As you will see by the dates in my screenshots, I wrote them quite a while back while touring the world mastering the art of Ultimate Fighting. Yes, I consider it a form of art. Maybe that is why I forgot about this in my blog pile. One too many hits to my skull that is! :) At any rate, my beautiful wife, (who was going to be training some people in TSQL and SSRS this week) asked me if I had any blogs or articles about it and I said that I did. Only to find out that I never actually posted them!...
Read More
First lunch in March Link : http://www.sqllunch.com/Meeting.aspx?lunchid=51 Speaker: Chris Albrektson Date and Time: 3/3/2011 11:30:00 AM CST BIO: Chris Albrektson is a Business Intelligence consultant for Pragmatic Works and is experienced in Reporting Services, and Integration Services. Chris is an active member of the Jacksonville SQL Server User Group (JSSUG), volunteers at SQL Saturday events and is a regular blogger on Bidn.com. Register today and get the most of it :)
Generally when designing a data warehouse (at least in my experience) you don’t think about NULL values appearing often in measure data of a fact table. You may have unknown foreign keys from your dimension data but even those unknown foreign keys relate to some kind of fact data. If you’re new to data warehousing measure data would be things like price, quantity, duration. These are usually the business numbers that you want to aggregate in your cube. One case where I have seen NULL data in mea...
I read a intersting article today about having MDX measures in the rows for SSRS reports with workaround. http://blog.robkerr.com/blog/post/2011/02/23/SSAS-MDX-Measures-on-Rows-in-SSRS.aspx
Most of my examples utilize either adhoc type of data samples or one of the versions of AdventureWorks. I do this so that the reader (you) can see and duplicate my efforts. In working with the various versions of the AW databases, I’ve often completed web searches to look for a database diagram. Not only to make it easier for me to find them, but also anyone else out there digging for them; I have a zipped up file containing the below files. AdventureWorks.pdf AdventureWorks2008R2.pdf AdventureW...
I just wanted to take a moment to thank Kevin Kline , Brent Ozar , Christian Bolton, Bob Ward, Rod Colledge and Raoul Illyaos for creating the SQL Server PerfMon Counters of Interest PDF file available for download on Quest.com. If you ever have to dig into some serious performance monitoring, this pdf will definitely help you. It tells all kinds of great values to look for and even gives you some good benchmark values that you want. I only wish they would have released this back in September wh...
Like many other companies, Pragmatic Works has the culture of email communication. I often had made the joke that I need to change the tones and chimes in Outlook to be my wife’s voice since I typically due what Outlook tells me to do. Email has made us much more productive but has had its downsides. There are some days that make me less than friendly to be around where I do nothing but answer emails for four hours after being out of the office for a few days. I’m not the only one with the volum...
The Time dimension with one row for each day is the most important table in most data warehouses. You'll usually need special attributes like holidays, working days and alternate hierarchies. Data warehouse guru Ralph Kimball therefore advises to build this dimension in an afternoon in Excel. (Tip 51: Latest Thinking On Time Dimension Tables) For simple time dimensions and to get a head start use the query below. De query uses common table expressions a feature that ships with version 2005. It a...
SSIS 2008 Logging to SQL Server 1. Can I change the dbo.sp_ssis_addlogentry system stored procedure to non-system stored procedure and if so how is this done? Yes – you must drop and recreate the procedure (and don’t run [sp_MS_marksystemobject] N’[dbo].[sp_ssis_addlogentry]‘) 2. Can I change the dbo.sysssislog system table to non-system table and if so how is this done? Yes – you must drop and recreate the table (and don’t run execute [sp_MS_marksystemobject] N’[sysssislog]‘) 3. Is the new SSIS...
Dashboards with SSRS 2008 R2 Date: Saturday March 19th. Time: 9:00 AM - 4:00PM. Location: Microsoft Office, 201 Jones Road, Waltham, MA, 02451, 6th floor, room MPR C. Web: http:// www.bostonbi.org Course Overview This one day seminar provides an end-to-end overview and direction for BI developers, administrators and managers who want to excel at leading high-performance teams and their organization through the Full BI Project Life Cycle (DW,ETL,OLAP, Visualization). Learn the fundamentals of Mic...
Good organization helps us to develop efficiency and, even more importantly, increases our solutions understandability. Organizing the physical implementation of a business intelligence solution’s data tier within SQL Server™ is critical for organizing the overall business intelligence solution. The use of schemas to organize the business intelligence solution’s SQL Server™ database objects (tables, views, stored procedures, functions) has many benefits including: 1. Clearly differentiates the o...
A lot of companies have several departments and want to limit the sub sites users can view. For example, the IT department should only see the IT sub site, but the HR department may need to be able to see all sub sites. To set up individual security for sub sites you will need to stop the sub sites from inheriting from the parent. To do this click on the Site Action menu while viewing the sub site, then select Edit in SharePoint Designer. On the right hand side of the screen you will see the per...
There are several ways to create a custom navigation control in SharePoint. In the below image you can see the left navigation is hidden. This is done with the use of a master page and some custom CSS. Now you want to create your own list of links to other pages and content that you control. Notice this page is not as wide as the default SharePoint site. If your client has smaller monitors throughout the company this may be necessary as in this case. The first step is to create a new web part pa...
If you have not seen the new Project Crescent from Microsoft yet, take a moment and check it out. The videos look great and the silver light controls are beautiful. I can't wait to get my hands on this. http://www.microsoft.com/showcase/en/us/details/a90a1be4-7125-46b6-abdb-66966d764ddd
The problem once you get over the learning curve of SSIS is not the tool; it’s all the things that work with SSIS and that can be used by/with SSIS. For instance, there are a ton of things that you can do with an Execute Process task. The other thing is trying to make your packages dynamic. Combining those two hurdles can sometimes be a lot to overcome. I ran into one such instance recently. There was a set of packages that called batch files in order to do some downloading from an FTP. The issu...
Over the past few years I have seen a lot of forum posts from people looking to make a single word bolder or a different color to highlight something inside a single text box. Most efforts in this area have resulted in frustration and work arounds. Starting with SSRS 2008 there something I consider a little known feature that brings most of this frustration to an end. The feature is called Create Placeholder, and it allows many new formatting options for a single textbox. The first time I went l...
Course Overview This one day seminar provides an end-to-end overview and direction for BI developers, administrators and managers who want to excel at leading high-performance teams and their organization through the Full BI Project Life Cycle (DW,ETL,OLAP, Visualization). Learn the fundamentals of Microsoft Business Intelligence, data-warehousing and Dishoarding. Learn how to manage the BI solutions development process effectively using Agile approach. Specific emphasis is placed on how to: Arc...
Awaited BI training cources schedules from Pragmatic Works in March 2011! Sessions includes, Designing your Data Warehouse Platform by Brian Knight Microsoft’s BI Stack: How to Choose a Technology by Mark Stacey Rock Your Report by Sherri McDonald 0 to Cube by Adam Jorgensen Deploying SSIS packages by Jose Chinchilla and many more... Register your sessions today! http://pragmaticworks.com/Resources/webinars/Month.aspx/94
Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE Working with Third Party controls seems great isn’t it; with all the new styles and design they have we can’t resist using those in our project.The use of controls can greatly help your team remain productive an efficient as their efforts Well as we say each and every coin has two side, the same funda applies here... Working with Third Party can be a daunting task sometimes. It takes time to get settled down with getting used to them in case you are...
PASS DW/BI VC Presents: Multidimensional Reporting: MDX Essentials for Report Design Date / Time Date: 2/23/2011 Start Time: 12:00:00 PM End Time: 1:00:00 PM Timezone: (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada) Short Description Learn the fundementals of MDX query design for Analysis Services cubes. Migrate your SQL skills to this simple and elegant language that will enable you to unlock the awsome power of a cube and to gain deep insight from a single version of the truth. Learn to develop dyn...
I have been introduced to the Business Intelligence concepts thanks to my manager way back in 2007. I have started working from DTS days and I have built a datawarehouse all by myself of which I was proud of. Then later on with the introduction of sql server 2005 and more advanced features of BI we had to rebuild our datawarehouse with a lot more requirements. Exactly a year ago I have joined BIDN after attending a webinar of Patrick Le Blanc. I am very thankful to him for mentioning this site a...
For many people just beginning to learn how to program, they encounter a wall of confusing jargon, abstract ideas, and sometimes just plain nonsense. Programming languages by definition are tools to encapsulate repeated ideas or machine operations into concepts which are more easily understood by we “simple minded organic creatures that are super creative” . J By breaking down an ideas, such as adding two numbers together, we can make something which in assembly (the closest written version of w...
Normal 0 false false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE SQL 2011 Denali New SSIS Parameters SQL 2011, code name Denali, has some great new features for SSIS. One of the most powerful features is parameters. These are a lot like variables in the package. But when scheduling a SQL agent job to run a package there is a new tab for parameters. Now you can set your package parameters without having to set the variables using the command line code. More on this later.
Today's post is not about BI but very valid in our day to day interactions with the systems. Since our systems administrator left our company I have had a lot of opportunity to learn about things outside my normal coverage area. I am very thankful to my manager Ashley for giving me that opportunity. In one of the meetings I sat with the external consultants 'Outlook Anywhere' was mentioned. Outlook Anywhere is one of the Exchange 2007 feature that Microsoft has developed. The consultant mentione...
When you're working in SSIS, there are definitely some quirks that can drive you crazy. Luckily, most of them have a pretty simple resolution. One example of this is Connection Manager passwords not being saved in your package. Let's say you set up a connection to an Oracle database that looks something like this: Now, when you test the connection, it tests successfully. But when you apply a configuration to this connection (on the Connection String), the password is not saved. So if you try to ...