Browse by Tags
All Tags »
Analysis Services (RSS)
If you have been following this blog over the last few days, then we are at the stage we know what we want to measure to get the pulse of our business and we have all of that on a scorecard. However just because we are measuring performance doesn’t
Read More...
I have put Business Intelligence into a number of small businesses and these guys typically have one server set a side for BI, so how do you cram the database and the cubes into one box to get the best performance? SQL Server databases and Analysis Services
Read More...
Every now and then I see an internal mail with a query and I think “What were they thinking?” In this case a customer was trying to build a hierarchy that is built from attributes that are in different dimensions. My immediate reaction to this arises
Read More...
Backing up a cube is not an ideal experience in SQL Server 2005 for two reasons, it’s a manual process to schedule a backup and as the size of the cube grows the backup time increases exponentially i.e double the size of the cube and the backup time and
Read More...
Analysis Services 2000 was my life for several years and like a good friend you tried to appreciate the good things and try and work around what is not so good. I enjoyed how seductive and easy it was to build a cube, I hated the fact that
Read More...
I keep recommending IT Professionals to check out codeplex for the various samples that are on there to make life easier, but I haven’t been on there myself for a couple of weeks (doh!). This site has largely taken the place of the resource kits
Read More...
Fact tables should be narrow and deep. If you are recording every debit card transaction for every customer across the fifteen retail banks you own, you end up with 15 million rows a day, so to save space they need to be as thin as possible.
Read More...
My first ever post was about the features in SQL Server 2000 that were deprecated in SQL Server 2005 i.e. they wouldn’t be available in the next release (SQL Server 2008). In the same way there are SQL Server 2005 features that will be deprecated in SQL
Read More...
Let me start with a little history of Microsoft BI. Microsoft acquired an OLAP tool from a company called Panorama , project name Plato, which was bundled in with SQL Server 7.0 and from this grew the present incarnation of Analysis Services which IMHO
Read More...
One of the limitations of Analysis Services in SQL Server 2000 (AS 2000) was that a member in a dimension could only have 64,000 children, which was removed in SQL Server 2005 (SSAS 2005). So now you can create a customer hierarchy for your 1 million
Read More...
Before I joined Microsoft, I was working on a large project to build SQL Server 2005 analysis services cubes from data in Oracle 10g. The fun we had trying to get the data out and setup the servers! Getting the OLEDB drivers and the Oracle
Read More...
Continuing my series of posts on upgrade, I thought it might be good to have a look at the business intelligence components of SQL Server, so here’s a simple grid that I have adapted from Scalability Experts for use in the upgrade workshops and
Read More...
Excel already has always had excellent support for analysis services, but to get the best form it you need to use a version of office later than than the version of SQL Server you are connecting to. So for analysis services 2000 excel 2003 is OK
Read More...
Excel is the number one business intelligence tool; It fronts Hyperion, Cognos Financial Planning, and of course SQL Server Analysis Services and Performance Point Server Planning. In Office 2007 there is now excel services so that information workers
Read More...
Following all the acquisition mania in the BI marketplace last year, it's interesting to see that the Microsoft approach of growing your own BI platform seems to be paying off according to this article by Gartner in Information Week. It has taken a while
Read More...
