• Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals

    November 11, 2006 / No Comments »

    The newly released CTP7 of Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals (aka DataDude) now supports bi-directional schema updates. Once you generate the scripts from your database schema, you can choose either the database or the scripts as a source of changes and commit the changes to the target. Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals requires Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition.

  • SQL Server 2005 SP2 CTP 2 Build Released Today

    November 8, 2006 / No Comments »

    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 move the report catalog to SharePoint to enable publishing, viewing, and managing SSRS 2005 reports within SharePoint 2007. Report Builder support for Oracle 9.2.0.3 or above (previously only SQL Server and Analysis Services 2005 were supported for Report Builder models) New .NET Data Provider for Hyperion 9.3 BI+ Essbase Enterprise Analytics Select All option has been restored with multi-valued parameters (it was disabled in SP1 for performance reasons). Analysis Services Better Excel 2007 integration – advanced filtering, cube formulas, offline cubes. Data mining add-ins for...

  • Office 2007 RTM’ed

    November 6, 2006 / No Comments »

    Microsoft Corp. today announced the completion of the 2007 Microsoft® Office system code and confirmed its release to manufacturing (RTM).

  • Linked Attribute Hierarchies

    October 21, 2006 / No Comments »

    In 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 is logical to expect that end users may be willing to browse data by the Geography-Customer hierarchy. As common this requirement is, modelers today need to make some tradeoffs to meet this requirement. To start with, you could embrace the star schema and build two UDM dimensions (Geography and Customer) on top of the corresponding dimension tables. Then, the end users can drop these two dimensions side-by-side in their favorite OLAP browser to slice the data by Geography and Customer. Behind the scenes, the server...

  • Drill Through Your Way

    October 17, 2006 / No Comments »

    One 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 are performance implications when this feature is used with UDM as a data source. Or, you may need the drillthrough report to bring data from a different data source than the one the Report Builder model is built upon. To meet this requirement, you can wire up a custom drillthrough report. For example, let's assume that your model has Customers and Accounts entities where a customer can have one or more accounts. You need to define your own drillthrough report that shows the customer's account...

  • ProgressTracker Bug

    October 3, 2006 / No Comments »

    Some 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 Initialize() function and make the following code changes: //_progress.ProgressColor = Shared.GetColorFromString(LookupCustomProperty(_cri.CustomProperties, Shared.PROP_PROGRESS_COLOR, Drawing.Color.Salmon.Name)); //_progress.BorderColor = Shared.GetColorFromString(LookupCustomProperty(_cri.CustomProperties, Shared.PROP_PROGRESS_COLOR, Drawing.Color.Gray.Name)); _progress.ProgressColor = Shared.GetColorFromString(_cri.Style["Color"].ToString()); _progress.BorderColor = Shared.GetColorFromString(_cri.Style["BorderColor"].ToString());    3. Close the Reports project (if it is open) and rebuild the ProgressTrackerCRI project to deploy the code changes. The net result of making these changes will be that the CRI will reuse the Color and BorderColor standard RS properties instead of trying to find corresponding custom properties in RDL. Thanks to Sorin Sandu for reporting this.

  • And the MVP Award Goes To

    October 1, 2006 / No Comments »

    I learned today that my MVP award has been renewed. This will be my third year as an MVP for Windows Systems – SQL Server.

  • Transcend T-SQL Limitations with SQL Server 2005 CLR Objects

    October 1, 2006 / No Comments »

    One 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 to use the same scalar-valued function with an arbitrary column. In comparison, the sky is the limit about what a CLR stored procedure or a CLR UDF can do. Here is an extract from a real-life CLR UDF written in C# that returns the YTD aggregated value for a given measure: [Microsoft.SqlServer.Server.SqlFunction(DataAccess = DataAccessKind.Read, SystemDataAccess = SystemDataAccessKind.Read)] public static SqlDecimal YTD(int companyID, DateTime financialPeriod, string measure) {   using (SqlConnection conn = new SqlConnection("context connection=true")) {      conn.Open();      SqlCommand cmd = new SqlCommand(String.Format("SELECT SUM({0})...

  • Office 2007 Business Intelligence Videos

    September 27, 2006 / No Comments »

    Microsoft 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.

  • The Many-to-many Revolution

    September 25, 2006 / No Comments »

    One 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 who are not familiar with his work, Marco is one of the few people on this planet that has deep understanding and real world experience with Analysis Services since its early stages. Thus, this whitepaper is a valuable resource that discusses practical implications of the UDM many-to-many relationships. The real-life scenarios presented in the whitepaper unlocks the mysteries of this revolutionary OLAP concept. Don't forget to check Marco's blog and his SQLBI.EU website for more UDM insights. Great work, Marco, and looking forward to a...

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