I had an interesting issue this week. I was working on a small test cube with financial data. The lowest grain in the measure group was the Account dimension which represents a customer bank account. I had to implement rolling 12 calculations on semi-additive measures (e.g. Avg Account Balance) by weighting the balances at the account level:Rolling 12 Bal = ∑(Number of Account Active Days…
Thanks for Russell Christopher's blog, I've learned that Microsoft donated an Analysis Services Load Simulator (ASLoadSim) sample project which lets you load test Analysis Services using the VS.NET 2005 test capabilities. While I am to try the code sample, I am very impressed by the whitepaper included in the sample which got harvested from Project REAL. Chris Webb also contributed in the SSAS performance area…
Microsoft has released a cumulative update package (build 3161) for SQL Server 2005 SP2. Among other things, the update package fixes the SSRS black preview.
Nick Barclay is telling us that the book The Rational Guide to Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005 that he co-wrote with Adrian Downes is out! You can use BSM to design scorecards that can be published to SharePoint dashboards or SSRS reports. As far as I know, this is the first BSM book which makes it even more appealing.
A bit outdated announcement perhaps but the Office team has released a Designing SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services Cubes for Excel 2007 PivotTables whitepaper. Instead of pestering you with how-to PivotTable questions, now your users can have proper documentation. A great deal of it discusses UDM implementation details but who is to say that you didn't travel the extra mile… As for me, well I…
I've been having fun lately with a dashboard page which has an Excel Web Access (EWA) web part connected to a PivotTable report. The PivotTable report is nothing to brag about. It displays a few KPI-related measures coming from an SSAS cube. PivotTable was converted to formulas to achieve a free-form report layout. So far, pretty straightforward stuff. That is, until the customer wanted the…
As I mentioned in a previous blog, Visual Studio 2005 SP1 includes updated versions of both the WinForms and ASP.NET versions of the Report Viewer control. Microsoft has just released full and upgrade redistributables for the Report Viewer SP1.
Documenting the UDM schema is a common requirement but to the best of my knowledge neither Microsoft nor third-party vendors provide schema generators. While you are waiting for a commercial tool to fill in the gap, you can roll out your own schema generators. Thanks to the Analysis Management Objects (AMO) library, this task is remarkably simple to implement. For example, here is a .NET…
One must-read SSRS resource which I missed was the excellent article "Get More Out of SQL Server Reporting Services Charts" by Robert Bruckner from the Reporting Services dev team. Now I have something to point folks to for how-to chart-related questions.
MVP Summit is over and I am back in Atlanta. I had great time meeting other MVPs, MS employees, and learning about the future in MS terms. I posted pictures from the event. Some interesting statistics given to us by Microsoft: The MVP Summit is the largest event held at the Microsoft campus 1889 attendees were registered to attend 88 countries will be represented (based…