evin and I just wrapped up an all day session that was filmed live called Knight's BI Summer School . While the session was only 6 hours on camera after you take out lunches and breaks, I thought it'd be an interesting blog post to talk about the 60 hours that were spent preparing for it. While I've been public speaking for well over a dozen years on technical topics, it never ceases to amaze me how I'm still trying to master it. It feels a bit like a finish line that constantly moves as you try...
Read More
When developing reports in SSRS, you will often want to click on a given value and go to a URL on the Internet. This is an easy concept in SSRS with Actions with the "Go to URL" option as shown in the below screenshot. The challenge comes in where most people want to open a new browser window when a user clicks on this row so the user doesn't navigate away from the report. To do this isn't especially obvious in SSRS but involves a single line of code with some JavaScript as shown in the below li...
Congratulations to Brian McDonald who has triumphed as the winner of this month's Zune contest. Brian achieved more than 700 points on BIDN over the past 30 days and was also promoted to Jedi Knight status because of that :).
Microsoft Business Intelligence Summer School Upgrade Your Resume in 1 Day In this full-day virtual workshop, you'll learn from author team Brian Knight and Devin Knight how to build a data warehouse for your company and support it with the Microsoft business intelligence platform. What you'll learn in this online workshop : How to design a data warehouse How to load a data warehouse with Integration Services How to create slice-and-dice reports with Analysis Services How to create beautiful das...
The contest for the ZuneHD is about half way over ( http://www.bidn.com/blogs/BrianKnight/ssis/784/zune-contest-for-community-participation-in-july). So far, you can see the contest is a close one with the numbers showing a rolling 30 days. PatrickLeBlanc 329 Padawan briankmcdonald 305 Padawan SMcDonald 245 Padawan DustinRyan 216 Jedi Knight AdamJorgensen 200 Jedi Knight indupriya 160 Padawan BrianKnight 136 Padawan DevinKnight 130 Jedi Knight MarkGStacey 125 Padawan MikeMollenhour 100 Padawan
It's always funny when I go 12 years in this industry and don't know some basic trick about writing T-SQL until weeks ago. So, in today's installment of Doh' that's Cool, I wanted to share with you a trick I learned from watching another DBA (Patrick LeBlanc) recently and then said, "How'd you do that?!". This trick will help you write queries much faster and hopefully get you out of the bad habit of typing SELECT *. To do the trick, simply open your query window in Management Studio. Then, when...
Thanks to all who attended the Implementing the SQL Server Fast Track presentation this week. If you missed it, you can see the recordings here: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/933664848 or download the slides her: http://www.bidn.com/Assets/Uploaded-CMS-Files/9888faa4-bbf7-40e8-958b-9835a2fb30a5BIE402-BRK-Bknight.pdf Resources Here are some of the resources you can find about the Fast Track: Fast Track Homepage: http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/fasttrack.aspx Fast Track Datas...
I was looking through the event bags from TechEd and it looks like we bought an extra Zune HD (16GB). So, I need to find an interesting way to give it away! I decided a great way to give it away is to the biggest community supporter. So, on July 29th, I'm going to the homepage and click Last 30 Days under Top Contributors and will give the Zune HD to the top name. Keep in mind that the Last 30 Days is a rolling 30 days so names that are active right now may drop off as the month goes on but on J...
Most of us have used SSIS to load a flat file into a destination. A little known fact about the Flat File Source which is used to do this is that as it loads data into a destination it validates any numeric and date values to ensure they're indeed those data types. This validation adds overhead to the tune of about 8% extra per column of these data types. This is especially felt in fact table loads where you have loads of numeric or DateTime columns. Of course, this validation is done for a reas...
It's been a great month of free education from Pragmatic Works. The recordings from the previous ones are now posted and I have one on Tuesday on SQL Server Data Warehousing Fast Tracks. Check out all the information below: June 22, 2010 View Recording Powershell for complete beginners Featuring: Sean McCown , InfoWorld Editor and SQL Server MVP Topic Summary: Have you been wanting to learn powershell but don’t know where to get started, or even why you should bother? This is where you start. In...
Once upon a time, in SQL Server 2005, the SQL Server team was working tightly with the SQL Server product team to reserve a special spot of shared memory for SQL Server for SSIS to dump into and then as SQL Server would write into the database seamlessly. This was done with the with the SQL Server Destination in SSIS' data flow. The net result in SQL Server 2005 was about a 8% gain in performance typically in my older benchmarks. Enter SQL Server 2005 SP2 stage right. The big tenant of SQL Serve...
We had a bit of an impromptu session today during today's webinar. You can find the recording for that session at http://www.PragmaticWorks.com and click Webinars. Here's my scripted demo which shows DAX, PowerPivot and more from the AdventureWorksDW2008(R2 optionaly) database. You can also download the weather data from our friends at PowerPivotPro ( http://powerpivotpro.com/2009/10/28/us-meteorological-data/ ). With those two pieces, this script should work great for your presentation! Please ...
For those who attended the webinar last week, I mentioned some code on how to do a parallel load in SSIS. I started to write this in a blog post but it was so long, that I had to make an article out of it. You'll find the full post here: http://bidn.com/articles/integration-services/119/parallel-loads-in-ssis .
April Webinar: MVP Series In these sessions you will learn how to design a data warehouse, load it using SSIS, place a cube on top of it using SSAS and report against it using SSRS. Finally, you'll see how to performance tune and scale the data warehouse using common techniques. All speakers have authored many of your favorite books from Wrox. All sessions are recorded in case you miss the date. Please be sure to install gotomeeting video codec’s , those unable to play webinar recordings should ...
I've been using SQL Server 2008 R2 in beta for about 6 months with no issues but today, I had a strange one I'd have to share. In Management Studio, I was adjusting my open windows and at some point Object Explorer closed and would not come back. I was able to get in back in Full Screen only. It turns out that in my registry a key had become corrupt. The easy way to fix it though was to go to Window ---> Reset Window Layout in Managment Studio. After that, I was golden. Well, at least after a...
February SQL Server 101 Series New to SQL Server or trying to enter the field? This webinar series will walk you through the Microsoft SQL Server stack so that you can become a DBA or Business Intelligence (BI) developer. Registration Opens February 1st, 2010 and is limited to the first 1,000 people. Webinars traditionally fill quickly. Date and Time (All times EST) All sessions are free. Session and Speaker * (click book images take you to author book) Description Febuary 22 9AM View Recording ...
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 Dear Community Leaders, It gives me tremendous pleasure to announce that the PASS Board of Directors recently voted to acquire the SQL Saturday Event brand and management. SQL Saturday is a...
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 !
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 a r...
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...
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 TinyURL...
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 ...
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...
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 of the ...
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...
It's fast, easy and free! Submit articles, get your own blog, ask questions & give answers in the forums, and become a better developer, faster.
enter your email address: