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If you haven’t heard already this week there is a great free webinar series going on that’s meant for beginners.  This series is meant to get you up to speed on many topics like TSQL, DBA Fundamentals, SSIS, SSAS, SSRS, and Performance Tuning.  Oh and did don’t forget… Read more

"The world's favorite season is the spring. All things seem possible in May." - Edwin Way Teale This spring, the Portland, Oregon, development community is coming together in a way never experienced before. Using the University of Portland campus, SQL...(read more)

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Once of the more common issues with working with data in a cube is that it does not always line up like we expect. This is usually a combination of our interpretation of how SSAS will handle our business and a lack of understanding of some feature, option, property or…

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I promise to make this worth your time.  (Oops, I better make this quick.)

Alright so with PowerShell if you open it up and just run this code you’ll be able to query your database right from the start.  Anyone who has worked with data systems for a while will…

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We booked a vacation over the weekend, so I’m marking off the week before Christmas as vacation this year. Hoping not to get caught again with everyone but me taking time off.

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There are many ways to optimize your analysis services cubes, but the real trouble is how do you know where you’re making progress and where you’re not? Well, how would you do this in your T-SQL environment ? You’d check out a profiler trace while you were running the queries…

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It’s now 3 events that I’ve canceled in the last 6 months, and a 4 or 5 more that I’ve declined an invitation to, despite having a desire to go. I got a note this morning, reminding me of a presentation tomorrow more, a remote webinar, that is supposed to… Read more

I'm a big believer in looking at systems when everything is okay. I'm not the only one, as Joe Richards, a Directory Services MVP, commented the same thing a while back. If you work with Active Directory and you don't know who Joe Richards is, you need to go ahead and revoke… Read more

So the other day I read Andrew Kelly’s article, Do You Have Hidden Cache Problems, in the latest electronic edition of SQL Server Magazine, and decided to run the query he listed in the article to see if my server was suffering from this problem:

SELECT
    SUM(single_pages_kb…

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I know it’s daunting and a little intimidating, but there are so many people with knowledge to share. I see them answering questions, sharing knowledge, and being helpful to the community, so when are you ready to start speaking?

The answer probably varies, but what I’ve seen in many areas… Read more

This happened earlier in the year, finally getting around to writing some notes on it – you can read more here. The numbers I found were that they were to save about $230k a year, mainly by reducing the need for two administrators.

I’ve used Outlook and Exchange for… Read more

Data compression is an Enterprise Edition only feature that was added in SQL Server 2008. It allows you to use either Page or Row compression on the clustered index or any non-clustered indexes on a table. Data compression lets SQL Server trade off disk space and I/O pressure for some… Read more

Or am I?

As I proceed down the path on a consolidation project, I have taken time to pause and ponder the approach.  One driving goal is to shrink our footprint.  Another goal is to improve performance and use of hardware and software resources.  I am looking to make sure… Read more

I recently restored a SQL Server 2005 database to a testing environment. The database contained several CLR assemblies, when the tester tried to execute one of the CLR’s SQL returned the following error:

An error occurred in the Microsoft .NET Framework while trying to load assembly id xxxxx. The server… Read more

The Windows Server Division blog has a post up trumpeting a very impressive iSCSI benchmarking result achieved with Intel hardware and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 software in January of 2010. Running on server hardware equipped with an Intel Xeon 5580 CPU and an Intel 82599 10GbE network interface card… Read more

Recently, I was working with a client we were working on a calculated measure using the aggregate function to rollup a periodstodate calculation using a calculated measure. The value repeatedly returned null, but when I used SUM it worked fine. This appears to be directly related to an issue Microsoft…

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When configuring measures in SSAS, you want to make sure you address a few important  properties. They are show in the screenshot, but let’s talk about them and what they do.

Aggregate Function

As shown in the screenshot you have a number of different options (pardon the pun). These are…

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When configuring measure groups in SSAS, you want to make sure you address a few important properties. They are show in the screenshot, but let’s talk about them and what they do.

IgnoreUnrelatedDimensions

Ignoring Unrelated Dimensions controls the way an unrelated measure is rolled up based on if there is…

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There are a large number of Member functions in MDX that do everything from returning ancestry of a member to identifying the current member context dynamically. They can also provide some functionality around periods for opening and closing. Let’s review a few of the most important and commonly reviewed ones…

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