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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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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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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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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
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Data Mining like every other term in business intelligence seams to mean different things to different people. For me the key things that data mining does are: Assist in discovering relationships in data sets that were previously unknown. An example
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When you build a cube in analysis services it is very easy to expose every attribute in every dimension to the user. You can also add-in every measure and if you don't feel that's enough then you can create your own calculated members to add to the users'
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I got asked a very odd question today - "How do you use virtual cubes in Analaysis Services 2005?". I was momentarily speechless (a rare thing for those that know me!). This got me to thinking that there must be quite a few installations of the previous
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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
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In SQL server the Cast and Convert functions change one type of data to another. A pod cast is the art of converting knowledge into sounds so that's the tenuous link for this post. Pod casting is not something I have ever tried, but the security expert
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Just when you thought you had heard the last of hierarchies there's another post. This one is a little different - it's about managing confrontation and arguments, not with the code in the SQL server CLR but with other humans! In a hierarchy you navigate
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I though it might be worth another post on hierarchies in Analysis Services 2008 CTP4 to show some more attribute relationship. If we look at the attribute relationships in the date dimension of adventure works below: the relationships match the hierarchies
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Continuing on from my last post, I explained what Natural Hierarchies were but I thought it would also be worth mentioning what the opposite was and the issues around that. Unnatural hierarchies can be created between any two attributes for example in
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Looking at that product dimension for my last post, I noticed that there were five hierarchies defined for the product dimension. A hierarchy is a very important part of any OLAP engine and allows users to drill down from summary levels down to detail
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I had many happy debates with a business analyst on one of my recent projects because he was bought up an an early olap product called HOLOS and he couldn't see how the dimensional model I was presenting was ever going to work. If we had been using HOLOS,
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Technorati Tags: BI , Business Intelligence , OLAP , SQL server 2008 Business Intelligence is just like digital photography, the more detail you want the more space you are going to use and in both cases we talk about grain and granularity. If you have
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