• 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.

  • 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...

  • 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

  • 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!

  • 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.

  • 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...

  • What’s New in Office 2013 BI: Part 5 – New Features in PerformancePoint 2013

    August 10, 2012 / No Comments »

    I'd delegate this one to the PerformancePoint 2013 blog, where Kevin Donovan, Microsoft Program Manager, nicely addresses PerformancePoint speculation, confusion and misinformation while also introducing what is new in detail.

  • What’s New in Office 2013 BI: Part 4 – New Features in Excel Web Reports

    August 6, 2012 / No Comments »

    To demonstrate the new features with Excel web reports, I stood up an Office 365 Technical Preview site. If you have received Office 365 invitations already, make sure that you choose the one with the SKU E3. Otherwise, you'll get access to the administrator portal only and you won't see the SharePoint, Outlook, and other menus. Assuming you use Office 2013, you'll find that it integrated much better with the cloud. Gone is the Save and Send menu. Instead, saving to could destinations, such as SkyDrive and Office 365, can be now be initiated from the Save As menu by adding a new place. As before, once the Excel workbook lands in the Office 365 SharePoint (or SharePoint 2013) land, it's automatically available for web reporting. However, the most exciting new feature now is that the web reports are editable and end users can change the report layout with both...

  • What’s New in Office 2013 BI: Part 3 – Improved Productivity

    July 30, 2012 / No Comments »

    Excel 2013 includes features that improve productivity. Here are the ones related to BI. Flash Fill Suppose that you have a list of customers with addresses. When analyzing the data, you might want to analyze sales by USA states but the data doesn't include a state column. Instead, suppose you have an address column that includes the mailing address, state, and zip code. So, you decide to create a new column. Now, instead of using a formula to parse the address as you would do in the past, you just enter WA in the first row. When you start typing CA in the second row, Excel figures the pattern and suggests to flash-fill the column. Notice that Flash Fill doesn't use Excel formulas and you won't get formulas in the column. Excel handles flash fill natively. Quick Explore This feature was included to allow you to quickly generate charts for...

  • What’s New in Office 2013 BI: Part 2 – Power View Enhancements

    July 26, 2012 / No Comments »

    [View:https://prologika.com/CS/cfs-file.ashx/__key/CommunityServer.Blogs.Components.WeblogFiles/blog/7762.Geography.xlsx:550:0] Power View in Office 2013 brings the following new features: Integration with Excel 2013 – Microsoft has decoupled Power View from SharePoint and included it in Excel so you can create ad-hoc reports connected to BI models, just like you can create pivot reports. I hope the PerformancePoint Decomposition Tree will follow suit. New visualizations – This includes interactive and drillable geospatial maps and pie charts. Better support of tabular models – Power View now supports key performance indicators (KPIs) and hierarchies. Design and branding enhancements – You can now insert images and change the report theme. To showcase some of these enhancements, I created a personal BI model based on a customer dataset imported from the AdventureWorksDW2012 database (I attached the Excel workbook). To create a Power View report, click on Insert ð Power View button in the Excel ribbon. This creates an empty Power View report connected...

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