Blog – Page 87 – Prologika

Applied Analysis Services 2008 Online Training Class with Teo Lachev

October 24, 2009 / No Comments »

We are excited to announce the availability of an online Analysis Services 2008 class – no travel, no hotel expenses, just 100% content delivered right to your desktop! This intensive 3-day online class (14 training hours) is designed to help you become proficient with Analysis Services 2008 and acquire the necessary skills to implement OLAP and data mining solutions. Learn how to build an Adventure Works cube from scratch. Use the opportunity to ask questions and study best practices.. Applied Analysis Services 2008 Online Training Class with Teo Lachev Date: November 16 – November 18, 2009 Time: Noon – 4:30 pm EDT; 9 am – 1:30 pm PDT 14 training hours total for only $799! Attend this class for only $799 and get a free unrestricted e-book copy of the book Applied Analysis Services 2005 by Teo Lachev! For more information or to register click here!
Phantom URLs

October 20, 2009 / No Comments »

An interesting "issue" popped up today. I did a fresh install of Windows 7 on my brand new HP 8530w laptop, which is a great laptop BTW. I install SQL Server 2008 followed by SP1 only to find that the Web Service URL and Report Manager URL don't show up in the Reporting Services Configuration Manager. The report sever would run just fine on http://localhost/reportserver and the URLs were registered correctly in the rsreportserver.config. I went as far as whipping out some WMI code and it would return the URLs as it should. But the darn URLs won't show up. Not to mention that another user has recently reported the exact same issue to me. A bug? I started thinking of re-installing SQL Server. Then, a Eureka moment! As with most things, there was an easy explanation. For some reason, Windows 7 has set the system font size to be 125%. Resetting it to...
Intelligencia for Silverlight

October 19, 2009 / No Comments »

After retiring Office Web Components (OWC), which can hardly can pass the web test as it is implemented as an ActiveX control, Microsoft left developers with no web-based browser for Analysis Services. True, for those who can afford the hefty price tag, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) supports server-side Excel spreadsheets that render to HTML. However, while Excel rules the Windows-based OLAP browser space, HTML-based Excel spreadsheets with limited filtering can hardly meet the demand for web-based interactive reporting. Then, there is an option to author Reporting Services OLAP reports but outside limited interactive features their layout is pretty much fixed at design time. What's really needed is a Silverlight Analysis Services control that ships with Visual to let developers embed an Excel-like Analysis Services browser into their ASP.NET applications. You need this control and I need it but it's not coming anytime soon. Meanwhile, third-party vendors rush in to...
Aggregating Many-to-Many Relationships

September 18, 2009 / No Comments »

Relax…this blog is all about Analysis Services and not about polygamy or something worse. SSAS 2005 went beyond the "classic" OLAP model by introducing flexible dimension-to-measure group relationships, including many-to-many, referenced, fact relationships. M2M relationships can solve some nagging business problems. For example, in a recent project where we had to implement a financial cube, there was a requirement that a G-L account can belong to multiple account groups. This is a classic M2M scenario which can be elegantly solved by introducing a M2M relationship. Adventurizing this, let's take a look at this schema. Here, I changed the Adventure Works schema by adding a DimGroup and DimGroupEmployee tables. The DimGroup dimension is a parent-child dimension that lets the end user slice data by territory. An employee can be associated with one or more territories (think of a sales manager that covers multiple territories. This M2M relationship (groups-territories) is resolved via...
Passing Multivalued Parameters in SQL Server 2008

September 11, 2009 / No Comments »

One year after submitting this small article, SQL Server Magazine has finally published it. This article demonstrates how you can use table-value parameters (TVPs), a new feature in SQL Server 2008, to let you pass multivalued parameters from a report to a stored procedure. The code can be downloaded from the SQL Server Magazine site or from here.
Heat Maps as Reports

August 30, 2009 / 4 Comments »

Continuing my intrepid journey through the new Reporting Services R2 enhancements, in this blog I'll demonstrate some of the cool map features. As you've probably heard, R2 brings a brand new map control that lets you visualize spatial data on your reports. Since mapping is the one of the major enhancements in R2, there will be plenty of resources to cover it in details. For example, Robert Bruckner has written a great blog to get you started with mapping. The SSRS R2 forum adds more resources. But what if you don't need to visualize geospatial data, such as restaurants in the Seattle area? You shouldn't bother with the map, right? Not so fast. What's interesting is that the map supports the two spatial data types in SQL Server: geography and geometry. The latter lets you visualize everything that can be plotted on the planar coordinate system. That's pretty powerful when...
Yet Another Relative Dates Implementation

August 20, 2009 / 16 Comments »

Yet another relative dates implementation in an Analysis Services cube. So far, I've implemented two. But I'm now starting a project to implement an accounting (G/L) cube and the traditional relative date approach where each relative date is calculated for the current member in the Date dimension doesn't fly anymore. Heck, the business analyst even found the excellent "Translating Cognos PowerPlay Transformer Relative Date Functionality into SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS)" whitepaper by David Greenberg and told me that's exactly what they need. That's what happens when you have smart users. Power Pivot anyone? While the business users are not empowered yet, let me share how I implemented this approach. What's Needed? The difference now is that we want to drill down from each relative date to the periods that the relative date spans. Let's take a look at the screenshot below. The cube sets the default member of the...
Reporting Services 2008 Online Training Class with Teo Lachev

August 17, 2009 / No Comments »

There is still time to sign up for our Applied Reporting Services 2008 class with Teo Lachev. This three-day intensive event teaches you the knowledge and skills you need to master Reporting Services to its fullest. No travel, no hotel expenses, just 100% in-depth SSRS training delivered right to your desktop! Applied Reporting Services 2008 Online Training Class with Teo Lachev Date: August 31 – September 2, 2009 Time: Noon – 4 pm EDT; 9 am – 1 pm PDT 12 training hours total for only $799! Attend this class for only $799 and get a free paper copy of the book Applied Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services by Teo Lachev! For more information or to register click here!
SQL Server 2008 R2 August Community Technology Preview Available

August 14, 2009 / No Comments »

Microsoft released SQL Server 2008 R2 August Community Technology Preview which includes the Report Builder 3.0 R2 August CTP redistributable.
Reports as Data Feeds

August 14, 2009 / No Comments »

Reporting Services SQL Server 2008 R2 features reports as Atom data feeds. This is accomplished with a new Atom Data Feed extension, as shown on this screenshot. This extension produces an atom service document (an *.atomsvc file). It lists at least one data feed for each data region in a report. In fact, some regions, such as tablix with column groups (cross-tab report layout) may generate multiple feeds. At this point, you probably imagine subscribing to reports and receiving feeds in Outlook when report data is changed. Unfortunately, you won't get very far doing so. As it turns out, atom data feeds are different from Atom feeds that most applications, such as IE and Outlooks understand directly. So even if you extract the Url out of the service document and display the .atom rendering of a report in IE, the browser won't show useful information because it doesn't understand that...