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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

Tonight I took my first crack at getting SQL Server Denali up and running on my machine.  From what I had read so far there are no longer issue with installing a side by side instance of Denali with an existing SQL Server install so I went that route.  The… Read more

Yesterday I was thrilled to find out that my session "Common Analysis Services Design Mistakes and How to Avoid Them" was accepted for SQL PASS this October.  This will be my first solo PASS session I have ever presented so I'm really excited!  The last time I attended PASS was… Read more

For many Analysis Services developers building dimensions with many attributes and hierarchies is something that comes as second nature to them.  However, I’ve found for those that are new to Analysis Services changing the KeyColumns property can be particularly difficult to understand why and when it is necessary. 

In a… Read more

Wednesday I will be presenting for the PASS BI/DW group a session on Data Mining in Excel.  This is a fun topic that shows how business users can perform data mining on their own inside of Excel.  As usual this is a free event to attend so be sure to… Read more

Yesterday was the first day of the SQL Rally conference in Orlando, FL.  It was a great first day because I was able to be part of delivering a full day pre conference seminar.  Patrick LeBlanc, Adam Jorgensen, Mike Davis and I did an End to End BI workshop that… Read more

Imagine you have spent the last 9 months developing a sales Data Warehouse and an Analysis Services cube.  Your end users love what you have built for them so far but it’s never good enough right?  You have a new requirement to allow your users to enter in projected or… Read more

Often when building dimensions there is a need to order you dimension attributes by something other than the NameColumn or KeyColumn properties.  An example of this may be an accounting structure that is preferred to be viewed in a certain order.  The data doesn’t represent that order well so you… Read more

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For the 4th year SQL Saturday comes to Jacksonville, FL this year on April 30, 2011. Many of you already know about these events but just to remind you it is a totally FREE all day event that brings top speakers to you.

I hope everyone already realizes this, but… Read more

I had a client recently show me a neat little tip that I thought I would share.  In the cube he was designing he had the need for measures to show under multiple display folders.  For example, he had a Sales Amount measure and he wanted it to be in… Read more

SSIS provide several methods for passing values into your packages at runtime.  The benefit of doing so allows you to change the results of the package without having to even open the package in the development environment (BIDS). 

The typical way of doing this is to create variables inside your… Read more