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Chris Webb MVP can, to quote a friend of mine can, “Make MDX sound interesting”. I have to say when I first when on a course on MDX the tutor went for the “Make MDX confusing and boring” approach. Chris has recently coauthored a book on Expert Cube
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Excel and analysis services are pretty open technologies so it’s very easier for anyone to grow their own stuff in for a richer experience, and even Microsoft provide things like the data mining add-ins which follow this principle. These add-ins are not
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Compared to T-SQL and the database engine , MDX and analysis services is a somewhat poor relation and is usually catching up. There’s no resource governor in SQL Server 2008 or intellisense for MDX in management studio. I expect this is because
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Metadata is “data about data” and in the BI world this means two things: Definitions of terms, particularly calculations so that business users can understand what they are looking whether on screen or on paper. Lineage to understand where and how
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Speaking at SQL Bits is a cool thing to do but may terrify many of you. Part of this is that you are on stage for an hour and that means a lot of preparation, both content and rehearsal. So one of the organisers, Martin Bell has come up with
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Microsoft reckon that 7% of workloads are virtualised, so there’s still a lot of consolidation work to be done, but how high up the list should SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) be? In order to answer this it’s important to understand what SSAS is there
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Both Standard and Enterprise editions of SQL Server come with a lot more than just a database engine, there’s also a suite of BI tools: Integration Services (SSIS) Reporting Services (SSRS) Analysis Services (SSAS) which you are also licensed to use on
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Day 8 of my virtual advent calendar, about stuff I like in SQL Server 2008.. Analysis Services allows you to create a set of things you are interested in and persist this in the cube. MDX is used to define the set e.g. CREATE SET CURRENTCUBE.[Top
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Day 5 of my virtual advent calendar, about stuff I like in SQL Server 2008.. Over 80% of the budget on improvements to Analysis Services in SQL Server 2008 went on improving performance. The answer was called block space computation and to understand
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Day 3 of my virtual advent calendar, about stuff I like in SQL Server 2008.. Backing up of analysis services in SQL Server 2005 ran out for steam for databases of about 20Gb, and so you have to follow a different route to back them up (see this technet
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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