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If you start at a new place, as a SQL Server Database Administrator (DBA), what is one of the first things you should do? In my opinion, after figuring out the key servers and instances running you need to support… is setting up alerts. By setting up alerts you can start to get an idea [...]

Microsoft has published a site, PC vs Mac There is only one thing you have to know, everything else is fluff. You will never get a blue screen of death on a Mac. Oh, I got one last night on a Windows machine. With an xlsx half way open and not done yet. Lovely. done. [...]

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 [...]

Funny how you might not EVER use a given tool, and some days you might end up using it twice. Sysinternals Procmon was that tool today. It is the successor from old utils from Sysinternals – Filemon and Regmon. What does it do? It monitors all processes and services and watches what they are doing [...]

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 [...]

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” [...]

I use SQL Agent a ton. It is like my go to place to schedule jobs and tasks. Problem is, there are pieces “missing”. Like if a job hangs, you can have it auto stop after a given amount of time. It doesn’t alert on changes to a job, etc, etc. I asked on twitter [...]

Digging into the blog post from earlier this summer I wanted to see what was new and exciting in Excel 2010. Recently I have been working on an cube and we want to be able to budget right from the cube. There are also many other cubes/scenarios where the ability to writeback to the cube [...]

I manage some servers that have many cubes. OK, a lot of cubes (60+ on one). I needed some way to output a report of last processed time, last schema update, etc. Now, there are about 5 different ways to do this (one being the SSAS Stored Procedure Project), but this is what I came [...]

If you are developing a .NET/ASP.net solution using ADOMD.NET locally, and everything works great, and you go to release to a production server and end up with this error: Could not load file or assembly ‘Microsoft.AnalysisServices.AdomdClient, Version=9.0.242.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91′ or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified. You need to install [...]