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
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…
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…
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…
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.
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…
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…
[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…
Jen Underwood wrote a great summary about what's new in Office 13 BI. Interestingly, you'll be able to drill down to lower location in the Power View maps, e.g. from country to state and then to lowest level you placed in the location zone when configuring the map visualization.
In a current project, international users indicated that they prefer dates and numbers to be formatted using their regional settings. Localization is a big and complicated topic and we've been fortunate that the scope was limited to just number and date formatting … or, at least so far. Localizing reports on a report server running in native mode is easy. You just need to use…