Although late to the party, I announce the arrival of a very interesting BI technology - PivotViewer Extension for Reporting Services – CTP1. What's interesting is that it leverages several BI technologies to provide great data visualization: The Microsoft LiveLabs Pivot which was developed by Microsoft Research. PowerPivot – a Microsoft self-service BI tool. Analysis Services R2 Reporting Services R2 SharePoint 2010 You should keep…
I've just updated the Atlanta BI Group home page to announce the topic for our first meeting on August 23th. Given the great interest surrounding Self-service BI, I'll present "Self-service BI with Microsoft PowerPivot". Hope you can make our first meeting!
Kudos to Greg Galloway (SQL Server MVP) for upgrading his fantastic OLAP PivotTable Extensions for Excel 2010 add-in (now available in both x32 and x64). This add-in is one of the first third party tools I install on a new machine. Since the Excel team seems to be ignoring customer feedback for improving the Excel BI features, OLAP PivotTable provides what's lacking, including: Excellent search…
Every now and then, I run into mysterious report timeouts. This time the client had a farm of two report servers integrated with MOSS with long running reports that would time out after two minutes or so. Normally, you shouldn't have such report monsters but life is not perfect, right? The client did a due diligence and had checked/changed every possible timeout setting, including: Report…
The website for the Atlanta Microsoft Business Intelligence SIG is up and running although it's still work in progress. http://atlantabi.sqlpass.org 1. Please register. 2. Please fill in the two polls on the first page for the first meeting attendance and topic of interest. 3. You can post suggestions for our first meeting on the Discussions page (Meetings forum) as a reply to my first post…
The great search for a meeting place for the Atlanta BI SIG is over! I am happy to report that I found the perfect place. Matrix Resources graciously offered to host and sponsor our meetings in a training room at their premises at 115 Perimeter Center Place #250, Atlanta, GA, 30346. I visited their location and another location today and I think their place is…
To follow up on my recent blog about forming an Atlanta-based Microsoft Business Intelligence Special Interest Group, I am planning to have our first meeting in August. The effort now is to find a venue where we can meet. If you have a confirmed location, please post its address to the discussion thread. I'll compile a list and I update this blog and the discussion…
A customer requested the ability to interactively sort a matrix on rows and columns. When they click the sort indicator in a row, the matrix should sort columns based on that row. For example, if the first rows is clicked and we are in an descending sort mode, the following screenshot shows the desired behavior. When they click on a column sort, all row groups…
To Atlanta Business Intelligence fans: Some of you have approach Geoff Hiten and me about forming an Atlanta-based Microsoft Business Intelligence group. After an intense internal discussion and brainstorming involving SQL Pass, Atlanta.MDF, and the local Microsoft office, we agreed that we should form such a group as a special interest group (SIG) within Atlanta.MDF. I volunteered to lead the group. I started a discussion…
I am back from vacation in Florida and I am all rested despite the intensive sun exposure and the appearance of some tar from the oil spill. I have scheduled the next two runs of my online training classes: Applied Reporting Services 2008 Online Training Class Date: June 28 - June 30, 2010 Time: Noon - 4:30 pm EDT; 9 am - 1:30 pm PDT…
