PROLOGIKA BLOG · IDEAS FROM THE FIELD
Practical perspectives on Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, semantic models, and the work of turning data into insight.
Explore the latest articlesVisual Studio 2008 embraces the exciting new world of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) for communicating with services. However, pitfalls await the unwary. I've recently tackled invoking the Reporting Services Web service with WCF and I want to share my findings. The Visual Studio Add Web Reference menu has been renamed to Add Service Reference to denote that WCF can communicate with much more than Web…
Read articleThe Microsoft CAT team has released a new whitepaper Analysis Services Many-to-Many Dimensions: Query Performance Optimization Techniques. "Many-to-many dimension relationships in SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services (SSAS) enable you to easily model complex source schemas and provide great analytical capabilities. This capability frequently comes with a substantial cost in query performance due to the runtime join required by Analysis Services to resolve many-to-many queries. This…
Read articleAs he posted here, Brian Welcker (Group Program Manager of Reporting Services) is leaving the Reporting Services team and moving to the Microsoft Healthcare Solutions Group. Brian did so much to build and promote Reporting Services. SSRS wouldn't have been the same if it wasn't for Brian. The technical community (myself included) will surely miss him. Let's wish Brian good luck with his new career!
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As you know, business scorecards are the latest BI craze. Nick Barclay was kind enough to send me a copy of his new book Monitoring and Analyzing with Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 by Rational Press which he co-authored with a co-worker and friend Adrian Downes. This is one of these relatively-small and very practical books which helps you hit the ground running quickly. As…
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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…
Read articleHere 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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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…
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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…
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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…
Read articleAn 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…
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