• Speaking at Atlanta Code Camp

    July 21, 2013 / No Comments »

    I'll be speaking at Atlanta Code Camp on August 24th. Given the developer-oriented nature of the event, I settled on a more code-intensive topic: Real-time BI with StreamInsight. "So, you have (or heard of) classic BI, self-service BI, Big Data BI, descriptive, predictive or even prescriptive BI, but do you have real-time BI? Real-time business intelligence (BI) has become one of the top priorities for data analytics. The ability of having near real-time access to large amounts of data across heterogeneous data sources is one of the key factors to enable effective business decisions. Join this talk to learn how to implement real-time analytics over streams of events using StreamInsight and .NET. You'll see how these technologies come together in a Big Data Twitter demo that allows you to analyze the Twitter stream in real time."

  • Solving Laptop Overheating Problems

    July 15, 2013 / No Comments »

    Off the BI path but I wanted to save this tip for future generation and my sake in case I forget and I run into the same issue in Windows.NEXT or a new laptop. My $3,500 HP 3-year old EliteBook 8540w is prone to overheating. If a task puts a sustained pressure on the CPU, e.g. 10% or more, the fan engages and produces a noise like a howling wind in winter. It's not so bad but it's good enough to destroy my faith in HP… and embarrass me during meetings. The bottom of the laptop gets hot to a point where it can't be used a laptop anymore. Eight months after I bought the laptop it became so bad that it would shut down from overheating so HP had to replace its motherboard and heat sink. And, now that the 3-year warranty expired it's getting worse again. Anyway, what...

  • Power BI Expands Microsoft Cloud Self-service BI

    July 9, 2013 / No Comments »

    Expanding its Office 365 feature set, Microsoft introduced Power BI. Power BI is an umbrella name of the following BI offerings in the cloud: Power Pivot, PowerView, Power Query (previously known as Data Explorer), and Power Map (previously known as GeoFlow), plus more. Microsoft demonstrated Power BI at WPC yesterday (scroll to the 30th minute marker to see the Amir's heart attack-provoking demo) or see the YouTube extract. The "more" is the intriguing part to me: Data Management Gateway – not sure how exactly this will work but it will provide some sort of connectivity to on-premise data so you can schedule PowerPivot data refreshes between the Microsoft cloud and your corporate data. Expect your ISP speed provider speed to be a limiting factor here so don't hope for fast refreshes of millions of rows. BI Sites – a dedicated SharePoint site that will support finding and collaborating on BI...

  • PerformancePoint Display Condition Not Working

    July 3, 2013 / No Comments »

    Issue: A client reports an issue with our PerformancePoint dashboard where the clicking a KPI in the scorecard doesn't show the supporting analytical grid. Normally, when the user clicks a row in the Operational Scorecard (see the image below), the SharePoint connectable architecture triggers an update of the Operational Detail Report Months analytical report that shows more details about the selected KPI.   Workaround: Finding the cause was tricky. To make things even trickier, the SQL Server Profiler would show "Query (1, 36) Parser: The syntax for ',' is incorrect." error so you would believe that there is something wrong with the MDX queries. This turned out to be an "innocent" error if there is such a thing. The reason for the issue with the report refresh not working was actually a PerformancePoint Display Condition bug presumably introduced by a recent SharePoint upgrade (more than likely the April CU). The...

  • Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Community Technology Preview 1 (CTP1) Released

    June 26, 2013 / No Comments »

    Microsoft released the Community Technology Preview 1 (CTP1) of SQL Server 2014. As I mentioned in my previous post, the accompanying Product Guide should get you started with the new features.

  • Microsoft SQL Server 2014 CTP1 Product Guide Released

    June 23, 2013 / No Comments »

    In anticipation of SQL Server 2014 CTP1, which should be out soon, Microsoft released Microsoft SQL Server 2014 CTP1 Product Guide – a collection of white papers, slides, and other resources that discuss the new features to help you evaluate SQL Server 2014. "The SQL Server 2014 CTP1 Product Guide is now officially available to customers and partners. The guide is intended to help you get the most value out of Microsoft SQL Server 2014 CTP1."

  • Atlanta BI Group Meeting on Monday

    June 23, 2013 / No Comments »

    The Atlanta Microsoft BI Group will have a meeting tomorrow, June 24th. Main Presentation: Developing a Custom Task in SSIS 2012 Level: Intermediate Date: June 24th Time 6:30 – 8:30 PM ET Place: South Terraces Building (Auditorium Room) 115 Perimeter Center Place Atlanta, GA 30346 Overview: Integration Services uses tasks to perform units of work in support of the extraction, transformation, and loading of data. Integration Services includes a variety of tasks that perform the most frequently used actions, from executing an SQL statement to downloading a file from an FTP site. If the included tasks and supported actions do not completely meet your requirements, you can create a custom task. In this session we will demonstrate to you how to create custom SSIS tasks. Speaker: Aneel Ismaily was born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan. He moved to the United States at the age of 18. Since then he has...

  • Big Data Twitter Demo

    June 20, 2013 / No Comments »

    So, you have (or heard of) classic BI, self-service BI, Big Data BI, descriptive BI, predictive BI or even prescriptive BI, but do you have real-time BI? I've been doing quite bit of research and work in that area lately. As you could imagine, real-time BI requires a different architecture that is capable of processing streams of data (sometimes thousands of events) in real time. The Microsoft premium technology for Complex Event Processing (CEP) is StreamInsight (requires a SQL Server license). Microsoft has also a lightweight, open-source .NET library called RX which does event streaming but it doesn't have many of the StreamInsight features, such as windowing. To demonstrate how classic BI, Big Data, and real-time BI can play together, Microsoft put together a great sample – Big Data Twitter Demo. The demo allows you to subscribe to one or more Twitter topics of interest. It uses StreamInsight to listen...

  • SSAS Instance Not Starting

    June 17, 2013 / No Comments »

    Issue: A customer reports an issue with a production SSAS Tabular instance not starting after reboot. The server has also an SSAS Multidimensional instance which starts just fine. There are no interesting messages in the Event Viewer. Resolution: During installation, the customer has configured the LogDir of both instances to point to the same physical folder. However, the Flight Recorder can't start on the Tabular instance because the log file is already locked by the Multidimensional instance. The solution to this horrible problem was to reconfigure the LogDir setting of the Tabular instance (in SSMS, connect to the SSAS instance, right-click the server, and click Properties) to a separate folder. Moral: Always separate DataDir, LogDir and TempDir folders so each instance has its own set of folders.

  • Smart Date Keys Got Smarter

    June 12, 2013 / 3 Comments »

    Using "smart" date surrogate integer keys in the format YYYYMMDD is a dimensional modeling best practice and venerable design technique. To make them smarter though, consider using the Date data type which was introduced in SQL Server 2008. The Date data type stores the date without the time component which is exactly what you need anyway. Using the Date data type instead of integers have the following benefits: The Date data type allows you to perform date arithmetic easier as the date semantics is preserved, so you can use date functions, such as YEAR and MONTH when querying the table or partitioning a cube. Self-service BI users can conveniently filter dates on import. For example, PowerPivot enables relative date filtering, such as Last Month, when the user filters a date column. The Date data type has a storage of three bytes as opposed to four bytes for integers. The only...

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