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When Dynamic Sets Are Not Dynamic
February 19, 2014 / No Comments »
In my "Optimizing Dimension Data Security" blog, I've mentioned that converting static sets to dynamic could reduce the connection initialization time. To my surprise, using Excel to connect to the cube triggered the executing of dynamic sets and end users reported long wait times for the connection to initialize. It turned out that when Excel connects to the cube, it issues DISCOVER statements to query the metadata. One of these statements queries MDSCHEMA_SETS to find out what sets are available in the cube. For some obscure reason, this triggers the actual set evaluation for dynamic sets. If the set is expensive, e.g. touches all partitions, the DISCOVER statement can surely delay the connect time. It turned out that other users are experiencing the same issue even if security is not applied. Greg Galloway found a workaround and extended the Analysis Services Stored Procedure project with a CurrentCommandIsDiscover method. You can...
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The Office Click-To-Run Setup
February 18, 2014 / No Comments »
As you've probably head, Office 2013 supports now two installation options: the traditional MSI-based installation and the new Click-To-Run streaming installation. Chris Webb mentioned about it here and Melissa Coates describes how it works in more details here. The MSI setup is a perpetual one (you pay for a version once and you're entitled to fixes for it) while the C2R setup is a subscription-based Office 365 setup (you continuously pay for using the software and you're entitled to fixes and the latest features within the SKU you're subscribed to). Perpetual installations will get updates (cumulative updates and service packs) just like they're used to but they are meant primarily to be fixes rather than features. On the other hand, Office 365 subscribers have the benefit of getting fixes and new features as long as their subscription is active. Currently, there is no way to switch your existing Office installation...
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Best Visualization Tool for Dashboards?
February 16, 2014 / 3 Comments »
More and more organizations are planning and adopting dashboards. And, the question "which visualization tool is the best for dashboarding?" has been asked more frequently. The visualization aspect of BI has been rapidly evolving. There are plenty of vendors and plethora of tools out there. And, they keep on leap-frogging each other and each one has its strong sides and limitations. More than likely, the darlings of today will be forgotten in a few years. So, a quest to find the perfect tool that does it all is likely to fail or it will be short-lived. I'm not a visualization expert. When it comes to visualizations, I listen to guidance from experts. If you navigate to slide 30 of my "Best Practices for Implementing Enterprise BI Solution", you'll see a mockup of a sales dashboard by Stephen Few that is taken from his excellent "Information Dashboard Design" book. This is...
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Drill Your Way with Power View
February 11, 2014 / No Comments »
Although it might not be immediately obvious, Power View supports various options for exploring data in more details. Although some scenarios are not natively supported, workarounds could be available. Drilling Down Drilling down involves navigating through multiple fields from the same or different dimensions to explore data at a lower granularity. Every interactive tool supports drilling down (and drilling up) and Power Pivot is no exception. For example, if you have a visualization that has multiple fields in a given zone, such as the AXIS zone, you can double-click a series to drill down to the next level. In the example below, I can double-click the Year series to see the data by Month. Drilling down is not automatically enabled for Table and Matrix visualizations because by default they show all fields in separate columns. What if you want one column but still be able to drill down? If you...
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Announcing Prologika Match
February 1, 2014 / No Comments »
Data is your biggest asset and today's currency but the data can be messy. You know it and we've seen it. The messier the data, the bigger the headache. At Prologika, we believe that data quality issues should be addressed as early as possible and the validation process should start with the source systems. You need a solution to detect possible duplicated entries without ETL, custom validation code, and exhaustively hard-coded rules. This is why I'm excited to announce today the availability of Prologika Match! Data is "dirty" because of misspellings, truncations, missing or inserted tokens, null fields, unexpected abbreviations, and other irregularities. Prologika Match uses approximate string matching (fuzzy lookup) to detect potential duplicate entries to help you improve data quality at the point of data entry. When the user attempts to save a data entry that is similar to what's already in the database, Prologika Match can detect...
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Presenting at SQL Saturday Atlanta
February 1, 2014 / No Comments »
The next Atlanta SQL Saturday will be on May 3rd. I'm doing a "Deep Dive into the Microsoft BI Semantic Model (BISM)" pre-conference session on May 2nd. You can register using this link. The organizers set up a promotion code for $10 off registration, good for the first 10 users – the code is "AtlantaBI". Teo Lachev: Deep Dive into the Microsoft BI Semantic Model (BISM) SQL Saturday #285 - Atlanta Friday, May 2, 2014 from 9:00 AM to 4:30 PM (EDT) "The chances are that your organization has a centralized data repository, such as ODS or a data warehouse, but you might not use it to the fullest. Join this insightful full-day event to understand the importance of having a semantic layer that bridges users and data. In the Microsoft BI world, BISM consists of Power Pivot, Tabular, and Multidimensional. We'll start by comparing these technologies to understand their...
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Divorce Your Methodology
January 29, 2014 / No Comments »
At the Atlanta BI meeting last night, there was a question from the audience about differences between Inmon and Kimball and which methodology should be followed when implementing a data warehouse. I'll recapture my thoughts and the feedback I shared. As BI practitioners, most of us use methodologies and it's easy to fall in love with a specific methodology. But sometimes methodologies conflict each other. So, don't feel very strongly about methodologies. Instead, study them and try to synthetize their best. The best methodology is the one that delivers a business solution in the most practical and simple way. Back to Inmon vs Kimball, I have deep respect for both of them. They both contributed a lot to data warehousing that forms the backbone of modern BI. Both of these two methodologies aim to consolidate data and promote a single version of the truth. Both of them are "pure" database-focused...
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Is SharePoint Overkill for BI?
January 24, 2014 / No Comments »
As you know, Microsoft BI is tightly interwoven with Excel on the desktop and SharePoint on the server. Most complaints about SharePoint fall in two categories: Complexity – SharePoint is like the ocean. The further you go, the deeper it gets. Troubleshooting is no fun. You know it and I know it. Cost – Most BI features require SharePoint Server Enterprise. Besides the product cost, each user requires a client access (CAL) license (about $100 per user). With larger companies, cost quickly adds up when you roll BI to the masses. You can use the Microsoft License Advisor to estimate your investment but be sure to include additional cost for Windows and SQL servers. So, is SharePoint overkill for BI? My answer is it depends. Let's take a look at the graph that shows the correlation between the organization size and SharePoint features. A small organization might not need SharePoint...
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"Bus Matrix – the Foundation of your Dimensional Data Model" Atlanta BI Presentation
January 24, 2014 / No Comments »
Our next Atlanta Microsoft BI meeting will be on Monday, January 27th. The main presentation is "Bus Matrix - the Foundation of your Dimensional Data Model" the speaker is Bill Anton. The meeting will be sponsored by TEK Systems. I hope you can make it. The Bus Matrix is the cornerstone of a successful Dimensional Data Modeling strategy. It serves many purposes: from communicating requirements, capabilities, and expectations with the business users down to the prioritization and delegation of tasks across the development team. Join me in this session and learn what a Bus Matrix is, why it is the single most important document in your Data Warehouse project, and what can go wrong without it. We'll also cover several approaches for creating and maintaining the Bus Matrix. Bill Anton is an independent consultant whose primary focus is designing and developing Data Warehouses and Business Intelligence solutions using the Microsoft...
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Auto-generating SCHEMA.INI
January 18, 2014 / No Comments »
Power Pivot (and Tabular) uses the Access Connectivity Engine (ACE) provider to import from text files. This provider was originally designed for Microsoft Access databases and it's limited to import files no larger than 2 GB (or 4 GB with the Office cumulative update from April 2012) as explained here. The Power Pivot Table Import Wizard allows you to import from delimited files and only a subset of delimiters are available for you to choose from. However, the ACE provider supports a SCHEMA.INI file that can describe other formats, such as fixed-length files, or delimited files that use other delimiters, such as a double-pipe character "||". If a SCHEMA.INI file exists in the same folder where the source file is located, Power Pivot will use the file. Generating the schema file can be tedious, especially if the source file has many columns. However, the ODBC Data Source Administrator tool can...