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Getting Rid of the Vista Credentials Prompt
December 6, 2007 / No Comments »
There could be 1001 reasons why IE asks you for credentials when you access a website configured for Windows Authentication and none of them has to do with Reporting Services itself. Windows Vista and IE 7 add yet another one. IE 7 will prompt you for credentials if your computer is not added to a domain and you access a local website configured for Windows Authentication, such as http://localhost/reports. Thanks to the help from James Wu on the SSRS team and Bryan Noyes's blog, the solution is simple. Open IE and go to Tools, Internet Options, Security tab. Select the Local Intranet zone. Press the Sites button. Unselect the Automatically detect intranet network checkbox and check the three checkboxes below it. Restart IE. Now http://localhost/Reports or http://localhost/ReportServer shouldn't prompt for credentials. If it still prompts and you have SQL Server 2008 installed, it could be an issue with Kerberos. To...
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Performance Improvements for MDX in AS 2008
November 26, 2007 / No Comments »
Here is a useful page from the SQL Server 2008 BOL that summarizes the SSAS performance improvements in Katmai pretty well. It also shows which functions are optimized. For example, the Lag function wasn't optimized in 2005 but now is.
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Radius Producer "Produces" No-nonsense SSAS Support
November 21, 2007 / No Comments »
In my opinion, the biggest challenge the Microsoft BI initiative faces today is the inadequate support for Analysis Services. The premimum Microsoft reporting tools claim to support SSAS but they all take an idependent view about what features they should support or not. To make things worse, even supported features turn out to be not "supported" enough and subsequenly declared as "by design" or known limitations. This cripples UDM and forces customers to look outside the Microsoft BI stack, hoping to find third-party tools to fill in the gap. Recently, I had the pleasure to take a look at the pre-release bits of the Radius Producer by 90 Degree Software. Those of you who installed the November CTP of SQL Server 2008 and played with the standalone Report Designer, will undoubtedly find many similarities between both tools, in terms of artchitecture, designer experience, even look and feel. One feature that...
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SQL Server 2008 November CTP Is Out
November 19, 2007 / No Comments »
The November CTP (CTP5) of SQL Server 2008 is out. Here are the most significant BI-related highlights that caught my attention. Reporting Services The standalone Report Designer has undergone a major facelift. It now sponsors a shiny Office 2007 ribbon interface. It will surely charm end users who are planning to use the standalone Report Designer for ad hoc reporting. The bad news is that there is still much integration work ahead. For example, the Analysis Services and custom data processing extensions are not integrated yet. Further, only the Dundas chart component has made the CTP5 cut. Nevertheless, I am very excited about the standalone Report Designer and its long-term potential to unite professional and end-user reporting needs. Analysis Services The block computation enhancements debut in CTP5. Based on my experiments, they result in 50-60 percent and more improvement in query response times. For example, a highly inefficient Report Builder...
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Parameterized Parameter Prompts
October 18, 2007 / No Comments »
One new SSRS 2008 feature that international users will undoubtedly appreciate is parameterized parameter prompts. Previously, the parameter prompts were static. In SSRS 2008, you will notice the familiar function symbol (fx) next to the parameter prompt which means that the prompts can be expression-based. This allows the report author to change the parameter prompt caption at runtime. For example, you can retrieve the localized version of the parameter prompt from an external resource assembly based on the user language. UPDATE 03/27/2009 This feature didn't make it to the release version of SSRS 2008. SSRS 2008 doesn't support expression-based parameter prompts. The feature has been slated to a future release.
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NEB Revenge in Katmai
October 9, 2007 / No Comments »
An advanced SSAS performance-related feature is Non Empty Behavior (NEB) which has been discussed in many places including this Mosha's blog. The issue with NEB in SSSAS 2005 is that you can very easily get it wrong. The server will trust you (this could be an optimistic assumption) and accept a NEB even if it's not correct. Example: CREATE MEMBER CURRENTCUBE.[Measures].[Profit Gap To Prior Period] AS [Measures].[Profit]-([Date].[Calendar].PrevMember, [Measures].[Profit]), FORMAT_STRING = "#,#;(#,#)", NON_EMPTY_BEHAVIOR = { [Measures].[Profit]}, VISIBLE = 1; Here, the intention is to default the expression for the Profit Gap To PriorPeriod calculated member to NULL if Profit is NULL. But the expression may be not be NULL even if Profit is NULL. This can yield incorrect results in 2005. In 2008, optimizations were made that don't use the NEB expression. The net effect is that some calculated members that use wrong NEBs can produce different, albeit correct, results in 2008....
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Protect UDM with Dimension Data Security Reloaded
September 21, 2007 / No Comments »
SQL Server Magazine published the second part of my Protect UDM with Dimension Data Security article in the October issue of the magazine. In this article, I explain how to use MDX expressions to implement dynamic dimension security. I discuss two practical approaches for meeting advanced requirements for securing UDM data. First, I present a solution in which the security policies are stored in a factless fact table. Next, I explain how to leverage SSAS stored procedures to integrate UDM with an external security service. The article is available for public access. Enjoy!
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Scale-Out Querying with Analysis Services Using SAN Snapshots
September 12, 2007 / No Comments »
If your organization can afford SAN, here is another best practices article by Carl Rabeler from the SSAS team. The Scale-Out Querying with Analysis Services Using SAN Snapshots article "describes the use of virtual copy SAN snapshots in a load-balanced scalable querying environment for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services to increase the number of concurrent queries to Analysis Services servers with a rapid response time per query."
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MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-445): Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Business Intelligence—Implementation and Maintenance
September 12, 2007 / 2 Comments »
Those of you preparing for Microsoft exam 70-445 Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Business Intelligence – Implementation and Maintenance may be interested to know that Microsoft Press has just published a training kit with the same title which I co-authored with Erik Veerman, Dejan Sarka, and Javier Loria from Solid Quality Learning. I wrote four of the SSAS chapters. I also took the actual exam prior to writing the content so I hope the book will help you to prepare and pass 70-445.
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SSRS 2008 Variables
September 9, 2007 / No Comments »
As I mentioned in my Under the Hood post, the SSRS 2008 engine has been redesigned to perform on-demand report processing for better scalability. As a result, textbox values are calculated on-demand every time the containing page is rendered. Irrespective of the on-demand behavior, values of dataset-bound textboxes won't change because the underlying dataset is cached in the report database. Therefore, the end result for dataset-bound textboxes is the same as with SSRS 2005. What about expression-based values? For example, you may have a textbox that references some custom method. Unlike SSRS 2005, the new engine will execute that method each time the page is rendered. This may be or may not be what you want. If you need up-to-date information, the new behavior will be welcome. However, there will be cases, when you may need the old behavior where the custom code is executed once. For example, imagine that...
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