Pragmatic Works is on YouTube !

I bet you didn’t know Pragmatic Works has our own YouTube channel ? Check it out at

There is some great...

Quotes in Calculation Tab

A quick clarification on something I said the other day to a group of students in one of our quick...

Selecting Top N Rows from Excel Source

Excel is a significant source of data in most enterprises. Therefore there is a large amount of Excel work being...

SSAS Query Processing and Performance Tuning

Any of us can work with some simple MDX queries and get them to do what we want, but in...

Testing Security in SSAS

Security in SSAS is a simple yet powerful application of windows integrated security. MDX adds extra power to this by...

Using MDX to work with the File System

There are sometimes some cool things you can do with a language that is not really it’s primary focus. T-SQL...

Why don’t lookup columns appear in no match output?

I often get asked when we are discussing loading dimension tables in SSIS, why the key columns from the table...

Bikes for Almost Grownups

Ran across this in Make Magazine, http://www.bigkidbike.com/, these are totally custom bikes, with names like Bigger Wheel, Lizard, and Kitten....

Feedback from Connect : Allow Snapshot Backups

I posted a note to allow snapshots to be backed up in SQL Server. The inability to do so, and...

On Ethics

I was having a conversation recently with a friend and former co-worker of mine. He's bounced around here and there,...