In the same vein as my blog post about Syncing your calendars, I wanted to post how to sync your contacts in Outlook, Gmail (Google Contacts), and iPhone:

- Transfer your Outlook contacts to Gmail via Transfer contacts between Outlook and Google Gmail

- In Gmail, remove the duplicates… Read more

In the same vein as my post Watch out, Visual Studio 2010 does not support BI, Visual Studio 2012 does not support BI.  Meaning, VS 2012 does not support SSAS, SSIS, or SSRS.  If you try to open one of those projects, you will be greeted with:

At least… Read more

Microsoft has posted ALL the session videos for TechEd Europe 2012 and they are available for free!  What a great way to learn all about SQL Server 2012.  Check them out here.

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Starting with SQL Server Reporting 2008 Reporting Services (SSRS) was the removal of the Internet Information Services (IIS) dependency, so you do not need to install IIS on the machine that you will install SSRS.  This only applies when you configure it in native mode.  In integrated mode you have… Read more

LinkedIn is a great resource to improve your career.  It has definitely worked for me as the last 5-6 jobs I have been hired for was because a recruiter found me through LinkedIn or I noticed a job posting on LinkedIn.  And because my income has nearly tripled over those… Read more

Microsoft PivotViewer is a really cool Silverlight web-based control that provides a visual way to interact with massive amounts of data (download).  It allows you to present thousands of things at once and visualize them in a way that exposes value from the group.  By visualizing thousands of… Read more

As a business intelligence architect consultant, I have met many people out there who are as good or better than me in building business intelligence solutions, yet earn much less than I do.  Why you ask?  In the past 18 months, I have nearly tripled my yearly income.  How you… Read more

If you are using partitions in SQL Server, be aware that “partition switching” is a great feature to quickly truncate partitions or to load data in parallel.

To truncate a partition:

1. Create a staging table with the schema structure matching the source partitioned table
2. If they are in different filegroups,…

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In the multidimensional model in SSAS, there is a storage mode called relational OLAP (ROLAP), which is the multidimensional solution for allowing real-time access to relational data sources.  In the tabular model in SSAS, the solution for real-time access is a query mode called DirectQuery, which uses a fundamentally different… Read more