Clik here to view.
Excel 2010 gets sparklines, finally
There are a number of different Office 2010 features and functions we’re getting wind of now that the covers have come off at the WPC in New Orleans. One feature that is of particular interest is...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Microsoft Virtual Catch 64
How does it go again, Steve? “Developers, developers, developers”? As we move further and further into the 64 bit world, Microsoft’s virtualization path on non-server operating systems will leave some...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Book Review: Expert Cube Development with Analysis Services 2008
Full disclosure: the authors of this book provided me with a free review copy of this book.As the title suggests Expert Cube Development with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services is not a book...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Windows 7 and PerformancePoint M&A Setup Gotcha
For those who have, or are about to, upgrade to Windows 7 and reinstall a local instance of PPS for the purposes of demos / experimentation / learning etc. here are a couple of quick tips on getting...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Cloud-based Tabular Data Sources
I realize there are many out there who are sick of the term “the cloud”. Larry Ellison's rant on this topic is great.Nonetheless I got my Azure invitation yesterday and for no other reason other than...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Data Dude Error TSD03006 – Explicit Database Reference
ProblemYou’ve just created a new Data Dude project and imported your DB schema, or you’ve just synchronized schemas with an existing project having added several new views / UDFs / SPROCs etc. When you...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Windows Problem Steps Recorder
Been meaning to write about this one for some time. This year’s TechEd USA keynote was centered around Windows Server 2008 R2. The speakers demoed plenty of good features but the one that stood out...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Conditionally Hiding Axes for Trellis Displays
Over the last year MVP Tim Kent has put out a series of really useful posts showing how various data visualizations can be created using SSRS.Trellis / Lattice displaysWin / Loss ChartsBullet Graphs in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Un-cooking the books with Benford’s Law
So, if you take a set of real life numeric data (e.g. sales figures, customer sat scores, baseball game attendance figures) stripped the first digit off each number and counted those up what would the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
PerformancePoint Services - What’s New
Now that the NDA has been lifted it’s time to start talking about PerformancePoint Services. I plan to expand on many of these points in upcoming posts. For now I’ve put together a series of summary...
View ArticleClik here to view.
PerformancePoint Services - What’s Changed / Improved / Different
Continuing on from the What’s New post, here are some of the changes and improvements to the product. This post covers some of the more subtle changes and improvements to the product. You could argue...
View ArticleClik here to view.
PerformancePoint Services - What’s Deprecated
Continuing on from the What’s New and What’s Changed / Improved / Different posts, here are some of the things that will be going away in PerformancePoint Services.OWC SupportNo more OWC-based...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Who let the Bulldog out?
‘member what happened when Microsoft said “Hey, let’s bundle a reporting engine into the SQL Server license”, “Hey let’s bundle an OLAP engine into the SQL Server license”, “Hey let’s bundle an ETL...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How believable are paid evangelists, anyway?
Many of you may know Don Dodge - he’s a start up and technology evangelist who, up until a day ago, worked for Microsoft. Apparently Don was part of the most recent round of layoffs. He was immediately...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Beginning Master Data Services (Part 1 of 7)
Like many other geeks out there I learn by doing. One of the things on my todo list has been to get familiar with MDS. During my experimentation with the recently released CTP I figured I'd take some...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Beginning MDS - Creating a Model (Part 2 of 7)
Models are the highest level container within an instance of MDS. Models are created to manage groups of similar data. In BI-speak it’s not much of a stretch to equate a model with a dimension, they’re...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Beginning MDS - Creating Entities (Part 3 of 7)
One or more Entities can be defined within a model. Entities are the foundational objects within an individual model and serve as the containers for Members, the data records themselves. For example a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Beginning MDS - Creating Attributes (Part 4 of 7)
Attributes are defined within entities. An attribute contains values that help to describe the member they’re related to. For example our ProductName leaf entity within a Product model could have a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Beginning MDS - Loading Members & Attributes (Part 5 of 7)
Now that we’ve defined some basic structures we can add some data. Through MDS' web based management interface we can manually add individual members or configure attributes on an entity one-by-one, or...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Beginning MDS - Creating a Derived Hierarchy (Part 6 of 7)
There are two kinds of Hierarchy that can be created within MDS: Derived and Explicit. We’re only going to deal with derived hierarchies for now.As the name suggests, derived hierarchies are derived...
View Article
