Sid Atkinson

Sid is a business intelligence (BI) and SQL Server specialist at Catapult Systems, and blogs about Microsoft-related topics including BI.
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Nov17

SSAS tools: mdx studio

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.
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Oct28

Sharepoint server 2010 Insights

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.
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Oct15

SSIS on a cluster

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.
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Sep14

Awesome speaker for our next BI User group!!

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.
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Aug17

Design Tip - Analysis Services Aggregations

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.
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Aug6

Reminder: BI User Group meeting August 13th!

Reminder, we are having our next Central Texas Microsoft Business Intelligence User Group meeting a week from today, August 13th, 2009 from 6:00pm to 8:00pm at the Microsoft Austin office. Session Topic: "PerformancePoint Monitoring and Analytics 101" Description: In this session we will cover the basics of PerformancePoint: what it is, how it is deployed and sample architecture patter...
Posted by Sidney Atkinson on Thursday, 6 Aug 2009 04:56.
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Jul30

WhitePaper: PerformancePoint in an extranet environment

Great read for when you are stuck in the airport: Publishing PerformancePoint Server in Extranet Scenarios. This is actually a very detailed document outlining many of the aspects around establishing an extranet deployment, particularly a secure one. Important Note: We have run across a bug in Server 2008's implementation of Kerberos. This issue will cause a fatal flaw to your implementation wi...
Posted by Sidney Atkinson on Thursday, 30 Jul 2009 03:03.
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Jul7

Installing SSRS for SharePoint, the fun way

I figured the search engines would do a good job of delivering the answers to these questions, but as I have seen this theme reoccur many times over the past few weeks in the MSDN forums, I am going to write out the steps for everyone (if nothing else, at least I'll just be pasting a link to this versus copying the steps all over again in forum responses). For many people installing the SSRS plug...
Posted by Sidney Atkinson on Tuesday, 7 Jul 2009 01:07.
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Jun25

Book Recommendation: Drive Business Performance

Good sales staff for consulting and services firms are hard to find. These great sales people are always working to strike the balance between knowing enough about the services, and in our case, the Microsoft products to talk intelligibly, but at the same time, not be overwhelmed in studying details and product nuances so that they are distracted from selling. Bruno and Joey's "Drive Busine...
Posted by Sidney Atkinson on Thursday, 25 Jun 2009 02:33.
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Jun18

First Meeting for the Central Texas BI User Group

We kicked off the first BI User group meeting for Austin last night and had a very decent turn out for our first meeting. For our first topic, I covered the sticky points of implementing Kerberos in order to support Reporting Services 2008 running in integrated mode in a MOSS farm. As doing the entire implementation would take longer than the time allotted for our meeting, I will be posting a wr...
Posted by Sidney Atkinson on Thursday, 18 Jun 2009 03:33.
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