On a different subject, you've probably heard the news: Google will release an operating system called Google Chrome OS which will challenge Windows and instill fear into the Microsoft camp. To the contrary, I think Google is the best thing that ever happened to Microsoft. How come? I remember reading somewhere that after the perestroika, Mikhail Gorbachev had supposedly told Ronald Reagan "we'll now do…
I often need to capture an MDX query that a report sends to Analysis Services and execute it in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). I usually do this to understand what parameters the report passes to the query and to troubleshoot the query itself. Unfortunately, SSMS doesn't support parameterized MDX queries so you have to resort to the following technique: Capturing MDX Queries The easiest…
Sometimes, more advanced reporting needs may require maintaining state using custom code. Recently I had to implement a rather involved report consisting of two sections: a detail section that used a recursive sum, Sum(Fields!SomeField.Value, , True), and a summary section with additional calculations which would reference some of the aggregated values in the detail section. Since Reporting Services is not Excel, you cannot reference arbitrary…
There is an unfortunate issue with the MDX Query Designer in SSRS 2008 Report Designer and Report Builder 2.0 where changing the main dataset overwrites the parameter datasets. This is a rather annoying issue because often you need to make manual changes to the parameter datasets. However, when you make a change to the main dataset, the MDX Query Designer wipes out the manual changes…
I've uploaded the slides and code from my Reporting Services 2008 Tips, Tricks, Now and Beyond breakout presentation delivered on May 13th 2009 at TechEd 2009 North America.
The TechEd 2009 BI Power Hour demos, which I blogged about before, are posted on the Microsoft BI Blog. Robert Bruckner has also posted the SSRS demo from the TechED USA 2008 Power Hour, which he renamed to Sea Battle.
I got the final evaluation results from my session. Out of some 15 Business Intelligence sessions, mine was the fourth most attended session with 169 people attending. Based on 35 evaluations submitted, it was ranked as the third most useful session with an average satisfaction score of 3.46 on the scale from 1 to 4. For someone who does presentations occasionally, I'm personally happy with…
Today was a long day. I started by attending the Richard Tkachuk's A First Look at Large-Scale Data Warehousing in Microsoft SQL Server Code Name "Madison". Those of you familiar with Analysis Services would probably recognize the presenter's name since Richard came from the Analysis Services team and maintains the www.sqlservernanalysisservices.com website. He recently moved to the Madison team. Madison is a new product and…
I started the day by attending the Donald Farmer and Daniel Yu's session "Creating the Right Cubes for Microsoft Excel and Excel Services" hoping that I'll get a sneak preview of Excel 2010. Alas, it was all about refining the cube definition with display folders, perspectives, hierarchies, etc. so it appears more user-friendly in Excel. Later, I learned that Office 2010 (or whatever it will…
Day 1 of TechEd 2009 is almost over with the exception of the Community Influencers Party tonight. I heard that this year they expect 7,000 attendees. This is a huge scale-down from previous years. For instance, we had 16,000 attendees at TechEd USA 2007. Economy is hitting everything hard. I thought the keynote was kind of lame. Judging by it, Microsoft has only three products:…