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It is the year 2008, we are half way through. Excel 2003 is 5 years old. Stop using it please.
Why? Excel 2003 has the old “limits” - 65,000 rows, 256 columns, memory limits etc. Excel 2007 on the other hand, 1 million row limit, etc etc. That coupled with the way pivot tables work [...]

In SQL2005, you can create SQL Agent jobs. They can be scheduled, have multiple steps, alert, notify, etc. Pretty great setup. There are some downfalls though.
Like in order to call a job from a job, you need to execute the second job with T-SQL. Thing is, it doesn’t run synchronously. It runs asynchronously, which [...]

In SQL Server Analysis Services 2005, you can create "perspectives" on cubes. What a perspective can do, is allow you hide different dimensions, measure groups and attributes. This works great but I still think there are a few things that are missing.
The first thing is that the cube itself is a perspective, [...]

Ugh. Found this one out the hard way. Usually when you change underlying object id’s in SQL Server Analysis Services, it shouldn’t cause any harm. You might have some XMLA to process dim’s and measure groups, if so you would have to change those, etc. But all reporting services reports and excel 2007 pivot tables, [...]

Ok.. if you are using SSAS 2005 and using the deployment wizard (not using BIDS) - probably because you want to retain your partitions or something. But anyways, if you use it and choose the option to retain your roles, you will deploy, and no one will be able to get to your SSAS DB [...]

Ok, add this one to the annoying bin. If you are writing SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services) reports of a SSAS (SQL Server Analysis Services) cube, and there is a time dim, you need to format the date parameters in the SSRS report to match the SSAS date format, as a string.
I started out [...]

So, you have a SSAS 2005 (SQL Server Analysis Services) Cube, and its not performing how you want it to. What do you do?
The first thing to look at is your attribute relationships (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms174557.aspx). Make sure you don’t have redundant relationships (AS should warn you as well) By default when you create a cube, and [...]

Today, I re-read this best practices article on MSDN - Scale-Out Querying with Analysis Services
The architecture they talk about makes sense. Multiple web servers on the front end, a “query” layer, and processing layer. One thing that I don’t get though is how a setup like that can only support 30-60 concurrent users. I guess [...]

So, today I decided to try out Microsoft’s site: CodePlex. I recently created a utility app to process dimensions and partitions in SSAS (SQL Server Analysis Services) because I didn’t like the way it worked in SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio). I don’t know because I never used it, but I guess in pre-SP2 you [...]

If you want to create a calculated measure in SSAS (SQL Server Analysis Services) that will always get the value for yesterday, this is what I have come up with:
 
CREATE MEMBER CURRENTCUBE.[MEASURES].[My Yesterday Measure] AS (StrToMember(’[Time].[Calendar Date].&['+ VBA!Format(vba!dateadd("d", -1, vba![date]()),’yyyy-MM-dd’) +’T00:00:00]’),[Measures].[My Cool Value]), FORMAT_STRING = “$#,##0.000″, VISIBLE = 1  ;
What is really cool is you can [...]