Brian Knight

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• SQL Saturday and PASS
  I wanted to post this letter that just went out from PASS. As it reads, Andy, Steve and I are excited to announce that we have gifted one of our prized brands, SQL Saturday to PASS to grow the brand with the community owning at a whole. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 ...
  
  2/2/2010  by BrianKnight  Comments: 1
• SQL Lunch Code - Scripting in SSIS
  Thanks for all who attended my SQL Lunch session! There was a few questions that reoccured. One was about the free components I showed. The free component was Task Factory and can be downloaded from http://www.pragmaticworks.com. The other was for the coding examples, which you can see here: Download the code examples !
  
  1/19/2010  by BrianKnight  Comments: 0
• SSAS MDX Year to Date (YTD) Calculation Example
  Often times, you want to analyze sales using a year to date view as shown below: While you can do this in an MDX formula in SSRS, you might find this calculation valuable enough to store a server-side calculation. To do this, you'll need to pick what date dimension or role playing dimension you want to slice this by. After you know that, you can use an MDX calculation as shown below for this:     Sum(YTD([Delivery Date].[Calendar].CurrentMember),[Measures].[Internet Sales Amount]) This will show...
  ssas, mdx, calculations
  12/18/2009  by BrianKnight  Comments: 0
• Watch the BIDN.com Twitter Feed
  We're moving fast at the BI Developer Network (BIDN.com). In an effort to make sure you get your BI questions answered, we've installed a new twitter interface that if your question in our forums doesn't go answered after 2 days, it will escallated in a number of ways. We'll first feature your question in our newsletter and it will also be automatically be tweeted to http://www.twitter.com/bidn for any followers. Your question will be featured on twitter with a prefix of "BIDN User SOS" with you...
  twitter, bidn
  12/17/2009  by BrianKnight  Comments: 1
• A Simple Twitter Console Application
  I've been working this week to automate the BIDN.com's twitter connectivity and to do so, decided to build a quick Twitter interface to communicate with BIDN.  I needed a simple console application that could be called via a trigger or a SQL Agent Job (my actual method). The entire application winds up only being a 50 lines of code or so. Essentially from a command line, you pass in your twitter account, password, the message and optional URL. If you pass a URL in, it will be converted to TinyUR...
  twitter, bidn
  12/17/2009  by BrianKnight  Comments: 2
• The Need for More Data on Unknown Members
  As ETL developers, we typically lump anything that's NULL or something we can't find an ETL lookup match on to -1 or "unknown". We would first of course have to create an Unknown record in each dimension table then during the ETL attempt an INNER JOIN into the dimension table through a Lookup Transform or through a classic INNER JOIN. If a match could not be found, then it's branded as unknown or -1. On a recent project, a new need for unknown arose which I've seen in the past. This hardened my ...
  surrogate keys, SSIS, data warehouse
  12/7/2009  by BrianKnight  Comments: 1
• MDX Example Code
  After promising a dozen people a dozen times that I'd do this, I finally posted my MDX examples that use during my sessions http://www.bidn.com/files/ . You'll need to have the AdventureWorks cube installed, which you can get from the CodePlex site here: http://www.codeplex.com/MSFTDBProdSamples . Once deployed, open Management Studio and open the MDX Example.mdx code. Each block of code is commented telling you why you're doing what you're doing. Make sure you go off script though and experimen...
  mdx, script
  12/1/2009  by BrianKnight  Comments: 5
• Microsoft BI Video Resources
  I just stumbled upon a great resource for Microsoft BI believe it or not, on the Microsoft website. The first one is a list of short concise videos about how to implmement BI:   http://www.microsoft.com/events/series/bi.aspx?tab=videos   On the same site, you can also find a list of webcasts that are much longer (about an hour each) that offer a complete view of BI topic:   http://www.microsoft.com/events/series/bi.aspx?tab=webcasts   Don't be fooled by the original lists of webcasts. Click each...
  webcasts, microsoft, videos
  11/29/2009  by BrianKnight  Comments: 2
• BI xPress 2.0 Launch
  I'm excited to announce the new version of BI xPress 2.0. It has a new feature called a Package Builder. The Package Builder will allow you to capture components of SSIS into a template that you can reuse and deploy to hundreds of packages in seconds. You can also use some of the Package Builder to create a new package with one of our canned templates. This is one of many features in the new build! To see the recording of the launch event click the below link: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/regist...
  BI xPress, Pragmatic Works
  11/13/2009  by BrianKnight  Comments: 0
• Creating a SSAS Rowset Action
    In the last post (http://blogs.pragmaticworks.com/brian_knight/2009/09/calling-an-external-query-from-mdx.html ), I showed you how to install an external assembly for Analysis Services to query a relational data set, whether in SQL Server or any other database like DB2. This enables you to close the loop as a user is analyzing the data to see live real-time data. Now that you have that installed, let’s create an action to open the recordset with a right-click action in Excel or most cube ...
  
  11/7/2009  by BrianKnight  Comments: 0