All the videos for this popular conference are online or will be soon (48 of them). Take a look at the recorded sessions at http://sqlbits.com/content/Event9.  All are free to watch!  The one’s on my list to watch (because I’m interested in SQL Server 2012/Data Warehouse/SSAS):

• Basic BISM
• Handling Advanced…

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Another must read white-paper: Analysis Services 2008 R2 Performance Guide.

This white paper describes how business intelligence developers can apply query and processing performance-tuning techniques to their Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Analysis Services OLAP solutions.  It applies to SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008, and SQL Server 2008… Read more

As you may know, the TechEd in the U.S. is not the only one.  There have been many all over the world, and it 2011 there have been one’s in New Zealand, Australia, and next month in Russia.  The Australia and New Zealand TechEd ended a couple of months ago,… Read more

Technology Adoption Program (TAP) and Rapid Deployment Program (RDP) are ways for Microsoft to get early feedback on new products or product updates as well as give important customers a heads-up on what Microsoft is up to.  Participation is by invitation only (usually by someone in Microsoft’s field sales force),… Read more

This is my biggest gripe with SSIS: I have a data flow task, and within that I’m pulling data from multiple sources into multiple destinations, with a few performing data flow transformations.  While testing, I want to disable some of the components.  You can’t.  You can disable any task in… Read more

Microsoft and HP have announced another appliance, called the Database Consolidation Appliance (see my blog about the other two appliances).  In short, this appliance consolidates databases into a single, virtual environment.

In more detail:

Many customers continue to struggle with solving the problem of SQL server sprawl.  With a proliferation… Read more

Over the past few years I have developed a list of ways to improve performance in SSAS and in two of the tools that use it: ProClarity and PerformancePoint.  Below are those performance tips along with other important items to be aware of:

1) Manually add aggregations to the cube… Read more

In SSAS, to improve query performance, it’s important to understand what happens inside analysis services when a query is run.  Analysis Services is made up of two engines:

Formula Engine (FE) – It is single-threaded.  It processes the MDX queries, determines what data is needed to answer them, then requests… Read more

Some announcements and notes from SQL PASS Summit 2011, going on this week:

It was announced that the official name of the SQL Server “Denali” product is SQL Server 2012 and will be released in the first half of the year 2012.  There will be a Release… Read more

Some announcements and notes from SQL PASS Summit 2011, going on this week:

It was announced that the official name of the SQL Server “Denali” product is SQL Server 2012 and will be released in the first half of the year 2012.  There will be a Release… Read more

In SSAS, there is an Error Configuration object that is central to the management of data integrity errors.

The following picture shows the ErrorConfiguration properties for a cube:

There are numerous objects where you can specify the error configuration via the properties dialog: dimension, cube, measure group and partition.  Also,… Read more

Here is a quick example of when using temporary tables will give you a big performance gain.  I recently was given this query to improve, as it was taking over 15 hours to run:

SELECT *
FROM
(
SELECT * FROM
GL_Star_FactsDetails GL
LEFT JOIN DimAccount ACCT on GL.Account =… Read more

When building a SSAS cube, you typically have a star schema containing dimension tables and fact tables.  For dimension tables, you generally model these as one table per object.  Building the dimension in the ETL system involves joining the various normalized description and hierarchy tables that populate the dimension… Read more

If you are the decision maker in your company and you are tasked with purchasing one or more servers to be used solely for SQL Server and solely as a data warehouse, be aware there are options outside of the usual ordering a server and internally installing the hardware, OS,… Read more

In our day-to-day activities, browsing the web is one of the most important aspects of our job.  Whether researching for an answer to a problem, reading our favorite blogs, checking LinkedIn, or using a web application, it’s used so much that increasing the speed at which pages display will increase… Read more