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You can whip out reports in SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services) very quickly with the report builders (2.0 and 3.0 are money). But what should you remember to do each time, or information to get? Where does the data come from (GL, Sales, etc) – we could use a cube or datawarehouse, or staging, or [...]

Good ideas are hard to stop from happening. After dorking around with Pivot Viewer, I was thinking of things I could “pivot”, and the iTunes App Store was one of them. No real API though, there are some out there that have created APIs, or you could scrape the web, etc but nothing solid. Looks [...]

Most people have probably done this at least once in their lives.. You go to a restaurant and order a meal. The waitress is nice, comes over, gets your drinks, takes your order, checks up on you, refills, what not, brings out the meal, and woah, something is wrong, it is cold, bad, just something. [...]

Not sure why I didn’t look into this sooner. OData. Open Data Protocol. Not many providers, but this has huge potential. First off, PowerPivot can consume OData feeds! See the “From Data Feeds” button :) I used it to download Netflix’s whole library. I tried to download StackOverflow’s data (http://odata.stackexchange.com/) but had no luck. Either [...]

So, I previously blogged about using PivotViewer in your Web Applications, but you can also just consume Pivot collections using the “Pivot” tool from Microsoft Live Labs You can download it here What does this tool offer? Well first it has a library/homepage of collections you can browse You can do some slicing and dicing [...]

I have been reading about Microsoft’s PivotViewer lately, and decided to try to get it going for myself. What is PivotViewer? Think of it as visual data slicing through a web page. What you do is take some data, and then tie records to images, and then publish out your “collection” and you can consume [...]

Had a request to export data out from SQL Server to Excel directly. There are a few ways you can do this. BCP is one, another is OPENROWSET. SSIS, etc.  Here is the OPENROWSET method, using Jet (I think this only works on 32bit servers as well) First you need to enable a setting on [...]

Now that SQL Server 2008 R2 is out, and Excel 2010 is out. You can get PowerPivot (http://powerpivot.com/) and create your own in memory cubes! …. Or something like that. I still haven’t figure out where PowerPivot fits in a business scenario. Why? Well first you have what are now being called the “old school” [...]

Source Control. In my eyes, one of the best inventions of development. Software Developers have used it for years, and it allows them to easily develop in a team environment, and be less scared they will lose a change or not be able to see things they did historically. I have blogged a few times [...]

I have always wanted a good way to search all the db’s on a server, find procs, views, whatever that have something in their DDL so i could do what I want with it. There are ways using DMV’s or other things in SQL Server, but it just becomes a pain. Then came along SQL [...]