Last week, I attended 2 days of Fast Track Data Warehouse and 3 days of Parallel Data Warehouse training at the Chicago Microsoft Technology Center presented by Jim Carroll, Ross LoForte and John Plummer. It was an intense, thought provoking week, to say the least, with so much information I could not possibly touch on […]

So you’ve spent an extraordinary amount of time and resources implementing a top notch BI solution at your organization and no one is using it, or at least they say they are not. So what now? Well, chances are people are using it without even knowing. Many organizations face this dilemma going live with their […]

Just as the creation of the internet and the World Wide Web has forced companies to bring on new technologies and consequently create new roles that they did not have 20 years ago, increasing data volumes and analytical power, as it relates to Business Intelligence, has had the same effect on organizations in order for […]

One of the most useful features of Excel 2010 and Pivot Tables is the new Slicer component. The Slicer allows end users to more easily visualize what dimensions and attributes are available to “slice and dice” the data and what has been selected as filter criteria. In past versions of Excel, the Report Filter was […]

Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services has some great features and is extremely useful for cleansing and importing data into SQL Server, however; not every situation warrants its use. One instance where I found SSIS to be less useful was when importing a lot (just under 100) of XML source files into a SQL data warehouse. […]

While assisting an organization in deciding if they should obtain a Business Intelligence solution; which vendor is most adequate to suit their needs and actually implementing the system may seem like the hard part, in many cases, it turns out to be the easy part. In my experience, the hardest part lies in the adoption […]