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When it comes to dashboards, Microsoft’s business intelligence stack seems to have some overlap in it, so how can you decide what to use when? Dashboards are an overused term, so what I am talking about here is the ability to provide an interactive instrument
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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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If you have read my last two posts and are interested in applying BI to your business, how do you get started? I would be begin by deciding what success look like for your business, and this should be a balanced view taking in such factors as: Finance.
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Technorati Tags: softwre plus services , BI , Business intelligence , small business Georgina ( Curious George on the TechNet team) sent me some feedback about my last post , she wanted to know was there any evidence to support my assertion that BI was
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While many IT professionals equate business intelligence (BI) with large organisations, the reality is that there are many small and medium sized businesses who are quietly implementing BI because they see the benefit of it. I think there
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If you glance to the side of this post you will see that one of the few books on my bookshelf is the Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit , and so I am annoyed that I can’t make the course of the book, presented by the authors, Joy Mundy and Warren Thornthwaite
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Working for Microsoft is strangely like working for the government, yu are essentially trying to please everyone, but there are significant minorities on any given issue who aren’t that satisfied. Let me explain with a real world example.. The lack of
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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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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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Every one from politicians to the IT industry is trying to raise their profile by establishing their green credentials. This causes lots confusion as they I’m greener than you arguments fly across companies, parties and even countries. I think a
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My first experience of ‘proper’ databases was using Ingres back in 1994 while working for an obscure part of Customs & Excise (as it was). We could get a soundex person search from Inverness to return probable matches in under 8 secs from the
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Despite my love of SQL Server and my respect for Oracle, and MySQL the worlds number one database is excel. I know that many purists and DBA’s will shudder at me grouping a spreadsheet with a database, but look at this form the perspective of number
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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
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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
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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
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