Mike Burger

It is very easy for SSIS packages to get messy if you don’t adhere to some strict naming conventions. As a consultant, my job is to try to make the SSIS packages as easy to understand as possible. One way to do this is to make sure to use naming conventions for all your tasks […]

The cube synchronization in SQL 2008 is vastly improved compared to SQL 2005 (much faster). On the target (or production) server you have the option to run the Synchronization Wizard within SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) to pull data from a source (or staging) server, but what if you want to run the ETL and […]

Problem Within most BI projects you need to in some way handle slowly changing dimensions in your ETL solution. Be it Type 1, Type 2, they are unavoidable because truncating the dimension and fact tables and reloading from scratch is not an option unless the data warehouse is very small. On most of my projects […]

Overview One issue that I have run into in every BI project is data quality and data cleansing. Oftentimes data cleansing can be excluded from the scope of a BI project since the client is often afraid to even tackle the problem. On top of that, data cleansing can often be a project all by […]

Check out my SharePoint 2010 Business Intelligence Posts:   1. SharePoint 2010 Insights – Reporting Services and Chart Web Parts 2. SharePoint 2010 Insights – Excel Services and Visio Services 3. SharePoint 2010 Insights – PerformancePoint Review Part 1 of 2 4. SharePoint 2010 Insights – PerformancePoint Review Part 2 of 2   Enjoy!!

If you are like me you have spent a lot of time fighting with BIDS to get every connector within SSIS to line up perfectly straight…ahhhhh!!! Thanks to Steve Jackson for this great tip on how to easily format and align all of the items within an SSIS package. I have fought with this before […]

Reporting Services: There really isn’t much to say about Reporting Services within SharePoint 2010. This is due to the fact that SSRS is already prolific within MOSS 2007, however, there are a few very important facts that should be pointed out. At least for now, SSRS cannot be setup and configured with SharePoint 2010 unless […]

Excel Services (Excel): A new addition to Excel within Office 14 is Sparklines. Sparklines are an easy way to show a trend within a data set. Interestingly enough, even though these do look like a type of graph, they are simply conditional formatting! The new Sparklines can be found within the "Insert" tab of the […]

Welcome to the second part of a two part blog series covering the functionality of PerformancePoint within SP2010. In the first part I covered the functionality of PerformancePoint specifically in regard to how it is integrated with SharePoint. In this part I will more specifically cover the enhancements to the PerformancePoint content such as Dashboards, […]

I am actually quite impressed with the initial evaluation of the new functionality with PerformancePoint and SharePoint 2010 (SP2010). In a series of two blogs I will try to point some of the big changes and improvements that are going to be included with the release of SP2010, specifically in relation to PerformancePoint Services. Some […]

Introduction: I recently worked on a quick SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services) project with a client that had a need to be able to query large datasets (potentially over 300,000 rows by 30 text columns wide). The report needed to be very dynamic, meaning that the report would need to allow the end user to […]

Overview: Oftentimes when developing a cube there will be a need to limit which dimensions and measures a user can view within the cube. For the purpose of this blog, the steps and processes needed to develop a solid security model are out of scope; however, I will offer four different techniques which can be […]