A common issue when setting up Reporting Services integration with SharePoint is that the SharePoint add-in is not installed properly although the setup program doesn't indicate any issues. More than likely, the culprit is that the person who installed the add-in is not SharePoint Web farm administrator and Site Collection administrator. As a first stop for troubleshooting SharePoint integration issues, you should examine the add-in log…
Microsoft has released the Cumulative Update 2 build (build number 1779) for SQL Server 2008. The update is not publicly available as of now. It has to be released individually based on whether you are running into a bug fixed in the build and it is password-protected. Among other things, it fixes the freeze issue associated with opening SSAS projects in BIDS.
Issue: You author an SSRS report that connects to a cube. You want to create a calculated member that uses a report parameter. For example, the Selector calculated member in the following query returns 1 if a given employee has exceeded 1 million in sales for the dates specified by the user in the report parameter. WITH MEMBER [Measures].[Selector] AS SUM ( StrToSet(@DateCalendar), iif([Measures].[Reseller Sales…
On Friday, Microsoft released chart controls for Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5. These are re-tooled Dundas .NET chart controls which are now baked in the .NET framework. This is important because you can add the same stunning Dundas chart features to your Windows Forms and ASP.NET applications without external dependencies or licensing fees. It also minimizes your learning curve, as the Dundas controls share the same…
I've been involved recently in a quest to optimize an SSAS 2008 long-running query that would return the 12-month history of a KPI. Since the KPI was displayed on a dashboard page alongside other KPIs and charts, it was important to optimize the query as much possible. Rephrased to Adventure Works, the query went something like this: WITH MEMBER increaser AS Iif([Measures].[Internet Sales Amount]>([Measures].[Internet Sales…
Today, Microsoft released Report Builder 2.0 (build 10.00.1600.60) , as Robert Bruckner announced in his blog. This is a major milestone in the Reporting Services roadmap. In my opinion, Report Builder 2.0 is one of the most important and exciting features of Reporting Services 2008 as it bridges the gap between standard and end-user (ad hoc) reporting. You should definitely consider Report Builder and Analysis Services…
At the BI Conference in Seattle, Microsoft announced the future roadmap for next BI-oriented SQL Server release, nee Kilimanjaro, that will focus on three major teams: • Self Service Analytics • Self Service Reporting • Sharing, Collaboration & Management The Self Service Analytics will encompass projects Madison (a share-nothing MPP scale-out version of SQL Server, powered by DATAllegro technology) and Gemini, which I mentioned before.…
As the news arrived today (see Mosha Pasumansky blog, Chris Webb blog, and Marco Russo blog) , the BI Conference revealed what has been brewing for a while in the Microsoft BI nest. Project Gemini, which one may call Memory-based Dimensional Model (MDM) to draw a comparison with the Unified Dimension Model (UDM), will let business users create ad-hoc cubes that are stored in memory.…
Microsoft has released the first for SQL Server 2008 cumulative update package. Among other issues, it fixes the SSAS bug with requesting measures with mixed aggregation functions which I previously reported.
Issue: You use Excel as an OLAP browser connected to an SSAS cube. You've defined the name of the Month attribute in the Date hierarchy in the format MMM-YYYY. While months are sorted in an ascending order in Excel, descending sorting doesn't work; or rather Excel sorts them as strings. That's because Excel interprets these captions as strings instead of dates even if you set…
