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Windows 8 Hyper-V Support
October 13, 2012 / No Comments »
I installed Windows 8 shortly it was released and I've been running it for almost two months now. I'm still in a learning mode to teach old dog new tricks. I have a few gripes here and there, such as the need for two screens (start screen and desktop), the absence of the start button and its search, the quest for dumbing down the OS, and the fact that my Quickbooks PDF converter doesn't work anymore. However, I do like the performance boost (Windows 8 really flies on a solid state disk). I also discover gems here and there and one of them is the Hyper-V support. For those of you who need to run virtual machines, such as to test prerelease bits or run other guest operating systems, you know that in the pre-Windows 8 era you had to rely on either VirtualBox or VMWare because Virtual PC wasn't...
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Office 2013 and SharePoint 2013 Go Live
October 12, 2012 / No Comments »
I have to admit this came as a surprise to me as I expected them to go live next year. Microsoft just announced that Office 2013 and SharePoint 2013 went live. Time for celebrating, learning, and adopting these great technologies! Check my coverage about what's new in Office and SharePoint 2013 BI.
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Prologika Newsletter Fall 2012
October 12, 2012 / No Comments »
I started a newsletter and I plan to update it on a quarterly basis. The topic of the first issue is Big Data. If you like the newsletter, you're welcome to subscribe and forward.
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Your Data Warehouse in the Cloud?
October 11, 2012 / No Comments »
I spoke with a customer today that has implemented Salesforce.com. For those who are not familiar with Salesforce, it's a popular cloud-based, customer relationship management (CRM) product. As it usually happens, just when you're done with the Salesforce implementation, you're immediately faced with the challenge of consolidated reporting. It won't be long before the Vice President of Sales asks you to integrate sales data residing in Salesforce.com and your on-premise data sources. In this case, the customer went to Dreamforce (the Salesforce premier conference) in search for integration options and was advised to solve the report consolidation issue by … migrating their multi-terabyte data warehouse to Salesforce.com! I'm sure that this approach makes perfect sense to Salesforce.com, but it's hardly in the customer's best interest. First, although Salesforce is extensible and you can add custom objects (tables), Salesforce.com is not designed to host relational databases. As far as I know,...
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MVP for Eight Years!
October 1, 2012 / No Comments »
Just got the news that my MVP (SQL Server) award got extended for another year! This is my eight renewal.
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Fix for “Wide” MDX Query Performance Degradation
September 16, 2012 / No Comments »
We ran into a situation where a wide MDX query requesting many regular and semi-additive measures side by side can degrade the Analysis Services server performance. As I explained in this connect bug report, the customer had a Reporting Services report that includes many measures (close to a hundred). Users insisted on having this report to be able to export all results in Excel and pivot on them. Of course, one of the advantages of having a cube is to make this exact requirement unnecessary but old habits die hard. We've noticed that when the report includes 75 measures from a single measure group, the query executes within 20 seconds. However, when adding more measures from the same measure group, the query performance degrades to minutes. The measures are either regular (persisted) measures or simple calculated member wrappers and don't use any intensive formulas or scope assignments. The important point...
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SQL Server 2012 CU3 Available
September 4, 2012 / No Comments »
Microsoft just released Cumulative Update 3 of SQL Server 2012. Among other bug fixes, this CU includes critical fixes for columnstore indexes that we've reported to Microsoft. If you use SQL Server 2012 columnstore, you must install CU3. The important columnstore-related fixes are: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2703193 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2708786
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Prologika is Microsoft Gold Business Intelligence Partner
August 17, 2012 / No Comments »
I'm excited to announce that Prologika is now a Microsoft Gold Business Intelligence Partner. This reconfirms our reputation as a premier BI consulting and training company in Atlanta. According to Microsoft, only top 5% of the Microsoft partners worldwide have Silver or Gold competency, and only 1% with Gold competency. Kudos to all Prologika consultants on the team who helped us to achieve this major accomplishment!
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Microsoft Case Study for Recall and Prologika
August 16, 2012 / No Comments »
Microsoft published a case study "Records Management Firm Saves $1 Million, Gains Faster Data Access with Microsoft BI". Prologika architected the data warehouse, OLAP cubes, and presentation layer consisting of operational reports, SharePoint management dashboard and Power View reports. Recall, a records-management firm, needed faster access to key performance indicators and more intuitive business intelligence (BI) tools. The company consolidated four data centers into a Microsoft SQL Server 2012 data warehouse. The solution's performance enhancements speed employee access to more detailed data. By consolidating into a data warehouse, the company saved U.S. $1 million in hardware and licensing costs…With help from Microsoft partners Prologika and Berg Information Technology, Recall started deployment in August 2011 and went into production in February 2012.
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Making Big Data Real from TAG BI
August 11, 2012 / No Comments »
TAG BI is organizing a "Making Big Data Real" event on August 23th and I was honored to be one of the panelists. Please join us if you can and ask me the techniques we use to implement multi-terabyte data warehouses on symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) systems that deliver reports within milliseconds and maximize your return on investment. "The Technology Association of Georgia's Business Intelligence/Enterprise Performance Management society explores one of the hottest topics in the technology landscape, Big Data. You have likely read the articles and the books and now you need to know more. On August 23, we will bring together a panel of experts for a most important session: "Making Big Data Real". Please join us as we engage corporate technology leaders and consultants that are on the cutting edge of this new technology landscape. We will tell you what Big Data is all about and how you...
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