer.vb if you use the VB.NET version) Locate the…
Read articleI learned today that my MVP award has been renewed. This will be my third year as an MVP for Windows Systems – SQL Server.
Read articleOne of the coolest SQL Server 2005 feature is .NET CLR objects. When use wisely, CLR integration can solve many nagging problems with T-SQL. For example, you cannot pass columns from an outer SQL statement to a TBF even though it returns one row. Or, for some obscure reason, you cannot use dynamic execution (EXEC statement) inside a scalar –valued function. Yet, you may need…
Read articleMicrosoft has released several cool Business Intelligence-related webcasts that target the forthcoming Office 2007. The webcasts are taken from the corresponding breakout session delivered at the Microsoft Office System Developers Conference 2006.
Read articleOne of the major UDM enhancements that transcends the boundaries of traditional OLAP is flexible dimension relationships, including many-to-many, referenced, and fact relationships. Marco Russo, who helped me tremendously with my Analysis Services book, ha s just published a very comprehensive whitepaper (shall we call it a mini book?) about many-to-many dimension relationships. I had the pleasure to be one of the reviewers. For those…
Read articleYou will probably never run into this issue unless you have very wide tables but here it is. If use the RS table region and the table has many columns and groups, the number of textboxes in the table cell can increase dramatically and exceed the maximum limit. This situation manifests itself with a rather cryptic error message upon uploading the report definition:[BC30494] Line is…
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