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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” [...]

In many shops, I am guessing there are multiple servers. Development, Production, maybe a Staging, etc. With SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) and SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), you set up data sources, connection to databases. In SSAS you usually have a connection which then you build your data source view off of, and in [...]

Crazy error today. In Analysis Services, (SSAS), some jobs got hung, sync command got hung, and what ended up happening is a cube on the default instance was totally unusable. Try to delete, rename, resync, redeploy, anything, and I would get the error.. Errors in the metadata manager. The dimension with ID of.. Couldn’t do [...]

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 [...]

I blogged a few weeks ago about creating Local Cubes with XMLA and ascmd.exe, and that is pretty cool, works great. There are some snags though if you use a server that is 64 bit. You can’t connect to the local cubes via .NET, Excel, or any other way. There are no drivers for local [...]

In a perfect world, your master data and master data management (MDM) is set up so everyone can see things how they want. Categories of Items, Regions, etc, etc are all defined in your dimension data, and you can create hierarchies, etc that make sense and everyone is happy. But, this is not a perfect [...]

Running a SQL Agent job to do an ETL/Cube Processing, you might also want to check the status of the cube after you process it, just to make sure. Create a job step that is a T-SQL type, and DECLARE @forecast VARCHAR(10)     SELECT  @forecast = CAST("[Measures].[Forecast-Part]" AS VARCHAR(10))         FROM     OPENROWSET(‘MSOLAP’, ‘Data Source=localhost;Initial [...]

Today I received an email asking to some extent best practices on development with SQL Server Integration Studio (SSIS) and Business Intelligence Developer Studio (BIDS) in a team environment. Here is part of the email: Me and another DBA belong to the same team, we have a SQL server with SSIS running. We use the [...]

One feature of Excel 2007 that I think is really cool, and also a little hidden, is the “Offline OLAP” feature. If you insert a pivot table connected to an OLAP cube into Excel 2007, and go to the PivotTable Options Ribbon Menu, You will see the “OLAP Tools” Button. Click on that and then [...]

Last week I was in a heated discussion about Business Intelligence, and it came up that “Business Intelligence is just writing reports, what is the difference from just writing some reports?” I tend to disagree. Writing reports is, well, writing reports. You can write reports off of tons of data, and yeah, probably get some [...]