While using a cube in SSAS is usually a great source for reporting, it is not always the best choice.  Sometimes it is better to report off of the data warehouse that the cube is built from.

For example, say you want to create a P&L statement using a financial… Read more

Here is a situation I ran into recently concerning using a fact table in SSAS.  This experience may help you out if you run into something similar:

A data warehouse has an advertising table that has these four fields: Product Type, Inches, Lines, Pieces. The Inches, Lines and Pieces fields… Read more

As your SSAS cube gets bigger, cube processing time will become a problem.  This is especially true as more and more companies want cube processing during the day instead of the usual off-hours time when no one is using the cube.  Partitioning the cube can help to reduce the processing… Read more

I get 15-30 calls/emails a week from recruiters (not counting the dozens of auto-generated emails I get).  Being a contractor I’m always trying to build relationships with recruiters so when my contract nears an end, I have plenty of job opportunities to choose from.  I’ve talked with hundreds of recruiters… Read more

If you are interested in viewing the recorded sessions for the PASS Summit 2011, you can order the DVD.  You can purchase the Regular Summit Sessions as well as the Pre-Conference Sessions.  However, if you are interested in the sessions from 2010 and older (going back to 2005), you can… Read more

There are some FANTASTIC videos of the sessions from SQLInspire New York 2011.  I highly recommend that you check out all the videos, as I found some great career tips in all of them.  As the site says “We’ve lined up speakers set to inspire you to create and… Read more

In previous SSIS versions as the developer you were responsible for configuring all of your logging options, such as what events you were going to log, which containers you were going to collect logs for, and where you were going to store those logs.

In SSIS for SQL Server 2012… Read more

I have been fortunate the past few months to be working on a HP ProLiant DL980 G7 Server.  This is one killer server: 8 processors, 80 cores, 160 virtual processors, and 2 TB’s of memory.  Oh, and there are two of them (clustered).

Check out the specs in Task… Read more

Since I work mostly from home, video/voice conferencing and IM are of major importance to me, and using the right tools is vital to keeping me productive.  The tools used for conferencing should have IM, presence indicator, voice and video calls, desktop sharing, file transfer and ad hoc conferences.  There… Read more

Thanks for everyone who attended my presentation “How To Make a LOT More Money as a Consultant” at HASSUG.

Here is the PowerPoint presentation: How To Make a LOT More Money as a Consultant

How to make a LOT more money as a consultant

James will show you the… Read more

When building a data warehouse, it is important that primary keys of dimension tables remain stable.  To accomplish this, it is strongly recommended that surrogate keys be created and used for primary keys for all dimension tables instead of using natural keys.  Surrogate keys are keys that are maintained within… Read more

If you’ve been working with databases for any length of time, you have heard the term normalization.

Normalization is the process of efficiently organizing data in a database.  There are two goals of the normalization process: eliminating redundant data (for example, storing the same data in more than one table)… Read more

ETL is the most common method used when transferring data from a source system to a data warehouse.  But there are cases where you might want to use ELT.  What is the difference between the two?  Read on:

Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) is a process that involves extracting data… Read more