• Demystifying Clustered Columnstore Indexes

    January 13, 2015 / No Comments »

    Non-clustered columnstore indexes (NCCI) were introduced in SQL Server 2012 to improve the performance of large aggregate queries (common for data warehousing) with the caveat that there were read-only. Consequently, the ETL process has to drop NCCI, load the data, and recreate the columnstore index. NOTE Building an index (columnstore or regular) should be a highly-parallel operation. Building a columnstore index in particular should max out all licensed cores. Currently, we have an open support case with Microsoft where a columnstore index allows adding a computed column (while it shouldn't). Consequently, SQL Server builds the index using a single thread which may lead to excessive index creation times. SQL Server 2014 introduced clustered columnstore indexes (CCI) which offer two main advantages: CCI is updatable -- Therefore, you don't have to drop and recreate the index anymore. Storage is greatly reduced -- For example, you might have a fact table of...

  • Presenting at Atlanta.MDF

    January 7, 2015 / No Comments »

    I'm presenting at the Atlanta.MDF group on Monday, January 12th. I'll be covering a wide range of tips and techniques for analyzing and improving performance of SQL Server-based data analytics solutions. Hope you can make it. Title: Can Your Data Analytics Solution Scale? Abstract: Does your ETL exceed its processing window? Do your users complain about the SSRS spinny? Can your SQL Server database design deliver the expected performance? Can the system scale to thousands of users? Join this session to learn best practices and tips for isolating bottlenecks and improving the performance of data analytics solutions. I'll dissect the layers of a "classic" solution (relational database, ETL, data model, reports) and share solutions harvested from real-life projects to address common performance-related issues. 

  • SQL Server and 20 Cores Limit

    January 7, 2015 / No Comments »

    Scenario: You execute a SQL Server 2012 task that uses parallelism, such as index rebuild or a query on a server with more than 20 cores running SQL Server 2012 Enterprise Edition. In the Windows Task Manager, you observe that the task uses only 20 cores. We discovered this scenario during a rebuild of a columnstore index. To confirm this further, you examine the SQL Server log and notice that a similar message is logged when the SQL Server instance starts: “SQL Server detected 8 sockets with 4 cores per socket and 4 logical processors per socket, 32 total logical processors; using 20 logical processors based on SQL Server licensing. This is an informational message; no user action is required.” Explanation: More than likely, you have upgraded to SQL Server 2012 from SQL Server 2008 R2 under Software Assurance. Microsoft created a special SKU of Enterprise Edition to support this...

  • Tabular M2M Relationships on the Horizon

    January 4, 2015 / No Comments »

    One of the biggest strengths of Microsoft self-service BI is the ability to create sophisticated data models on a par with organizational BI models built by professionals. This fact is often overlooked when organizations evaluate self-service tools and the decision is often made based on other factors but not insightful understanding of the data model capabilities. This is unfortunate because most popular tools on the market don't go much further than supporting a single dataset. By contrast, Power Pivot allows you to import easily multiple datasets from virtually anywhere and join the resulting tables as you can do in Microsoft Access. This brings tremendous flexibility and analytical power. Unlike multidimensional cubes, one of the limitations of the Power Pivot and Tabular data models has been the lack of support for declarative many-to-many relationships. The workaround has been using a simple DAX formula to resolve the relationship over a bridge table,...

  • Getting ETL Task Duration

    January 2, 2015 / No Comments »

    Happy New Year! ETL exceeds the processing time window? Optimizing ETL, starts with obtaining task-level execution times? If you use SSIS 2012 project deployment mode, task-level stats are already loaded in the SSIS catalog and you can use the following query: SELECT execution_id, CASE WHEN [status] = 1 THEN 'created' WHEN [status] = 2 THEN 'running' WHEN [status] = 3 THEN 'canceled' WHEN [status] = 4 THEN 'failed' WHEN [status] = 5 THEN 'pending' WHEN [status] = 6 THEN 'ended unexpectedly' WHEN [status] = 7 THEN 'succeeded' WHEN [status] = 8 THEN 'stopping' WHEN [status] = 9 THEN 'completed' END AS [status_text], DATEDIFF(ss,start_time,end_time) DurationInSeconds FROM catalog.executions e What if you are not on SSIS 2012 or later yet or you are not using the project deployment mode or a framework that logs the task duration? You can still obtain the task duration but you need to enable SSIS logging for...

  • 2015 Annual TI Forecast by TEKsystems

    December 22, 2014 / No Comments »

    TEKSystems has been a wonderful sponsor of the Atlanta MS BI Group. They've recently published an interesting 2015 Annual TI Forecast report. According to the report, Business Intelligence/Big Data will be among the top most impactful technologies in 2015. More key facts: Seventy-one percent of IT leaders report confidence in their ability to satisfy business demands in 2015, representing an increase from 66 percent and 54 percent in forecasts for 2014 and 2013, respectively. The top five areas where most IT leaders expect to increase spending in 2015 include security (65 percent), mobility (54 percent), cloud (53 percent), BI/Big Data (49 percent) and storage (46 percent). Twenty-nine percent of IT leaders also expect to increase spending on ERP. Seventy-three percent of IT leaders indicate that operational objectives such as reducing costs, improving efficiency, consolidating, standardizing and streamlining present the biggest organizational challenges. Salary increases are most likely to be average,...

  • Atlanta MS BI Group Meeting Tonight

    December 15, 2014 / No Comments »

    Come and join us tonight for last 2014 meeting of the Atlanta MS BI Group. In the spirit of the season, I'll revisit its most important tools and their role in a holistic and modern data analytics environment. Then, for each tool, I'll discuss its indented use, as well as its pros and cons. We'll discuss self-service and organizational BI, on-premise and cloud, emerging technologies, and how they complement each other in the context of Microsoft BI. And, Mark Tabladillo will do us a cool demo of the Azure Machine Learning Web Service. $60 Pizza Hut gift card and other cool door prices from Aspen Brands will be given away. Kudos to our fantastic sponsor TEKSystems for buying us food and drinks!

  • Embedded Power View and Pivot Reports

    December 13, 2014 / No Comments »

    I've been pestering Microsoft for years to provide an embedded Analysis Services Viewer control (similar to the SSRS ReportViewer) that would allow developers to embed interactive reports on custom Windows Forms and web applications. And, for years nothing happened, even after Microsoft acquired the Dundas OLAP Chart control in 2008. There are some positive signs on that end lately. Microsoft just rolled out the ability to embed Power View and pivot reports on a webpage or blog. I'm sure there are some scenarios that will be benefit from this feature but this is really not what I want because: It's just an URL-based mechanism targeting deployed reports and its customization options are limited to layout adjustments. It's not a control that developers can customize, such as to change the connection string in order to pass custom user credentials, replace parameters, etc. It requires the reports to be hosted in Office...

  • SQL PASS Summit 2014 Links

    November 13, 2014 / No Comments »

    Don't miss the gist of SQL Pass Summit 2014. Keynote Day One: http://www.sqlpass.org/summit/2014/PASStv.aspx?watch=7Pum0vfYtSk Keynote Day Two: http://www.sqlpass.org/summit/2014/PASStv.aspx?watch=g8DSwPjmLv4 All PASStv sessions can be found here: http://www.sqlpass.org/summit/2014/PASStv.aspx

  • Presenting at Dama-Georgia and Atlanta BI Group

    November 2, 2014 / No Comments »

    I'll present at DAMA Georgia Chapter on November 12. The topic will be "Best Practices for Establishing a Solid BI Foundation". For more details, please visit the event page. Don't know where to start with BI or if you're on the right track? Just like everything else, a successful BI rollout is based on a solid foundation. Targeting BI managers, technology officers, and architects, this advisory and technical session presents proven best practices to implementing BI for mid-size and large organizations. I'll present approaches and recommendations for the main layers of the BI architectural stack, ranging from staging databases, data marts and warehouses, semantic layers, and reporting tools. We'll discuss self-service and organizational BI, Big Data, and emerging technologies, and how they complement each other. Some of the concepts will be accompanied by demos using the Microsoft BI stack. Then, on December 15th, I'll present "Microsoft BI 2014 Review" at...

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