• MVP For Another Year!

    October 1, 2010 / No Comments »

    Just got the news that my MVP status got extended for another year! This will make it six consecutive years as MVP and as a member of an elite group of professionals that I am proud of belonging to.

  • Atlanta BI SIG September Meeting

    September 25, 2010 / No Comments »

    Atlanta BI fans, join our next Atlanta BI SIG meeting! Mark Tabladillo (Ph.D., Industrial Engineering, MCAD.NET, MCT) will show us how to do data mining with PowerPivot. And Dundas will demonstrate their latest BI offering – the Dundas dashboard. Here are the details: Please RSVP to help us plan food as follows: Go to the Atlanta BI home page (atlantabi.sqlpass.org). Choose Yes and submit the RSVP survey found at the right top corner of the page.   Main Topic:         Data Mining with PowerPivot 2010   Level: Intermediate Date: Monday, September 27, 2010 Time: 6:30PM Location Matrix Resources 115 Perimeter Center Place Suite 250 (South Terraces Building) Atlanta, GA 30346 Speaker:         Mark Tabladillo (Ph.D., Industrial Engineering, MCAD.NET, MCT) Mark Tabladillo provides consulting and training for data mining with Solid Quality Mentors. He has taught statistics at Georgia Tech and for the graduate business school of the University...

  • Analysis Services Processing Performance

    September 20, 2010 / No Comments »

    Analysis Services has a very efficient processing architecture and server is capable of processing rows as fast as the data source can provide. You should see processing rate in the ballpark 40-50K rows/sec or even better. One of my customers just bought a new shiny HP ProLiant BL680c server only to find out that processing time went three times higher than the old server. I did a simple test where I asked to execute the processing on both the old server and the new server. The query on the old server would return all rows within 2 minutes, while the same query would execute for 20 minutes which averages to about 4K rows processed/sec. This test ruled out Analysis Services right off the bat. It was clear that the network is the bottleneck. Luckily, the server had a lot of processing power, so processing wasn't ten times slower. As it...

  • DynamicHeight Bug

    September 16, 2010 / No Comments »

    The chart region in Reporting Services 2008 introduced the ability to dynamically size charts by setting the DynamicHeight and DynamicWidth properties, as Robert Bruckner explained in his blog. This feature is really useful and I hope one day it makes to the other regions as well. A customer recently reported an issue with their reports where regions would overlap when the report is previewed in Print Layout mode or exported to a hard page renderer, such as PDF. For example, in the report below the radar chart is positioned after the bar chart in RDL. However, in Print Layout preview the radar chart overlaps the bar chart. The customer tried every possible combination to enclose one or more regions in rectangles which helped avoiding the overlapping issue to some degree but introduced other issues. After some digging, I discovered that the issue is caused by the fact that the bar chart...

  • Importing SSAS KPIs in PerformancePoint

    September 7, 2010 / No Comments »

    Forging ahead through the unchartered land of PerformancePoint 2010, I ran into a snag today. Attempting to import Analysis Services KPIs resulting in the following error: An unexpected error occurred.  Error 47205. Exception details: System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.AnalysisServices, Version=10.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified. File name: 'Microsoft.AnalysisServices, Version=10.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91'    at Microsoft.PerformancePoint.Scorecards.Server.ImportExportHelper.GetImportableAsKpis(DataSource asDataSource)    at Microsoft.PerformancePoint.Scorecards.Server.PmServer.GetImportableAsKpis(DataSource dataSource) Since in our case, PerformancePoint was running on a SharePoint web front end server (WFE) which didn't have any of the SQL Server 2008 components installed, it was clear that PerformancePoint was missing a connectivity component. Among many other things, I tried installing the Analysis Services Management Objects (AMO) from the SQL Server 2008 Feature Pack but the error won't go away. I fixed it by running the SQL Server 2008 setup program and installing the Client Tools Connectivity...

  • PerformancePoint 2010

    September 3, 2010 / No Comments »

    PerformancePoint? Is it still around? It is (in SharePoint 2010), and it should peak your interest if you are serious about dashboarding. The planning component is of course gone and I have to admit I never had too much faith in it. When comes to dashboards, Microsoft gives you two implementation options: Reporting services reports in SharePoint web parts – Pros include low cost because Reporting Services is available with SharePoint Foundation, and no need to learn new skills. On the downside, you need to implement your own global filter web parts assuming that you don't use SharePoint Server. PerformancePoint – This is tool specifically designed for dashboards and it just got better in SharePoint 2010. However, it requires SharePoint Server 2010 which you need for PowerPivot as well. Unfortunately, this puts you in the $5,000+ upfront investment bucket (Vidas has more to say about SharePoint pricing). Personally, I was...

  • Kerberos Woes

    August 23, 2010 / No Comments »

    [Wikipedia] Cerberus, (pronounced /ˈsɜrb(ə)rəs/);[1] Greek form: Κέρβερος, /ˈkerberos/[2] in Greek and Roman mythology, is a multi-headed hound (usually three-headed) which guards the gates of Hades, to prevent those who have crossed the river Styx from ever escaping. I think Microsoft got the name right although the Windows version of Kerberos has more than three heads for sure. Yet another weekend spent in troubleshooting Kerberos. This one has an interesting setup. SharePoint Server 2010 on a Web Front End (WFE) box. SharePoint Server 2010 (core install) + SQL Server and Reporting Services 2008 integrated with SharePoint on a second box. Analysis Services 2008 R2 on a third box. The customer wanted this setup to minimize the SQL Server licenses. Microsoft recommends installing Reporting Services on the WFE servers but this requires as many SQL Server licenses as the number of the WFE servers, plus probably two more (for SQL Server to...

  • Applied PowerPivot Course Available

    August 23, 2010 / No Comments »

    I am excited to announce that Prologika has added an Applied PowerPivot course to the list of our training offerings in response to the strong interest for self-service BI. The class can be delivered as two-day online class (4 hours each day) or as one full-day onsite class. The cost for the online version is $599. Applied PowerPivot is designed to help students become proficient with PowerPivot and acquire the necessary skills to implement PowerPivot applications, perform data analysis, and share these applications with other users. The full course syllabus is available here. I scheduled the first run for September 21st. Happy self-service BI!

  • PowerPivot Implicit Data Conversion

    August 16, 2010 / No Comments »

    A student noticed an interesting behavior while I was teaching my PowerPivot class last week. He noticed that PowerPivot lets you join a text-based column to a numeric column. As it turns out, PowerPivot does an implicit conversion to text when it discovers that you are attempting to join columns of different data types. However, as a best practice, you should convert numeric columns to a numeric data type, such as Whole Number. This will help PowerPivot minimize storage and improve performance.

  • Professional Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel and SharePoint

    July 31, 2010 / No Comments »

    I had the pleasure to read the book Professional Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel and SharePoint by Sivakumar Harinath, Ron Pihlgren, and Denny Guang-Yeu Lee. All of the authors are with the Microsoft Analysis Services team. Together with David Wickert, Denny Lee runs the http://powerpivottwins.com/ blog, which is "dedicated to all things PowerPivot". Siva has written the 2005 and 2008 editions of the Professional SQL Server Analysis Services with MDX. So, the book is straight from the horse's mouth. I really liked the book. It's easy to follow and includes insightful tips. The book targets business users who are interested in creating self-service BI solutions. IT professionals and BI practitioners who will manage PowerPivot applications will find the book useful as well. Professional Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel and SharePoint incudes tutorials that walks the user through the necessary steps to build a PowerPivot-based solution. These steps include importing the data, enriching...

Training

We offer onsite and online Business Intelligence classes! Contact us about in-person training for groups of five or more students.
For more information or to register click here!

Books

Learn Power BI at your own pace with our latest book Applied Microsoft Power BI. Targeting information workers, data analysts, pros, and developers, It is designed as an easy-to-follow guide for learning how to implement BI solutions spanning the entire personal-team-organizational BI spectrum.

Syndication