PROLOGIKA BLOG · IDEAS FROM THE FIELD
Practical perspectives on Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, semantic models, and the work of turning data into insight.
Explore the latest articlesI had a presentation on the BI Semantic Layer and Tabular modeling for the Atlanta BI Group on Monday. Midway during the presentation, a DBA asked why we need an analytical layer on top of data. I'm sure that those of you who are familiar with traditional reporting and haven't discovered yet Analysis Services might have the same question so let's clarify. Semantic layer In…
Read articleI'll be presenting "The Analysis Services 2012 Tabular Model" for the Atlanta BI Group on Monday, May 21st. And, Darren Herbold will share some great insights harvested from a real-life project of how to use SSIS to integrate with Salesforce.com. I hope you can make the event, which will be sponsored by Prologika. "SQL Server 2012 introduces the BI Semantic Model that gives BI pros…
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Performance tuning – my favorite! This blog originated from a quest to reduce the processing time of an SSAS cube which loads some 2.5 billion rows and includes DISCINTCT COUNT measure groups. The initial time to fully process the cube was about 50 minutes on a dedicated DELL PowerEdge R810 server, with 256 GB RAM and two physical processors (32 cores total). Both the SSAS…
Read articleWhen moving to SQL Server 2012, ETL developers would need to rethink custom ETL frameworks. If you embrace the new project deployment model, SQL Server 2012 offers a lot of plumbing features out of the box. Jen Underwood wrote a great SQL Server 2012 ETL Framework Features in the New SSIS Catalog article about what supported and what's missing. I guess in most cases developers…
Read articleScenario: Processing a 100 GB SSAS 2012 cube on a dedicated DELL PowerEdge server (128 GB RAM with 32 logical cores) reveals that 50% of the time is spent on processing the cube indexes and building aggregations with only 20% average CPU utilization and not even a small dent to the memory consumption. It was clear that SSAS doesn't utilize the server resources and additional…
Read articleI have a talk "The Personal-Team-Organizational BI Conundrum" at SQL Saturday on April 14th at 9 AM. Confused about the BI alphabetical soup? Not sure which one makes sense for your organization? Join this session to learn you can use the Microsoft BI platform to address various analytical needs. Discover how to implement the Personal-Team-Organizational continuum on a single platform. I'll also discuss how Tabular…
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Issue: Previewing a Report Builder report connected to Analysis Services works in Report Designer but it fails in Report Builder 3.0 with the following error: An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host ---------------------------- Unable to read data from the transport connection: An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host. ---------------------------- Further, SQL Profiler reveals that an Anonymous connection is attempted…
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Question: How do I find the source column name in PowerPivot if I've renamed and moved columns around? Answer: Assuming that the table doesn't use a custom query to import data or it wasn't derived from an Excel linked table or Windows Clipboard, you can use the table properties to find the source column name as follows: In the PowerPivot Window, click the table to…
Read articleApparently, the name "VertiPaq" wasn't catchy enough so Microsoft rebranded it as xVelocity (probably got tipped by Comcast). This is just a name change, no new features. Glossary xVelocity: The SQL Server family of technologies that utilize in-memory columnar storage to achieve very high-performance in query processing. 1. xVelocity for Business Intelligence Introduced as VertiPaq in the SQL Server 2008 R2 release, this in-memory columnar…
Read articleFellow MVPs have just released the latest public beta build of BIDS Helper, which should one of the first utilities you install after you install SQL Server on your machine. Besides fixes and updates, this release adds support for SQL Server 2012 and new features specific to Analysis Services Tabular. This beta release is the first to support SQL Server 2012 (in addition to SQL…
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