I was called upon to troubleshoot an issue with creating an aggregation design for an existing cube. The Design Aggregation Wizard would refuse to design aggregations with the following cryptic message: Errors in the aggregation designer. The 'Perspective' dimension has no attribute for the aggregation design. The server cannot design aggregations when this attribute is missing. Upon a closer look, it turned out the Perspective…
Read articleNow that the age of in-memory databases has dawned on us, I've been experimenting with different aspects of VertiPaq and I find its technology fascinating. It's safe to say that VertiPaq will propel Microsoft Business Intelligence for years to come with all of its three flavors: PowerPivot (self-service BI), Business Intelligence Semantic Model (corporate BI), and data warehousing (column-based stored indexes). Unlike Analysis Services MOLAP,…
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Now that a snow blizzard has paralyzed Atlanta for a week, what a better way to start the new year than sharing a PowerPivot success story. A bank institution has approached Prologika to help them implement a solution to report the customer's credit history so the bank can evaluate the risk for granting the customer a loan. Their high-level initial requirements call for: Flexible searching…
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A recommended practice for implementing time calculations in PowerPivot is to have a Data table with a datetime column. Kasper de Jonge explains in more details in this blog. This approach will probably save effort when importing data from normalized schemas and won't require specifying additional arguments to the PowerPivot time functions. However, it will undoubtedly present an issue when importing data from a star…
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Report actions are an Analysis Services extensibility mechanism that lets end users run a Reporting Services report as they browse the cube. A customer reported that they have trouble setting up a Reporting Services action for a report server configured in a SharePoint integrated mode – a scenario which appears that wasn't tested properly by Microsoft. First, the customer wanted to pass multiple parameters to…
Read articleDigital dashboards, also known as enterprise dashboards or executive dashboards, are rapidly rising in popularity as the presentation layer for business intelligence. The chances are that you've been asked to implement a dashboard to let management quickly ascertain the status (or "health") of an organization via key business indicators (KPIs) and this task might seem daunting. This is where Dundas Dashboard can help. As a…
Read articleMicrosoft launched SQL Server 11 (Denali) pre-released forums and is eagerly awaiting your feedback. Judging by the number of BI-related forums, one can easily see that BI will be a big part of Denali with major enhancements across the entire BI stack. Of course, not many questions to ask if we don't have the bits yet to play with (CTP1 doesn't include the BI stuff)…
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I dare to predict that in a few years after SQL 11 ships, there will be two kinds of BI professionals – those who know the Business Intelligence Semantic Model and those who will learn it soon. By the way, the same applies to SharePoint. What can you do to start on the path and prepare while waiting for BISM? Learn PowerPivot, of course, which…
Read articleOur online Microsoft BI classes for December 2010 and January 2011: Class Mentor Date Price Applied SSRS 2008 Teo Lachev 12/14-12/16 12:00-5:00 EDT $799 Register Applied SSAS 2008 Teo Lachev 1/11-1/13 12:00-5:00 EDT $799 Register Applied PowerPivot Teo Lachev 1/25-1/26 12:00-4:00 EDT $599 Register Visit our training page to register and more details.
Read articleIn SQL 11, the VertiPaq column store that will power the new Business intelligence Semantic Model (BISM) will be delivered in three ways: 1. PowerPivot – in-process DLL with Excel 2010. 2. A second storage mode of Analysis Services that you will get by installing SSAS in VertiPaq mode. 3. A new column stored index in the SQL RDBMS. The third option picked up my…
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