Learn how to use Analysis Services Data Mining to identify the influence of RAID level and IO Pattern on Latency.  Read more...

Working with SSAS time related accounting functions can be tricky. SQL Server 2012 now offers Lag and Lead functions. Are these functions available in SSAS? What other related functions are available?  Read more...

Learn everything about MDX drawing only on your T-SQL knowledge in this series. Frank Banin continues talking about Calculated Members, Named Sets, and more in part III.  Read more...

Learn everything about MDX by drawing only on your SQL knowledge.   Read more...

When you have SSAS cubes with millions of rows of data, it is very helpful to create partitions. If you have a few cubes you could probably do this manually, but if there are many or if you want to automate this process you should look for smarter solutions such as programming the creation of partitions dynamically.   Read more...

Learn all you need to know about MDX, by drawing only on your current SQL knowledge.   Read more...

In this document I will attempt to talk you through writing your first very simple DAX queries. For the purpose of this document I will query the rather familiar Adventure Works Tabular Cube.   Read more...

This white paper provides practical guidance to help BI professionals and decision makers decide whether SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services tabular or multidimensional modeling provides the best fit for your next BI solution.  Read more...

This article shows a few simple techniques to summarize table data using T-SQL.  Read more...

Sometimes it would be helpful to run scripts from a command line for Analysis Services. This would be useful for things like creating backups, processing data or running other tasks. Is there a command line tool like sqlcmd for multidimensional databases and Data Mining?  Read more...

A customer provides an SQL Server Analysis Services trace file to analyze. You save this file into a trace table and execute T-SQL code to analyze the results. Rather than getting descriptive values for the EventClass and EventSubclass data, you get numerical values. How do you resolve these numerical values to meaningful descriptive names? Check out this tip to learn more.  Read more...

A guide to the SQL Server 2008 Business Intelligence exams.  Read more...

The introduction of the new analytic functions in the RTM version of SQL Server 2012, such as LAG, LEAD, FIRST_VALUE and LAST_VALUE, with the improved over clause, greatly facilitate the analysis on ordered data sets, such as time-series data. Read on to learn more.  Read more...

There are several aspects that can take a toll on performance for your Analysis Services cubes. Some problems could be related to the source systems, some could be because of poor design of your cube and MDX queries and some could be related to network issues.  Read more...

Data analysis from a cube starts with aggregated and summarized data, followed by drill-down and drill-through of the data for a deeper and intelligent analysis. Drill down is inherently supported when you browse the data of the cube, but drill through has to be defined as per the requirements of analysis. In this tip we will see how to enable drill through on a cube.  Read more...

In this tip you will learn how to design aggregations for a partition and optimize it for performance. Solution  Read more...

The primary purpose of SQL Server 2008 Integration Services is to deliver extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) functionality that supports core features of the SQL Server database management system. However, there are numerous scenarios where its role involves interaction with components that provide business intelligence-related features incorporated into the product.  Read more...

Getting the time dimension configured correctly is a necessary first step in order to take advantage of the Time Intelligence features in SSAS.  Read more...

This white paper describes how operations engineers can test, monitor, capacity plan, and troubleshoot Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services OLAP solutions in SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008, and SQL Server 2008 R2.  Read more...

This white paper explains how Microsoft® adCenter implemented a Microsoft SQL Server® 2008 Analysis Services Scalable Shared Database on EMC® Symmetrix VMAX™ storage. Leveraging TimeFinder® clones and Enterprise Flash Drives with the read-only feature of SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services allowed adCenter to dramatically scale out OLAP while maintaining SLAs and decreasing system outages.   Read more...