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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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Like Heracles, many an IT Pro has had to wrestle with Kerberos, and for those that don’t have rippling biceps I thought it would be good to give you some tips on doing battle with this many headed beast that is used to protect many a server. In IT Land
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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 the Business Intelligence being the top priority for for CIO’s for the last three years, and it’s long history their are many people in business who have no idea what it is. So I was delighted to be asked to present to the executive MBA
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We are obsessed by the weather in this country, but I can’t say I have ever actually used it in a business intelligence solution. I know that Iceland (the frozen food people not the country) have a model that identifies an ideal BBQ day i.e. not
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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.
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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
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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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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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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
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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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