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PROLOGIKA BLOG · IDEAS FROM THE FIELD

Making sense of data.
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Practical perspectives on Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, semantic models, and the work of turning data into insight.

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Tablix – The Crown Jewel

One of most important enhancements coming up in SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services is the new tablix region. In fact, I dare to predict that many folks will upgrade to SSRS 2008 just to get Tablix. What's tablix anyway? Tablix = Table + Matrix So, tablix combines the flexibility of the table region and the crosstab reporting features of the matrix region. Actually, a tablix…

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The New Kid on the Block (aka Stand-alone Report Designer)

The need for a stand-alone Report Designer is real. True, developers, including myself, enjoyed the VS.NET Report Designer. But novice users were overwhelmed with the complexity of the VS.NET IDE environment. In addition, not all IT shops rejoiced over the idea to install VS.NET or BIDS just to author reports. Enters the SSRS 2008 stand-alone report designer. As its name suggests, you run this designer…

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The Perfect Host

This is my first blog about SSRS 2008. The July CTP (CTP4) of SQL Server 2008 (aka Katmai) includes the new hosting model of Reporting Services. Gone is the dependency to IIS and all the management headaches associated with it. Instead, the SSRS Windows service pulls a nice trick by hosting the http.sys kernel-mode device driver which listens for HTTP requests. Behind the scenes, the…

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Scale-Out Querying with Analysis Services Article

I've come across a good best practices article about scaling out SSAS by Denny Lee and Nicholas Dritsas. It describes how to set up a load-balanced scalable querying environment for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services so that you can handle a large number of concurrent queries to your Analysis Services servers.

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July CTP of SQL Server 2008 Is Out

July CTP of SQL Server 2008 (Katmai) is out. On the BI side of things: New SSRS Report Engine "Improvements represent the two major infrastructure changes for Reporting Services. Reporting Services enhances the processing engine and rendering extensions to enable new functionality, such as Tablix support, and scalability as well as remove the dependency on IIS. Additionally, new report designer and configuration tool are provided…

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Empty Affairs

If you have a cube with large dimensions you may have come across the following error: The expression contains a function that cannot operate on a set with more than 4,294,967,296 tuples. The culprit is the NON EMPY (or NonEmpty), as mentioned in the Chris Webb's blog and Mosha Passumansky's blog. It turns out that NonEmpty simply gives up when the number of tupples in…

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SQL Server 2008 (Katmai) to Launch February 28th 2008

From the latest MS press release "In anticipation for the most significant Microsoft enterprise event in the next year, Turner announced that Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 will launch together at an event in Los Angeles on Feb. 27, 2008, kicking off hundreds of launch events around the world." Whoa, I didn't expect Katmai so soon. Well, Euan Garden is telling us…

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SSRS Setup Woes

I was setting up Reporting Services 2005 today on a clean Windows XP machine and I came across the infamous error: The report server has encountered a configuration error. See the report server log files for more information. (rsServerConfigurationError). Access to the path 'c:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.2\Reporting Services\ReportServer\RSReportServer.config' is denied. Here is how I fixed this horrible problem. First, I open the Computer Manager and…

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How to install SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services on a Windows Vista-based computer

I spent a couple of hours today trying to get SSRS 2005 working on Vista. I was getting the infamous IIS 500 error when browsing the Report Manager (http://localhost/reports) and Report Server (http://localhost/reportserver) virtual roots. I triple-verified the Brian Welcker's recommendations and the Vista considerations in the SQL Server 2005 readme file. I couldn't figure what's going on especially given the fact that I installed…

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