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…
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…
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.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
