• E-mail Unleashed

    July 16, 2006 / No Comments »

    Many, many apologies if you have received tons of e-mail from me (Prologika) during the weekend. The good news is that it seems like I’ve managed to find a way to send e-mail notifications from my forum. The bad news is that I didn’t notice that I had some 500 e-mails stuck in the queue which the e-mail job sent out. Oops!

  • UDM Data Islands

    June 28, 2006 / No Comments »

    As I mentioned in my TechEd Memoirs post, Microsoft is scaling back from the “super” cube approach in favor of more granular data “islands”. Since this took me by suprise, I approached the SSAS team for clarification. Here are the answers I managed to get:   1. What performance benefits could be realized by splitting UDM in data islands? At this point, we don't have detailed performance numbers we can share. But to give an indication - a cube that had around 15 measure groups, and a very large number of attributes (over 100 cube dimensions, many with more than 100 attributes) showed a performance improvement of about 6 fold when split into separate cubes (one per measure group), for queries that only referenced a single measure group. The main benefit came from the reduced cube space - the individual cubes only needed to include dimensions related to the measure group, and...

  • You’ve been Deadlocked

    June 24, 2006 / No Comments »

    If you’ve been using VS.NET 2005 for a while chances are that your debugging session could have been spectacularly crashing just when you thought you were so close finding that elusive critical bug. This situation may have manifested with the following exception: ContextSwitchDeadlock was detectedMessage: The CLR has been unable to transition from COM context <some nasty hex number> to COM context <another nasty hex number> for 60 seconds. The thread that owns the destination context/apartment is most likely either doing a non pumping wait or processing a very long running operation without pumping Windows messages. This situation generally has a negative performance impact and may even lead to the application becoming non responsive or memory usage accumulating continually over time. To avoid this problem, all single threaded apartment (STA) threads should use pumping wait primitives (such as CoWaitForMultipleHandles) and routinely pump messages during long running operations. Usually, you can’t...

  • TechEd Memoirs

    June 18, 2006 / 2 Comments »

    TechEd 2006 US is over. Given the fact that VS.NET 2005, .NET 2.0, and SQL Server 2005 have matured, there weren’t many earth-shuttering announcements and cool demos. Anyway, here are some of the most interesting BI highlights written in the plane on my way home. Brian Welcker told us that RS SP2 (CTP scheduled for November, final release alongside Office 2007 launch) will bring a much tighter level of integration between RS 2005 and SharePoint 2007.  This is great given that SharePoint is the Microsoft premium portal solution. Specifically, it would be possible to configure RS in a SharePoint configuration (SSP) mode using the RS configuration utility. In SSP mode, the entire RS catalog is migrated to the SharePoint database. Instead of the Report Manager, the SharePoint Administration portal will be used for report management. For example, the Report Server will authenticate the users using the SSP security settings. The...

  • Next stop – TechEd 2006 in Boston

    June 11, 2006 / No Comments »

    I am gradually tuning to the TechEd wave. I am leaving for Boston on Monday. I hope those of you who will attend TechEd will stop by to my session “Building Reporting Solutions with Reporting Services and Analysis Services”. I’ve already uploaded the slides and code to my website. The presentation is currently scheduled for 8 am on Thursday, June 15th in room 210. As the adage goes, an early bird early sings :-).  Hopefully, SSRS and SSAS is just what you need to boot up after the party on Wednesday. Time permitting, I will also hang around one or more of the BI discussions in the Discussion area (wherever that is). See you in Boston!

  • When the Host is not so Perfect

    June 9, 2006 / No Comments »

    Here is something that has recently bit me really bad. Customer requirements called for implementing an in-house report designer to create report definitions. Expired by the VS.NET 2005 Report Designer, we decided to implement a part of the tool as a WYSWYG designer using the design-time infrastructure (IDesignerHost) in .NET 2.0. If you don’t know what I am talking about, read the excellent Dinesh Chandnani's Perfect Host article to learn more about the .NET designer host support. To spice up the user experience, we decided to use the Infragistics Windows Forms suite. At runtime, the end user could drag Infragistics UltraTextBox and UltraImage controls and drop them on the design canvas. Everything was working just fine during development (aka my machine). However, once the application was deployed to QA, the WYSWYG designer failed abysmally. After some digging, we realized that the Infragistics controls was performing the same license check as...

  • Microsoft’s Performance Management Gambit

    June 7, 2006 / No Comments »

    An interesting article on TDWI about PerformancePoint Server.

  • PerformancePoint Server Announced

    June 7, 2006 / No Comments »

    As a follow-up to previous post, during the webcast Microsoft announced a new product called PerformancePoint Server due to be released in mid-2007 alongside Office 2007. PerformancePoint will be a convergent product of Scorecard Manager, ProClarity, and Biz# (yes, Microsoft finally let the cat out of the bag about the strictly confidential so far Biz# initiative). The product will be designed as a web-based portal and will offer performance management, planning and forecasting capabilities. I personally very excited about this new product offering. PerformancePoint will definately help Microsoft to compete better with other heavy-weight BI players, such as Cognos. More information about PerformancePoint can be found on its website.

  • Microsoft’s Business Intelligence Product Roadmap Webcast

    June 6, 2006 / No Comments »

    Jeff Raikes, President of Microsoft's Business Division and Lewis Levin, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's Office Business Applications Group, will present a Live Meeting webcast at 11 am (PDT) regarding Microsoft's Business Intelligence product roadmap. Click here to register.

  • MDX Performance Tips Article

    May 26, 2006 / No Comments »

    I found a short but very useful MDX Performance article on sqlserveranalysisservices.com. I know I am guilty of breaking not once the first rule (Don’t Filter on Member Property Values). Maintained by Richard Tkachuk (Lead Program Manager on the SSAS team), this site offers other interesting tips and insights.

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