Browse by Tags
All Tags »
Data Warehouse (RSS)
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
Read More...
This simple design, popped up in my inbox today asking for advice… What you need to understand about this diagram is that there is a concatenated key (keys are in BOLD ) on each of the orange dimension tables, with one part of that key being CompanyID.
Read More...
Many resources on data warehousing talk about slowly changing dimensions and how to deal with them but what happens when your dimensions change more quickly and what is does fast or quick mean in in this context? First let’s be clear on what is meant
Read More...
Day 19 of my virtual advent calendar, about stuff I like in SQL Server 2008.. I often get asked how much faster is SQL Server 2008 than SQL Server 2000, what impact will virtualisation have on my performance, and my answer in fine Microsoft tradition
Read More...
Day 15 of my virtual advent calendar, about stuff I like in SQL Server 2008.. If there were no issues with data quality in data warehouses I would have completed many of my BI projects in a third of the time. The client would always insist they had good
Read More...
Day 14 of my virtual advent calendar, about stuff I like in SQL Server 2008.. If it aint broke don’t fix it, is probably best aimed at Integration Services in SQL Server 2008. So what was ‘fixed’? The most important thing was the performance of
Read More...
Day 13 of my virtual advent calendar, about stuff I like in SQL Server 2008.. The SQL Group by clause has been around since I can remember, but in SQL Server 2008 we know have grouping sets. Imagine you wanted to sum sales amount from the adventure
Read More...
Day 2 of my virtual advent calendar, about stuff I like in SQL Server 2008.. Following on from my previous post, in some data warehouses there is a separate dimension for time of day, so that demand through a day can be modelled. Storing time in SQL server
Read More...
There is no possible connection between databases and Christmas, so I simply wanted to share 24 my favourite bits and bobs that are in SQL Server 2008…. The new date data types in SQL server crack a problem I have had since I started BI as there is (nearly)
Read More...
As I have remarked before Business isn’t run by the IT Department it is run by the people who hire and fire the IT department i.e. the Finance Director (FD). Given the current economic climate now would be a perfect time to see what you can do to help,
Read More...
The new Merge T-SQL command has great potential in a data warehouse scenario and Integration Services is the tool in SQL Server to load the data warehouse so how do they fit together in SQL Server 2008? The answer is not really and I am not sure they
Read More...
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
Read More...
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
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...
It's coming up to London Fashion Week so I thought a post on models for all you dedicated followers would be good. The models in this post are rarely size zero ! So what is one of these? Technorati isn't much help but if you look hard you will find some
Read More...
Subscribe in a reader" />
