I have been compiling a list of what things a person can do to become an expert, or guru, in his chosen field, whether that be in specific fields like SQL Server, BI, .Net, or in a broad field like career advise or data architect.  While we can all argue… Read more

Ever see a Windows group and want to know all the users in that group without having to ask your system admin?  There is an easy way to do this.  Just create this shortcut on your desktop:

%SystemRoot%\SYSTEM32\rundll32.exe dsquery,OpenQueryWindow

Call it something like “Search AD”.  Then when you run it… Read more

If you have been in the IT field for any length of time, I’m sure you have heard the phrase “Always Be Learning”.  If you want to be successful and make the big bucks, you are going to have to devote a certain amount of hours each week to learning.… Read more

When using role security in SSAS, one point of confusion is when a person sees the grand total for a measure that includes the total of ALL members in the cube, even though the security has limited the members that person can see.  To fix this, check the “Enable Visual… Read more

When Visual Studio 2010 was released about a year ago, I was very excited and wanted to quickly open up a SSAS project created in VS 2008 to see the new features that were available in VS 2010.  So I copied one of my projects to a test folder and… Read more

Interesting new BI site from Microsoft called “BI Labs“.  This site says: “BI Labs is a collection of experimental business intelligence projects and useful applications made available from internal sources across Microsoft. These projects are prototypes and concepts, and there are no current plans to include them in… Read more

While there are many DBA’s who do business intelligence, or BI, I believe there are even more who do not.  After all, there is enough tasks for DBA’s to keep them plenty busy without dealing with BI.  But if you want to earn more money, have more job opportunities,… Read more

Every couple of weeks I see this SSAS error when processing one of my cubes:

Internal error: Invalid enumeration value. Please call customer support! is not a valid value for this element.

An error occurred while parsing the ‘StorageMode’ element at line 1, column 2217 (‘http://schemas.microsoft.com/analysisservices/2003/engine’ namespace) under Load/ObjectDefinition/Dimension/StorageMode.

Errors… Read more

A quick tip for you:  Ever get some SQL or MDX sent to you in an email, or copied from a website, or pulled from SQL Profiler, that is difficult to understand because it’s not formatted?  Well, there are a couple of free tools that will clean up your SQL:… Read more

A quick little tip I found a couple of years ago. Ever use the count(*) syntax and it takes forever to count all the rows in a table? I had this problem when I would sometimes run counts on a bunch of tables to check that my replication was working… Read more

There are three job boards that I use: Dice, Monster, and LinkedIn.  I prefer Dice by far, since it has a ton of IT jobs on it, and it is focused solely on IT.  Monster is OK, but it does not have nearly as many IT jobs… Read more

I see this issue pop up every now and then: A developer creates an SSIS package in BIDS and gets it to run fine.  Then the developer connects to Integration Services and uploads the package to the server, and then uses the Run Package, and again it runs fine.  But… Read more

As I mentioned in my first post, I thought it would be real difficult to think of things to blog about.  Turns out to be real easy.  It’s just a matter of always having a “blog mindset”.  In other words, when at work, anytime a problem comes along that you… Read more