We had the pleasure to have some 70 people attending our January 30th, 2012 meeting of the Atlanta BI group. Our sponsor, Matrix Resources, was kind enough to give us the auditorium. FisionIO sponsored the meeting. Phil Per-Lee did us a "Prototypes with Pizza" presentation, titled Connecting the Dots. And, Carlos Rodrigues rocked the stage with the main presentation about dimensional modeling. I've uploaded pictures…
Read articleI had to download many ASP.NET pages from the SharePoint Pages library that were used to wrap up the Reporting Services ReportViewer webpart. I wanted the pages as files, so I could deploy them to another SharePoint server. Unfortunately, SharePoint doesn't support selecting and downloading multiple files. But, it does support the WebDAV protocol. Open Windows Explorer and type in the following URL: \\<SharePoint site>\<library>…
Read articleAs you probably now, Reporting Services doesn't allow you to create subscriptions with data sources that use Windows security because subsbscriptions are run in unattended mode. Moving to SQL Server 2012, we'll add Data Alerts to the list. This presents an issue if you use Analysis Services which only supports Windows security. The only option is to use Stored Credentials with the "Use as Windows…
Read articleI am teaching my online Applied PowerPivot class for personal and team business intelligence on Jan 24th and 25th and there are still seats available.
Read articleAs 2011 is winding down, it's time to reflect on the past and plan for the future. 2011 has been a very exciting year for Microsoft BI and me. Gartner positioned Microsoft as a leader in the 2011 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms. Although SQL Server 2012 will technically ship early next year, we can say it's a done deal as it's currently in…
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As I mentioned in my blog post on this subject, I've found a good use of SQL Server 2012 columnstore indexes to speed up significantly ETL processes that need to aggregate large datasets. But we run into a snag, which got promoted to a bug by Microsoft Support Services. Under some conditions, SQL Server would create a plan that uses a "stream aggregate" operator instead…
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Issue: Migrate a PerformancePoint dashboard from MOSS 2007 to SharePoint 2010. We used the Import PerformancePoint Content feature to import existing dashboards from the PerformancePoint database and this saved us a lot of effort. However, filters failed with this rather obscure error: After tracing with SQL Profiler and looking at the Windows Event log, we saw the following almost as useless error): Microsoft.AnalysisServices.AdomdClient.AdomdErrorResponseException: Query (1,…
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SQL Server 2012 introduces columnstore indexes. Using the same in-memory VertiPaq engine that powers PowerPivot and Analysis Services Tabular, columnstore indexes can speed up dramatically SQL queries that aggregate large datasets. For a great introduction to columnstore indexes, see the video presentation, "Columnstore Indexes Unveiled" by Eric Hanson. I personally don't see columnstore indexes as a replacement of Analysis Services because an analytical layer has…
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I was just about to write a blog about the new features in the Release Candidate (RC) build of Power View and I saw that Robert had written a great blog already. It's great to see the product coming along so nicely. Can't wait to be able to use multidimensional cubes as data sources! One feature that stirred a lot of excitement and deserves more…
Read articleThe public release of Microsoft SQL Server 2012 RC0 is now available.
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