Jul15
Transitioning from an Analysis Services mindset to working with PowerPivot is not always the easiest transition. One of the recent snags came in trying to work out a demo over some data where there are bridge tables – a common scenario in dimensional modeling that sits behind our OLAP cubes – but not a concept that PowerPivot is ready to handle. So, thank goodness Marco Russo wrote a lengthy an...
Posted by Sidney Atkinson on
Thursday, 15 Jul 2010 10:55.
Jun10
I have attended a couple of PowerPivot sessions at this conference 1) because it’s so damn cool and 2) very practically, it is one of the only real new product releases prior to this conference (yes , SQL 2008 R2 is out, and SSRS enhancements are nice and MDS is, well, we can cover that later….). The sessions that I attended were all very well thought out, the speakers were enthusiastic and very...
Posted by Sidney Atkinson on
Thursday, 10 Jun 2010 01:53.
Jun8
One of the great topics in today’s keynote session centered around shortly? coming features for PowerPivot – namely: Integration with Visual Studio 2010 Ability to utilize SSAS 2008 R2 as point of storage for billions of rows, not just hundreds of millions Pivot Reporter extension for PowerPivot and SharePoint integration Record Viewer view to help manage wide tables in PowerPivot...
Posted by Sidney Atkinson on
Tuesday, 8 Jun 2010 02:55.
Jun8
And this was one of them: “Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services Consolidation Best Practices Considerations”. The SQL CAT team continues to deliver – every conference I have been to, this group at Microsoft always delivers great content. Now, before I start to rave too much, I will say the title of the session fails a bit; rather, it should have read: “Really cool things we did with Analysis ...
Posted by Sidney Atkinson on
Tuesday, 8 Jun 2010 09:02.
May31
By now, some of you may have come across this error when processing your dimensions: File system error: a FileStore error from WriteFile occurred. Physical file: \\?\some path to a file. Logical file:…. At the core of this error is the fact that the asstore, bstore, kstore and string.data files for your dimension is hitting the 4GB limit and it cannot no longer be written to by SSAS. ...
Posted by Sidney Atkinson on
Monday, 31 May 2010 11:17.
Nov17
So many good tools out there, and yet not all of them get noticed….. At the SQL Pass conference the week before, I attended one of the classes by the Microsoft CSS groups on common Analysis Services support issues. While not the best presentation format or speaking, the information and thought processes were very relevant and thought out, so all in all – good session. What surprised me was h...
Posted by Sidney Atkinson on
Tuesday, 17 Nov 2009 04:39.
Oct28
You may or may not have heard by now that the business intelligence capability in SharePoint 2010 now has a platform branding called INSIGHTS. I will blog more about the features in my “down time” at the SQL PASS conference next week, but I wanted to put the links out to everyone so you can start ramping up on what is coming inside SharePoint 2010 with respect to business intelligence. First an...
Posted by Sidney Atkinson on
Wednesday, 28 Oct 2009 04:05.
Oct15
I figured this was worth a quick post: while many of SQL Server’s aspects are cluster aware, SSIS is not. Why? My guess is that there is not a pressing business need for this to be a cluster aware service – while many companies have vital ETL processes to help run company business, the need for failover in this scenario is not as pressing as in transactional systems. With that said, I had a cust...
Posted by Sidney Atkinson on
Thursday, 15 Oct 2009 03:25.
Sep14
I am excited to announce that we have secured a great speaker for our next Central Texas Business Intelligence User Group meeting on October 21st at the Microsoft office in Austin. Bryan C. Smith, prolific SSAS author and now of Microsoft fame, will be coming down to speak on a yet to be disclosed topic on SQL Server Analysis Services. If you have not done so, and you live/work in the area, be ...
Posted by Sidney Atkinson on
Monday, 14 Sep 2009 04:48.
Aug17
I was cleaning up a cube design for a customer, primarily working with the current implementation to resolve some performance issues and make some minor alterations to the dimensions, when I ran across an aggravation in designing aggregations for the partitions I implemented ( there were none before, part of the issue).
I had just finished designing my partitions when I started to design the aggr...
Posted by Sidney Atkinson on
Monday, 17 Aug 2009 12:18.