One of the most popular questions after an SSAS cube is moved into production and users begin accessing the data is, “Who’s using the cube?” It makes sense right? After spending a lot of time and money getting an analysis cube built, who wouldn’t want to know what the usage was like? Luckily, there is […]
Posts Tagged ‘SQL Server’
Excel Add-in to help beginners (and experts) write MDX
A client found a cool add-in for Excel the other day that allows users to view the underlying MDX associated with Pivot tables called PTPower. This is great because beginning MDX developers can use it to quickly view the underlying MDX for a Pivot table and use it to build elements within the SSAS cube, […]
Best Practice SSIS Naming Conventions
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 […]
Push Cube Changes Using Synchronization
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 […]
Alternative to the SSIS Slowly Changing Dimension Wizard
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 […]
Leveraging Data Management and Data Quality within SharePoint
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 […]
To SSIS Or Not To SSIS
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. […]
Using ADFS 2.0 for Role Management in SharePoint 2010
I noticed that almost all of my most recent blog posts on the new claims features of SharePoint 2010 involve using ADFS 2.0 in some way. However, I don’t want to leave folks with the impression that this is a requirement. In fact, when SharePoint 2010 reaches RTM, you’ll be able to happily federate SharePoint […]