Power View was a new reporting option added in the SQL Server 2012 release as part of the SharePoint integrated mode of Reporting Services. From the beginning it was limited to only reporting off tabular models (and therefore PowerPivot models as well). Power View later made its way into… Read more

There may come a day when you want to embed a Power View report into a PerformancePoint dashboard or a Web Part page in SharePoint. The first thing you will notice when entering the URL is the ribbon shows up in the web page viewer. The ribbon will be displayed… Read more

Recently while doing an installation of SharePoint 2010 on a Windows Server 2008 R2 server with a SQL Server 2012 back end I ran into a small roadblock. The following error popped up as I was running the product configuration wizard.

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Development and demo environments can be hard to come by. Over the course of this series you will learn how to setup all the necessary components to create your own SharePoint 2013 demo environment. We will start with a blank Windows Server 2012 VM and conclude with a fully functional… Read more

Have you ever wanted to browse your SharePoint 2010 site in Windows Explorer? If you are in SharePoint 2007 please upgrade to something a little more modern. In all seriousness, in SharePoint 2007 you could click on the Actions menu and then select Open With Windows Explorer. Simple. Easy. Read more

It was another great year at SQL Saturday Jacksonville. For the last several years I have been lucky enough to be part of the group that organizes the event. It’s definitely a lot of work leading up to the event, the others on the team definitely do more work than… Read more

Anyone who knows me will see the title of this post and tell you I’m about to trash the Surface, Windows 8 and Windows Phone. Let me assure you that’s not the case. I am a 100% openly admitted Apple fan. I have owned every version of the iPhone, have… Read more

I recently had an interesting situation where an SSIS package was scheduled to run at 1 AM but failed with a deadlock message. This seems a bit strange given that it was a deadlock on the step executing the SSIS package, not an error message from within the package. There… Read more

Recently while changing some production security around on a new server I needed to modify the SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) administrator group at the server level. This is a pretty easy process; log in, add or remove admins as necessary in the security section. However, by default any user… Read more

The SQL Server PDW (Parallel Data Warehouse) is a beast of a machine. Spreading workload across multiple nodes inside the PDW provides a huge performance gain over a traditional SQL Server; however, when laying out tables it is a little different. There are two options for creating tables on the… Read more

NOTE: Always create a backup before doing any type of Windows registry modifications!!!!

With the full public release of Windows 8 right around the corner it is inevitable that people will want to get in there and check it out. If you are working someplace that uses the Cisco VPN… Read more

I recently decided to move over to Windows 8 so I can take advantage of Hyper-V and get off a third party tool for virtualization. In the process I decided to rebuild my VM set up and modify the layout a little. Previously I had made each VM a domain… Read more

I was recently making some changes to my laptop setup and installing SQL Server 2008R2 and SQL Server 2012 directly on the computer rather than on my VM. In the case of my setup I had already installed the client tools for 2008R2 and 2012 on my laptop. So in… Read more

If you have done a lot of work with SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) you may have seen this message:

We’ve all been there. A build error. I tend to get this because I like to forget commas when modifying calculations in the MDX section of the cube editor. It’s… Read more

Modifying the Windows host file can be a great way to ensure that you don’t accidentally modify production while doing development or just redirecting traffic on your computer. For instance, while at a client’s office I was able to access a server by entering just the server name, but when… Read more

We have all been there; you need to take a look at the data inside a file. Sure you can open it in Notepad if it is under 20-30MB, bigger than that and you may run into problems depending on the computer. Sometime WordPad will handle the larger files, again… Read more

BCP, or bulk copy program, has been around in SQL Server for a long time. It is a great way to export large quantities of data very quickly from SQL Server. It can be used to export entire tables or even a custom query. In this post we will focus… Read more

Color expressions in SSAS allow you to build an MDX expression to control the color of text displayed in a calculation. This property can be found in the Calculations tab of the cube editor when working in BIDS. Simply select a calcuation and look for the section labeled Color Expressions… Read more

If you follow anything outside the regular SQL Server world coming from Microsoft it should be Office and more importantly SharePoint. The two follow the same release cycle and as of today (July 16th actually) they have released a public beta for Office and more importantly SharePoint 2013!

If you… Read more

The preview for Office 2013 is live!! You can hop over to the Microsoft website and grab it here: http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/en/try-office-preview. Naturally I am eager to see all the BI features in both Office and SharePoint. If you have ever used PowerPivot then you know how cool the technology is.… Read more