Dynamic Management Views are a very powerful tool that are part of Analysis Services in 2008 and 2008 R2. They give you the ability to monitor Analysis Services usage and metadata.

MSDN articles on SSAS DMVs – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms126079.aspx

Good post on using SSAS DMVs – http://dwbi1.wordpress.com/2010/01/01/ssas-dmv-dynamic-management-view/

A report developer could… Read more

In a previous post I wrote about how you can use embedded custom code to extend the capabilities of Reporting Services.  This week I will show you another method of using custom code but this time with external assemblies.  Ideally when using custom code you would choose to do so… Read more

This is my wish list of things I’d like to cover in todays session at 11 AM EST https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/935071481 but seeing that I know I’ll only get to a third of these thought I would post these for everyone.  If you’re seeing this late the sessions are recorded and can… Read more

It has been a quiet past few months while my family has adjusted to having
two new additions (twins!), but I have slowly been working my way back into
several speaking events.  Having said that January is a busy month of events and
I thought I would share them in… Read more

When developing reports in Reporting Services you will often use the built-in
expression language to make report data and formatting dynamic.  The expression
language can do a lot to within Reporting Services but any gaps in functionality
that it has can be filled with custom code. 

There are two ways… Read more

Display folders are an often used tool in Analysis Services to help end users navigate through a cube or dimension they could find what they need to build a report.  Imagine you develop a cube that has dozens of measures.  For an end user to find what they need they… Read more

The Analysis Services Deployment Wizard is an often under utilized but important tool when moving your OLAP database throughout your environment. Often I see developers deploy directly from BIDS to all Development, QA, and Production environment by changing the project properties to the different instances. For multiple reasons this is… Read more

This week has been an exciting and memorable week for me. The last PASS Summit I attended was in 2009 and I missed it so dearly. I meet a lot of people that I have only chatted with online but had never meet and others that were completely new to… Read more

The latest project I worked on had a heavy dose of PerformancePoint and one of the requirements was to launch Analysis Services Actions from PerformancePoint dashboard objects. I knew this was possible but did not no all the limitations that exist when you want to do this. Most of the… Read more

I apologize ahead of time on this post today because it will require lots of pre explanation and screenshots to set the stage for what I want to show you! Often when building a report with multiple row groupings I like to change the default way SSRS places the fields… Read more

PASS Summit is quickly approaching and while many of you are registering I wanted to remind you of some of the great Pre Conference seminars that are available (more specifically mine!).  On Tuesday, October 11, 2011 Brian Knight and I will be presenting on building a BI Solution from the… Read more

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Today I will be presenting in a webinar, which by the way is recorded for later viewing, on Commonly used DAX Expressions.  You can register (or if you miss it live watch the recording) for this webinar here.  I thought it would be great if I could push out… Read more

Probably one of the most anticipated additions to the latest version of PowerPivot is the ability to create KPIs. PowerPivot has made what was once a task that was done purely done by developers now something that anyone can do now.

KPIs (Key Performance Indicator) are an executive favorite that… Read more

PowerPivot – Perspectives

Many times when developing larger Analysis Services cubes you may find it necessary to use Perspectives to logically split up your cube so users can find what they want faster.  A perspective is similar to a TSQL view because it will take a larger object (the cube)… Read more

Hierarchies are one of the long awaited features that will now be available in the latest version of PowerPivot. Hierarchies are useful because it allows a single click for a user to bring in all the fields that exist in a natural table hierarchy.  Normally the user would have to… Read more

A little over a year ago Patrick LeBlanc wrote a blog post about inserting an unknown row into a dimension.  This is a great script and i've used it dozens of time, but this week I made a few modifications to it that I thought I would share.

First… Read more

For those of you in the Tallahassee, FL area on August 9th at 6:00 pm I will be speaking virtually for the Tallahassee PASS user group.  Several of the groups leaders attended SQL Saturday in Jacksonville this year and after speaking with them it sounds like they have a fanatics… Read more

The new “Denali” PowerPivot has a lot of fanatic new additions that I’ve really been looking forward to.  Many of my biggest complaints from the first version of the product have been addressed.  One of these complaints was the lack of a visual representation of object relationships.  You had to… Read more

There are a lot of fantastic new features in the latest CTP 3 release of PowerPivot, which you can download here.  This is a huge change for PowerPivot and really shows how the product is maturing into become a tool that can solve a variety of problems that it… Read more